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

The Buddha at Ayutthaya. Hey, I have seen that!

After having had a delicious pizza that I baked at home ... ok, I didn't start with making the dough, but in the grand traditions of praising fast food, I got the base with a little bit of sauce and cheese, to which I added: red chili flakes, onions that I sliced, tomato that I diced, cilantro that I chopped, and then, to top them all, cut up the chicken that I had cooked yesterday into tiny pieces.  This multi-topping pizza was awesome, and way better than a similar one that Wolfgang Puck's outlets serve--I did get the idea for this combination from having had one too many of Puck's pizzas!

Now, where was I?  Oh yeah, so, after the dinner, here I am scanning through some of my favorite web sites, and came across the following photo at Slate:

Caption at the source: AYUTTHAYA, Thailand—Buddha head embedded in a tree, 2008.

If not for the pizza still working its way through my stomach, I might have jumped up with excitement, for I have been to Ayutthaya, and have taken photos of this very Buddha:

Ayutthaya itself was simply amazing.  As I noted before.  I hope the place has recovered from all that nasty floods.

The tragedy at Ayutthaya. Yet again! And at Ayodhya too :(

As has become my habit, I picked up the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times from the library's newspaper shelves and got myself a comfortable seat by the window and, predictably, I reached for the WSJ first. I was saddened to look at this photo:

It is one giant statue of the Buddha in Ayutthaya (a UNESCO World Heritage site,) sometimes referred to as the reclining posture, while a few others describe this as his enlightened state as he breathed his last.

The floods are making quite a mess of Thailand, with more than 260 dead and quite a bit of destruction to property.  I am able to relate to the area, its peoples, and to this Buddha statue thanks to having been there--the photo below is from my trip a couple of years ago:

I liked this photograph because the humans standing there gives the viewer an idea of the size of the statue.

Now, all these areas are flooded.

Death and destruction at Ayutthaya are, however, not anything new. If at all, humans have caused a lot more destruction, which, ironically, was because of the wars between the Buddhists in Burma and the Buddhists in Thailand!  I was almost teary when I saw a row of Buddha statues--beheaded by the invading Burmese.

Ayutthaya is, yes, named after Ayodhya. It was founded in 1350, and served as the capital for more than 400 years before it fell to the invading Burmese forces. It is a cruel irony that many a devastating wars have featured in the history of these two neighbors, which are home to millions of followers of Buddha, who preached non-violence!

Ayodhya is one of the holiest places in Hinduism. It is located in northern India, not far from the Nepal border, and is believed to be the birth place of the Hindu god Rama—to whom I owe my name!

Like most religious Hindus, my grandmothers immensely valued making a pilgrimage to Ayodhya. Though they were born in villages far away from Ayodhya, my grandmothers made it, unlike their previous generations who could only dream of going there in their lifetimes, but never did because of resource and transport constraints. After all, it is almost a three-thousand mile round trip between their villages and Ayodhya, and travel before the advent of modern transportation would have been extremely challenging.  My grandmothers would have been ecstatic if I had visited Ayodhya—but, visiting Ayutthaya may have been good enough for them, given my atheism :) 

Anyway, after the fall of Ayutthaya, Bangkok has been Thailand's capital since 1782. The king assumed the official title of “Rama I,” thereby further cementing the symbolic association with Ayodhya.

Ayutthaya is about 85 kilometers—about 50 miles for the metric-challenged—from Bangkok. The contrasts are profound. Bangkok is modern, bustling, congested, noisy, dusty, and crowded. Ayutthaya, on the other hand, is everything that Bangkok is not—calm, and with lots of ambulatory space, and feels a tad cooler too. After spending a few hours walking through the ruins, it is not difficult to imagine the life that once flourished in Ayutthaya during its years of glory.

At least Ayutthaya’s days of battles are over. Ayodhya, on the other hand, continues to be a flashpoint because extremist Hindus claim that there ought not to be a mosque—the Babri Masjid—in the piece of land where, it is believed, a temple for Rama once stood.

The spread of Islam, and the arrival of Central Asian Muslim warriors, who founded the successful Moghul Dynasty, resulted in the destruction of more than a few Hindu temples in India, and some that did not face destruction were converted as mosques. The Babri Masjid is from that era, and its name is in honor of Babur, the first of the Moghuls.

The destruction and alteration of property was not anything unusual—historically, it is something that humans have done pretty much in every culture across the planet. Rare would have been the case when the invading forces did everything possible to preserve the “enemy’s” life and property.

