Kill the Buddha!

Four years ago, I stopped at Thailand on the way to India.  I was not ready for the heat and the humidity that  seemed to suck every bit of energy from my body.  But, hey, it goes with the territory and there was no point complaining about it.

So, I was off walking about like I always do.  And then went on a package tour to Ayutthaya and its environs.  I lost track of the number of bottles of water I had during that one-day trip and, yet, much to my surprise and worry, I wasn't peeing a whole lot either.

The history and the architecture were all wonderful and educational, confirming Ayutthaya's status as a UNESCO World Heritage site.  My grandmothers would have been happy that I at least went to this Ayutthaya, if not to the original Ayodhya itself.

It was, however, very troubling when I saw a headless Buddha.

Even more troubling it was to see a row of headless Buddha statues:

The destruction resulted from the Burmese invasion more than three centuries ago.  The Thai-Burma rivalry and wars was nothing new--history is full of neighbors warring with each other.  But, why destroy the statues of the Buddha?  It is not that the invading Burmese were fighting a religious war with the Thais to at least justify the destruction of the Buddha statues.  The Burma/China warriors and kings were Buddhists too!

I suppose this is also a long-running thread in history--to kill, even when the religion's founder might have been crystal clear about the primacy of peace and non-violence.  It is perhaps a surprise, therefore, that quite a few weren't damaged at all, and we have to be thankful for that and count our blessings!  (All these were later affected by the massive floods two years ago.)

In the contemporary Western world, far removed from the Buddhist populations, and based on an understanding of the Buddha as a peace-promoter, we walk around with highly caricatured images of regular people in those cultures as peaceful and meditative and pensive and everything else.  But, the closer we look, the more they come across as everybody else.

Overlay on all these the British Raj and its notorious policies of divide and rule.  And then remove the Raj and replace it with anti-democratic military rulers.  Then, remove the military rulers and suddenly allow for people to express their feelings.  Not any peaceful Buddhist scenario that is now unfolding in Burma:

mobs of Buddhist bigots and extreme Rakhine nationalists exercised their newly gained freedoms by marching through town past the charred remains of Rohingya houses and mosques. They screamed hatred at Muslims and denounced countries such as Turkey that want to aid the helpless refugees. Buddhist monks, heroes of the 2007 “saffron revolution” that tried to unseat the old military regime, egg on the crowds and help organise the protests. 

Buddhist monks help organize the protests against Muslims?  The followers of the Buddha did that?

ethnic Burman Buddhists have always resented the descendants of Indian Muslims who arrived on the coat-tails of the British in the 19th century to take all the best jobs and, to their mind, swamp the local cultures. ... The 2.5m people of Indian origin who remain are stigmatised and vulnerable; most have no citizenship. In this sense the Buddhist mobs are finishing off what the Burman chauvinist generals started in the 1960s. 

Are we talking about the same Buddha anymore?

(BTW, there are also Burmese refugees living in India. That is a separate story!)

The irony gets even more bitter:

This is the looking-glass world of the new Myanmar. Now it is only the once-reviled army that stands between minority Muslims and the bloodlust of Buddhist chauvinists.

How terrible!

These are the kinds of contexts when I really have to question Steven Pinker's thesis that we live in a lot more peaceful world now.

Update:
The WSJ reports:

A fire at a mosque in downtown Yangon that killed 13 schoolchildren Tuesday fueled fears among Myanmar's minority Muslim population that they had been targeted, though officials quickly insisted that the blaze had been caused by an accidental electrical short-circuit.  ...
The latest fire broke out around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, witnesses said, at a downtown mosque minutes away from offices, hotels and restaurants frequented by international businesspeople and tourists. The two-story complex includes a school and a dormitory that housed about 70 children, many of them orphans, who were asleep. Most escaped safely, according to state media reports, except for the 13—age 12 to 16 years old—who died of smoke inhalation.  Hundreds of Muslims clustered uneasily as firefighters battled the flames, expressing fears that arson had caused the fire. Such rumors persisted throughout the day