Experiences of Conflict Reconciliation using Buddhist Approach in Siam

Sulak Sivaraksa
Lapapan Supamanta

Religion as the cause of conflict

Religions – although they have been established to spread the message of peace, love and righteousness to its followers – for many times in human history, turned to be causes of conflicts, hatred and injustice. How religions create grievance to people requires us to look at the paradoxical nature of religions.

Religions have two dimensions. One is the role of a priest when the society is peaceful. Religions are active in maintaining the society, keeping religious tradition and performing rituals. This dimension is conservative. However, we can see in the history that, religions play another role, i.e. as a visionary when the society is in crisis. Religions tell people what is right and what is wrong. They look beyond the chaos, inspire the improvement to the society, and make people hopeful for the righteousness and the better future.

When religions fail to act out of visionary dimension in the time of crisis, they would only serve the powers that be in perpetuating injustice and oppression. Myanmar and Siam (Thailand) are examples. Majority of the monks there are close to the government or ruling elites. They are not aware of the need for changes and fail to act as voices of conscious when the two countries are facing political, economic, social and moral crisis. The result is the sufferings of the ordinary, poor people.

Besides, religions have another binary feature. In one hand, they possess the universal message of love, which is the same in all religions. Another one is the institutionalized feature, which is the egoistic. When the universal message of love for humankind is overshadowed by the attachment to institutionalized feature, people of religion become fundamentalists, narrow minded and intolerant. The attachment prevents the followers to see the same universal value in other religions, or even the other sects of the same religion.

The results from the attachment and failure to recognize universal values are disastrous. One of the negative results is all kinds of attempts to persuade people of different faith to adopt what one thinks the only way toward salvation. Following this is the crash both within and between religions, which is destructive to the establishment of inter-faith cooperation and understanding. Another danger is the hatred out of which people commit violence against others, ranging from conflicts among communities, religious war, to the latest version of war on terrorism.

A religion practiced in a country can be divided into the unchanging core teachings and culture which each land has adapted to suit its locality. Culture is enormously influenced by religion. For example, Buddhism practiced in Siam is different from the one in Korea, or in Tibet at cultural level although the core teaching is the same. Similarly, Islam in the desert of Middle East is different from the tropical Southeast Asia in terms of culture. But culture is not a religion. When we expect people to practice religion, it is not appropriate to assume people to adopt the culture. Culture has strength and weakness. To preserve culture, it requires critical analysis on the oppressive, chauvinist, tribal element of it, which is not always the case in most of the world. Then, when we mistake culture for religion, usually we will end up with sectarianism, which create troubles in the society.

Similarly, when religion is mistaken for an ethnicity or a nationality without the counterbalance from the universal message of love, it can vigorously support extreme nationalism and commit violence. A nationalist monk in Siam once said in the anti-communist era that killing a communist is not a sin. Likewise, in Sri Lanka the Tamil are seen as inferior to the Singhalese. The Hindu’s idea that India should only be for the Hindu results in the attack on other religious communities.

Contribution of Buddhist teachings in conflict mediation: principle

Not that the religions can only create and exacerbate the conflict. With their universal message of love, they have extremely strong potentiality to put it out.

Conflict is nature of human beings. It is impossible to aspire for a conflict-free community or nation. Otherwise it is only the suppression or concealing of conflict. From Buddhist point of view, conflict is another form of sufferings. It is for us to confront, not to avoid. People need to know how to handle it skillfully.

In traditional Thai society, the parties in conflict will seek reconciliation from the religious leaders or the senior and respectful member of the village. It is not common that both parties talk directly. With the help from the religious leaders and the senior, the process of reconciliation is influenced by Buddhist teachings.

The Buddha tough about the nature of life in terms of sufferings and the cessation of sufferings, which is common to all human beings. Human being is composed of body and mind. A part of mind is the storage of emotion. If the conflicts resolution involved only the confession and compensation, it is not enough. The strong negative feeling of hatred continues in the mind of both parties.

According to understanding of mind in Buddhism, all experiences of human being will leave a memory in the mind. Pleasant experiences become the pleasant latent tendency or “seeds”, such as compassion, generosity, joy, respect, etc. So do the unpleasant ones like hate, hopelessness, jealousy, and sorrow. Going through bitter experiences of conflicts, people make his unpleasant seeds grow stronger. The negative emotion is getting stronger over time, which turns to be obstacle to reconciliation. Buddhism provides some meditation technique to paralyze the negative seeds while fostering positive ones.

Buddhism talked about the three poisons – greed, hatred and delusion – which is the cause of unwholesome thought, speech and action. In doing conflict reconciliation process, the mediator must bear this fact in mind. No one is to be blamed. It is not a person who is enemy of another person. It is his three poisons that cause him to do harmful act. To do this, the mediator must cultivate skills such as deep listening and compassion.

The reconciliation process should remind the parties in conflicts about one of the most basic ideas of Buddhism of non-duality and interrelatedness. Because of the law of inter-relatedness, there is no separate self. Then, at the ultimate sense, the person who hurts and the person who is hurt are one. They share the same need, i.e. everyone wants happiness and hate sufferings. But with delusion, such fact is forgotten and people start to hurt the other party. If the bad deed is committed, the bad result will come back to the doer, making him unhappy at the end. This is a law of kamma, i.e. good kamma causes wholesome result and bad kamma causes unwholesome result. (kamma means volitional deed).