However, and unfortunately centuries later, Hindu extremists launched a holy war to restore the temple of Rama. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), through which the extremist Hindu concerns are politically represented, decided to make the converted mosque a big part of their politics. Thus, despite India’s Supreme Court warning against any vandalism and destruction of Babri Masjid, the fanatics from the BJP ended up destroying the mosque in 1992—a horrific act, that severely escalated religious tensions in the country.

I am confident that my grandmothers would never have supported the destruction of a mosque, despite their devotion to Rama and, therefore, to Ayodhya. It is a tragedy that throughout history we humans have intentionally destroyed our fellow beings and their settlements and, along with that, traditions and cultures. While we might be vaguely familiar with the adage that “Rome was not built in a day”, we do not seem to truly understand that it takes only a short time to destroy that which took years, perhaps even centuries to build.

Ayodhya, Ayutthaya, and Babri Masjid

My grandmothers would have been ecstatic if I had visited Ayodhya—but, visiting Ayutthaya may have been good enough for them.

Ayodhya is one of the holiest places in Hinduism. It is located in northern India, not far from the Nepal border, and is believed to be the birth place of the Hindu god Rama—to whom I owe my name!

Like most religious Hindus, my grandmothers immensely valued making a pilgrimage to Ayodhya. Though they were born in small towns—villages back then—my grandmothers made it, unlike their previous generations who could only dream of going there in their lifetimes, but never did because of resource and transport constraints. After all, it is almost a three-thousand mile round trip between their towns and Ayodhya, and travel before the advent of modern transportation would have been extremely challenging.

Ayutthaya is in Thailand and, yes, it was named after Ayodhya. Ayutthaya was founded in 1350, and served as the capital for more than 400 years before it fell to the invading Burmese forces. It is a cruel irony that many a devastating wars have featured in the history of these two neighbors, which are home to millions of followers of Buddha, who preached non-violence!

After the fall of Ayutthaya, Bangkok has been the capital since 1782. The king assumed the official title of “Rama I,” thereby further cementing the symbolic association with Ayodhya. The current king, a jazz aficionado, is Rama IX.

Ayutthaya is about 85 kilometers—about 50 miles for the metric-challenged—from Bangkok. The contrasts are profound. Bangkok is modern, bustling, congested, noisy, dusty, and crowded. Ayutthaya, on the other hand, is everything that Bangkok is not—calm, and with lots of ambulatory space, and feels a tad cooler too. After spending a few hours walking through the ruins, I found it quite easy to imagine the life that once flourished in Ayutthaya during its years of glory.

At least Ayutthaya’s days of battles are over. Ayodhya, however, continues to be a flashpoint because extremist Hindus claim that there ought not to be a mosque—the Babri Masjid—in the piece of land where, it is believed, a temple for Rama once stood.

The spread of Islam, and the arrival of Central Asian Muslim warriors, who founded the successful Moghul Dynasty, resulted in the destruction of more than a few Hindu temples in India, and some that did not face destruction were converted as mosques. The Babri Masjid is from that era, and its name is in honor of Babur, the first of the Moghuls.

The destruction and alteration of property was not anything unusual—historically, it is something that humans have done pretty much in every culture across the planet. Rare would have been the case when the invading forces did everything possible to preserve the “enemy’s” life and property.

However, and unfortunately centuries later, Hindu extremists launched a holy war to restore the temple of Rama. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), through which the extremist Hindu concerns are politically represented, decided to make the converted mosque a big part of their politics. Thus, despite India’s Supreme Court warning against any vandalism and destruction of Babri Masjid, the fanatics from the BJP ended up destroying the mosque in 1992—a horrific act, that severely escalated religious tensions in the country.

I am confident that my grandmothers would have never have supported the destruction of a mosque, despite their devotion to Rama and, therefore, to Ayodhya. It is a tragedy that throughout history we humans have intentionally destroyed our fellow beings and their settlements and, along with that, traditions and cultures. While we might be vaguely familiar with the adage that “Rome was not built in a day”, we do not seem to truly understand that it takes only a short time to destroy that which took years, perhaps even centuries to build.

I am, therefore, delighted that the ruins of Ayutthaya are now one of the five sites in Thailand, among others around the globe, that are listed by UNESCO in the World Heritage List for having “outstanding universal value.” This list is a fantastic way in which we can ensure—to the best of our abilities—the continued existence of priceless and irreplaceable historical treasures that, by themselves, speak volumes of our collective past.