“Violence and Moral Hierarchies of Victims in Buddhist Thought”
This paper illustrates Buddhist hierarchies of moral status that inform ethical approaches to violence. It offers new light on an ancient legend deployed in the current dehumanization of the Rohingya. The arhats’ designation of enemy casualties as mere animals, pasu, in the Mahāvaṃsa’s legend of King Duṭṭhagāmaṇi, derives from Vedic sacrifice, evolves into a standard Dharmaśāstric term for slain warriors, and is the Pāśupata Śaivites’ nomenclature of self-identity. By reference to Vinaya, the theory of the “five Immediates,” Mahāyāna sūtras and tantric sādhanas, we can see that the Buddhist ethics of killing is informed by a sliding scale of inauspiciousness gauged by the moral status of the victim in which harm against saints is the greatest sin possible, but killing those who would harm the Buddha may be no more inauspicious than killing ants.