As someone who used to be Buddhist and still harbours pretty Buddhist inclinations, my gut always wants to do the “No true Scotsman” fallacy in response to Buddhist violence, but that kind of tribalistic instinct is the source of a lot of violence throughout history.

Violence is complicated though. I recall the 14th Dalai Lama (spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism) responding to a question whether it would be justified to kill Hitler (and other genocide perpetrators) if they were early into their campaigns of genocide, and the reply was that it would be justified, so long as they weren’t killed in anger (because Buddhism puts a significant amount of weight on the intentions behind actions as well as the practical impact).

On average, I do think Buddhism is fairly low violence/hate than many other religions, but any I also think people in general will always have the capacity for violence, and so any religion large enough will have its violent extremists. There aren’t any particular examples in scripture that I can recall that are pro-violence, so I’ll share with you a wee story I’ve always found humorously dark. It’s one of the Jataka, which are stories about the Buddha in a previous life. (n.b. “Bodhisattva” means "one who is seeking enlightenment and is how the Buddha referred to himself pre-enlightenment)

"The Bodhisatta was once a rat. He lived in the forest and was the leader of a big pack of rats. A jackal came up with a scheme to eat the rats by pretending to be holy and staying near their cave. When the Bodhisatta saw the jackal, he asked his name and why he stood on one leg facing the sun while loudly inhaling air. The jackal answered that his name was Godly, and if he stood on all four legs the earth could not bear his weight, he faced the sun to worship it, and air was his only food.

The Bodhisatta fell for the ruse and began to take all the rats to pay respect to the jackal every morning and evening. And each time the rats left, the jackal lunged down to eat the last one and lick his lips clean before any others could see what had happened. Eventually the rats noticed their group had grown smaller, and they told the Bodhisatta. Hearing this news, he suspected it was the jackal, so the next time they went to worship, the Bodhisatta walked at the end of the line. When the jackal poised to strike, the Bodhisatta yelled out, “So this is your saintliness, you hypocrite and rascal!” and sprang at the jackal’s throat, biting hard into his windpipe and killing him. The other rats came back and devoured the entire body." ^[1]

I find this story wild because it seems like it’s presenting violence as a good thing? Like, the hypocritical jackal gets absolutely bodied. Sure, the Bodhisatta was a rat, and maybe a rat isn’t sufficiently advanced for us to hold responsible for killing (plus the Bodhisatta hasn’t reached enlightenment, so maybe I’m applying unreasonable standards here), but if we’re imagining talking animals that can scam and scheme, I’m going to think of them as somewhat human. I first read it in a children’s book, and was shocked at how dark it was.

Mainly though, the reason I remembered this story is because many Buddhist stories are heavily reliant on symbolism and take some digging to unearth the insight. The Buddha told this story after being told that one of his disciples had been exposed as a hypocrite (the story was like a “ah, some people never change” kind of angle), and the intended takeaway definitely wasn’t “you should go and kill that guy”. However, I can see how people could see it (and other stories that may involve violence for a greater good) as an endorsement of such. It gets messy because there’s significant variation in what texts and practices acknowledged by different sects of Buddhism; I can’t fathom an ideology that is both far-right while also being anything remotely resembling Buddhism, but I know very little about Sinhalese Buddhism, and I said I was going to avoid doing the the No True Scotsman thing

Edit: forgot the citation to the translation I used [1]: https://thejatakatales.com/bilara-jataka-128/

Also, I looked into Sinhalese Buddhism further. It appears to me that a key component here is the “Mahavamsa”, a non canonical text written in the 5th century CE, which presents the Sinhalese as the Buddha’s chosen people and Sri Lanka as a promised land. One story involves a Buddhist warrior king feeling bad for killing Tamil unbelievers, but his disciples reassure him that it’s fine, because they were barely better than beasts and it was necessary to “bring glory to Buddhist doctrine”. It presents the Sinhalese as the first humans to inhabit the island, given that those who predated them are considered to be sub-human. Yikes! I can see how this would drive far right extremism

The plot thickens though. Sinhalese Buddhism saw a big revival under British Colonialism, to counter the influence of Christian missionaries. A detail that I initially found baffling was that the British actually commissioned a translation of the Mahavamsa into Sinhalese, making it accessible to a wider audience; it was written in Pāli, a classical Indian language that relatively few could read. The 1881 census has Sri Lanka as being 61.57% Buddhist (not too far behind the 2012 figure of 70.20%), so I wonder whether encouraging Sinhalese Buddhism was an attempt by the British, as a colonial power, to make the Sri Lankan more homogenous and thus, more legible. It would be on-brand for Britain.

To summarise, I like this quote from political scientist Heather Selma Gregg:

“Modern-day Sinhalese nationalism, rooted in local myths of being a religiously chosen people and of special progeny, demonstrates that even a religion perceived as inherently peaceful can help fuel violence and hatred in its name.”

Yeah, that’d do it. It’s disappointing to learn, but not especially surprising.