{"id":57606,"date":"2016-08-13T16:10:53","date_gmt":"2016-08-13T23:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=57606"},"modified":"2016-08-13T16:10:53","modified_gmt":"2016-08-13T23:10:53","slug":"buddhist-fundamentalism-a-short-answer-to-asoka-bandarage-i-can-understand-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/08\/13\/buddhist-fundamentalism-a-short-answer-to-asoka-bandarage-i-can-understand-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Buddhist Fundamentalism? A short answer to Asoka Bandarage: “I can understand you”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian Thomas Kohl, Freiburg, University of Education<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Dear Asoka Bandarage, Thank you for your article “Buddhist Fundamentalism”?<\/p>\n

In your article you mention the reasons why Buddhists in many countries of Asia had been attacked by Muslims. You explain how Buddhist are just defending against Muslim domination and Muslim aggressivities in many aspects.<\/p>\n

That’s right. This is true. Nobody can deny this. I understand you.<\/strong>I can understand every Buddhist who want to defend himself and his community. I\u00a0understand your point.<\/p>\n

I am a Buddhist myself. I belong to the Tibetan Buddhism since 1984. Tibetan Buddhism belongs to the history of Indian Buddhism, in particular to the Nalanda School of Indian Buddhism.<\/p>\n

We belong to the Nalanda tradition of Nagarjuna. I am a student of Nagarjuna. I\u00a0know that the Nalanda University had been destroyed by Muslim conquerers and by inner weakness of Indian Buddhism in the 11th and 12th century.<\/p>\n

As Buddhists we should not blame the exterior ennemy only. There exists an inner ennemy also. This inner ennemy has a name and we should speak\u00a0about him:<\/p>\n

I call him ‘egoism’ and the feeling to be a better person than others. You might call it in English ‘self-congratulating’ or self-praise’ or self-adulation.<\/p>\n

It is the feeling to be\u00a0a better person than others. One political expression\u00a0for this is ‘Colonialism’. The attitude of colonialism had been well known in Africa and South America and Asia also. European ‘supermen’ took command over animals or half-animals or second-class human beings as they were considered by the white European colonial Lords.<\/p>\n

This belongs to the time of colonialism which ended in 1950 and 1960. But this is not finished yet completely and Asians are not completely free from this feeling of being superior to others.<\/p>\n

The majority of Myanmar how do they call Indians from India or from Bengal?<\/p>\n

I have heard that they have a very pejorative expression for them.<\/p>\n

Those who use these expressions might feel superior to Bengali or Indians or Rohingya\u00a0or other neighbours.<\/p>\n

This is a mistake. And we should start every international discussion by admitting our mistakes.<\/p>\n

We should not see just the mistakes of Muslims.\u00a0We should defend against Muslim terrorism.<\/p>\n

But we should shake hand with every peaceful Muslim. And we should tell the Rohingya people: You are not animals.<\/p>\n

And we should give up the idea of killing Rohingya and other Muslims. And we should give up anti-Islamic fear-mongering and the idea that every Muslim is our ennemy.\u00a0An we should learn the two arab words: Salam Aleykum.<\/p>\n

Christian Thomas Kohl, Freiburg, University of Education. http:\/\/ctkohl.googlepages.com<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian Thomas Kohl, Freiburg, University of Education Dear Asoka Bandarage, Thank you for your article “Buddhist Fundamentalism”? In your article you mention the reasons why Buddhists in many countries of Asia had been attacked by Muslims. You explain how Buddhist are just defending against Muslim domination and Muslim aggressivities in many aspects. That’s right. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buddhism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}