The abovementioned is not only for the person-to-person conflict, it is applicable to the collective one, according to my observance on Pak Moon Dam protesting movement.

The villagers at the confluence of Moon River and Mekong River lost their fishing career from the construction of the big dam built without the consultation with and compensation for them. They got organized and co-found the biggest people movement in Siam, the Assembly of the Poor. The conflict is between the poor villagers and the mighty electricity generating state enterprise plus international development banks. Their feeling of anger is counterbalanced by the spirit of hope and empowerment that they gain from their integration of Buddhist elements and tradition into their struggle. They are able to win the heart of some middle class people in town who speak for them to the government.

Contribution of Buddhist teachings in conflict mediation: process

By observing the process of the Pak Moon people, my understanding of spirituality-based reconciliation is better. In the moment of conflict, the parties involved will experience anger. Anger is natural mental phenomena. It is not good to ignore it, suppress it or let it run wild. Instead, we must allow both parties to express it and understand it without judgment. It is critical for reconciliation. To do this task, Buddhism suggests mindfulness practice. This practice makes us remain conscious and enable us to recognize the reality of interrelatedness and universality of sufferings. By seeing these two things, we become aware that it is useless to be angry and then compassion will arise into our mind. Meditation for mindfulness is supplementary to mediation. That’s because along the process of mediation, anger and despair come and go repeatedly. We must prepare to deal with it with mindfulness practices.

Then, the process of reconciliation must ensure that each party gets adequate and correct information regarding the conflict. When people get angry, the ability to search for facts and willingness to share information is reduced. However, with the three poisons, each party may present different version of facts. The wisdom to investigate the fact and information is critical in the process.

The feeling of guilt is the next thing that must be handled skillfully. The fact reveals the truth that causes the party who did wrong feel guilty. This is another critical stage in the reconciliation. It can create the duality of the wrongdoer vis-à-vis the sufferers, which obstruct the progress of reconciliation. The facilitator must make them understand that everyone has inner violence (aka the three poisons) and without careful attention to it, everyone can hurt other. Everyone can be a wrongdoer and everyone can be a sufferer. With a certain level of guilt, the wrongdoer will have to admit and take responsibility for his action.

In return, the sufferer must give forgiveness. In Buddhist concept, there is no punishment or revenge against the wrongdoer. The law of kamma will make the wrongdoer suffer the result of his own bad deed. If anyone does revenge or punishment, it means such person binds himself with another round of bad deed, and the vicious cycle will never end. To break such cycle, the Buddhist talked about “ahosikamma”. This word means to defunct kamma so that such bad kamma will has no longer any negative potential force to harm both parties in conflict. In Buddhist term, to forgive literally means to give up fear or not cause other frightened. That is because from that moment on, the sufferer agrees to stop making the other party fear from the possible harmful retaliation in the conflict. Now none of them will create fear for no one will feel fear. The meditation on compassion can play a good role in the process. If doing this stage well enough, the two parties will not only just understand and forgive each other, the process itself can extend the horizon of compassion in their minds. They must deduce the compassion for the suffering of fellow human beings who are in the world of sufferings like them.

Conflicts in the urban context

In rural area, the tradition is still relatively strong. Monks and senior villagers’ voices are influential. But it is not the case for the urban conflict. The urbanization makes people alienate from the nature which is the life support system for human beings. To survive, people have to struggle on the individual basis, not a communal one. The individualistic ideology dominates the urban society. The issues of conflicts may be different from the ones in the agricultural area. More and more we see conflicts in schools, in workplaces, in family, among neighbors, and so on.

However, to me, the principle and the process based on Buddhism are applicable to both the urban and rural. I am so certain because of the fact that in the Assembly of the poor, there are organizations of the urban poor, the slum dwellers and workers.

There are a few concerns. The traditional facilitator cannot be the monks or the senior villager. We will need to have a professional mediator with sufficient knowledge and practices of spirituality. Secondly, in the urban area, there is a great deal of diversity, both in ethnic and in religion terms. Though the principle of the Buddha can be practiced by anyone, without declaring oneself as a Buddhist, we must be sensitive to the religious terminology.

Conclusion

As conflicts are perennial in human society, we must learn to welcome it and turn it into the culture of truth, forgiveness and cooperation. In the task, we can resort to the valuable teachings of all religions on universal love. To settle conflicts through legal process alone is not sufficient. The sufferer may get compensation from the conflict, but the deep anger is not healed by any monetary or material reparation.

We must make our society to be the one that respects truth, and be shameful of manipulating truth to exploit others. We must raise awareness that we all are one and no one is the other. There is no point to hurt other, because at the end it means that person is hurting himself.

But what is even better than the improved skill of conflict reconciliation is that we must return to the root course of the conflicts. In Buddhism, motivation is the most important because from it all the actions arise. If a person knows how to turn greed into generosity, hatred into compassion, and delusion into wisdom, the tendency for the conflicts to occur is reduced. The attempt to remove the causes of conflict may not be attractive to many people because it is not as spectacular as the heroic action of conflict reconciliation. But if we neglect and let conflict grows, by the time it is fixed, a lot of damage may be in place already. But such attempt is important, as H.H. the Dalai Lama called it “the internal disarmament”. To him, there is no other way else to solve the conflicts and other problems in this world, we will need only compassion, compassion and even more compassion.

S. Sivaraksa is President and
L. Supamanta is Executive Secretary of
International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB).
They can be reached at [email protected]

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