A couple of updates:
Time-magazine cover: The Face of Buddhist Terror
A great favourite of mine, in the category of “utterly appalling people whom one would very much not wish to meet”. I’ve heard it said that the Baron honestly thought he was doing his victims a favour, by despatching them to a higher incarnation.
The Russian Civil War 1917 – 1922 was an extremely horrible episode in history, but had some definite black-comedy-and-farce undertones.
Yeah I think that people who are brought up as Buddhists culturally are less likely to be as adherent as those that choose it as adults, as with most religions. Although they have a lot less scriptural justification for violence than a lot of more mainstream religions.
Let me try to equate it to the North American majority religion. The 10 commandments are orders from God right? So theoretically Christians must follow them in order to adhere to their religion. I’m pretty confident that with a few mins we could find examples of a self proclaimed Christian breaking every single one of them.
Just because your religion tells you that you must do something doesn’t mean that human failings don’t intervene.
It’s not just violence either. There’s all sorts of inappropriate behavior. These guys are being heavily criticized right now for their antics while on vacation in the US.
One of my favorite stories may be the monk “gangs” rumbling a few years back. In the Northeast, pretty sure it was Nong Khai province along the Mekong and across from Laos, but two groups of monks from two rival temples got into a huge brawl.
My hands-down favorite story is probably the monk who by night donned civvies and a toupee, drove around picking up hookers and took them back to an apartment he was renting. He had set up hidden cameras and recording equipment. Got caught eventually.
In Thailand, which is mainly Buddhist, as few people live the true life of a Buddhist as Christians live true Christan lives in so called Christian countries.
Even monks murder, rape and behave badly, though that is a minority, of course.
That is true, but foreigners should be aware there are bad apples. Buddhist monks are often not the same as, say, Trappist monks in that it’s not a lifetime endeavor. Almost all Thai males become a monk at some point, traditionally for the three-month Buddhist Lent period from July-October, but increasingly, what with modern lifestyles, for much shorter periods such as a week or even a day. If a man is a monk before he is married, then his parents get the credit for it in the afterlife, and if he becomes a monk after he is married, it’s the wife who gets the credit, so parents always urge their sons into the monkhood fairly early.
But there are other reasons to become a monk, among them to dry out from a drug problem. Certain monasteries are known routinely to ordain junkies in an informal bid to set them straight. But they look just the same as any other monk, and I recall one incident maybe 15 or 20 years ago – in Kanchanaburi province I believe, over on the Burmese border – in which one such monk lured a young British tourist into an isolated spot by promising to show her something “special.” The naive woman apparently could not believe her luck, a holy man offering to show her, a common foreigner, something special. Once he got her isolated, he raped and murdered her.
Interesting update from Reuters: Myanmar gives official blessing to anti-Muslim monks