The Constructive Use of Violence

in Vajrayna Buddhism
Jennifer Woodhull, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town

A paper presented at the congress of the Association for the Study of Religion in Southern
Africa, October 2628, 2015 in Johannesburg.
Violence begins in the imagination. The religious imaginary accommodates a broad range of violent
potentials, the most extreme of these giving rise to some of the worlds most intractable conflicts and
consequently, to occasions such as the one at which we find ourselves: a congress dedicated specifically
to the relationship between religion and violence. In pondering religiously justified violence, some
scholars have plumbed foundational texts for their non-violent visions. Contrary to that approach, I am
about to present an explicitly violent imaginary central to a Tibetan Buddhist practice that has endured
for more than a millennium. This ferocious visualisation, I argue, holds the potential for a practical
methodology to counter violence.
I begin with a brief introduction to the view of Tibetan, or Vajrayna, Buddhism. Vajrayna means
indestructible or diamond-like vehicle. A central doctrinal tenet of the Vajrayna is that all beings are
endowed with buddha-nature, or natural wisdom. This innate quality is traditionally represented in
examples such as a gold Buddha statue wrapped in filthy rags, symbolising our habitual neuroses and
reactivities (Gyamtso 2000:157); or, along the same lines, honey obscured by swarming bees (Gyamtso
2000:152).
Tibetans sometimes describe the so-called three poisons of Buddhismgrasping, aversion, and
denial (Ray 2000:322)as the fruits of a poison tree. Where other schools of Buddhism practise to
fence off or chop down the tree, it is said, the Vajrayanist eats the fruit. This provocative image
describes precisely the inclusive, non-dual approach of Tibetan Buddhism. The logic goes like this:
since we are fundamentally possessed of buddha-nature, all human tendencies arise from that reservoir
of unconditional positivity. Thus, our destructive thoughts and actions are considered distortions of the
energy of wisdom, rather than opposing forces (Gyamtso 2000:130). Energy itself, in this construction,
is neutral and fundamental. Whether it bears us toward suffering or liberation from suffering depends
on how we engage it.
Thus, the practitioner trains to cultivate disciplined intimacy with her own most toxic tendencies, for it
is held to be here, and nowhere else, that humanitys indestructible wisdom is to be found. Violence,
from this perspective, is no different from any other poisonous fruit. The inclusiveness of this approach
is central to my argument; for I submit that it is precisely the reflexive habit of attempting to exclude
the undesirable experience (typically along with the enemy, the perceived source or agent of that
experience) that perpetuates violence.
Exemplary of this approach is an 11th-century Tibetan Buddhist text called Machiks Complete
Explanation (Harding, 2003). Machik Labdrn is believed to have lived in the Lab region of Tibet
between the mid-11th and mid-12th centuries of the common era. This now-legendary female master
introduced the practice of Chd, revered and practised to this day by Buddhists of all four Tibetan
schools (Harding 2003:49).
The word Chd means cutting or severance (Harding 2003:15). What is severed is the
practitioners attachment to habitual patternsthe filthy rags obscuring the gold statue of buddhanature. The severance is accomplished by means of explicitly violent visualisations. In short, the
practitioner visualises, as vividly as possible, the demons on which she blames her suffering. These
could be embodiments of physical or mental illness; of difficult circumstances such as poverty,
injustice, or personal tribulations; or of social or political afflictions like war, torture, or genocide. One
might even visualise actual people. Having established the demons as present and embodied, one
proceeds to cut off the top of ones skull; sets it on a tripod over a cooking fire; chops up ones body;
crams it into the skull-bowl to make a stew; and then offers it to the visualised demons. The demons are
invited to eat until completely satisfied (Allione 2000:169). This ferocious imaginary is intensified by
its traditional performance in the Himalayan charnel grounds (Harding 2003:15) where, the rocky
ground precluding grave-digging, dismembered corpses are routinely dispatched by wild scavengers.
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It is tempting to dismiss this grisly imaginary as an insubstantial, albeit distasteful, product of the mind.
But I argue, with the philosopher of religion Richard Kearney (2005:1), that the imagination plays a
crucial role in the ways we configure our ethical prioritiesand accordingly, the actions arising out of
those priorities.
That said, what kind of ethics could possibly arise from imagining such terrible violence to ones own
body? After all, self-harming is nothing new in religion. One need only think of the self-flagellation and
starvation practised by extremists across the range of religious traditions 1acts not merely imagined,
but actually perpetrated on the suffering body. These not having perceptibly advanced the cause of nonviolence, one might conclude that imagined self-harming would be even less likely to do so.
The visualised violence of Chd, however, is neither punitive nor redemptive. Its context is one not of
mortification, but of enrichment. Chd is designed to counteract the poison of grasping, said by the
Buddha to be the origin of suffering (Ling 1973:136). The most fundamental form of grasping, on the
Buddhist view, is the clinging to a notion of the self as an essential, enduring entity independent of
other phenomena (Ling 1973:116).
The practitioners first port of call, so to speak, on the misguided journey to this imaginary self is her
body. Paul Ricoeur (1991:215) has pointed out the direct connection between identification with the
body and the demonisiation of the Other: My own body is the coherent ensemble of my powers and
my nonpowers; starting from the system of possibilities of the flesh, the world unfolds as the set of
hostile or docile instrumentalities, of permissions and obstacles. Through the practice of Chd, the
unfolding Ricoeur describes may in fact be directed elsewhere than into a world of hostile or docile
instrumentalities. The practitioners first step in forging that new direction begins with an imaginative
unravelling of her attachment to her body.
Suffering, in short, is attributed to the practitioners identification with and attachment to the embodied
ego. The demons are considered reified projections of her resistance to her native wisdom, vehemently
demanding attention precisely because habitually rejected. In this context, the ritual violence of the
practice reveals itself, remarkably, as kindness. Hence, the following popular 19 th-century supplication
to the mother of Chd:
Only mother, Machik Labdrn, think of me
Cutting through the subtle pretense of clinging to a self,
May I see the truth of the simplicity beyond self. 2
Nonetheless, the Chd visualisation is undeniably violent. It could be argued that violence in the service
of peace is an oxymoron. It was the Buddha, after all, who taught that hatred cant be overcome by
hatred, but only by love.3 This apparent conundrum prompts a closer look at what we might mean by
violence.
I propose that violence requires two ingredients: aggression and dualism. This compound is evident in
the common dictionary definition: behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or
kill.4 The agression lies in the behaviour; the dualism, in identifying an object to be hurt, damaged, or
killed. The fulfillment of a violent act requires a perpetrator to commit it and an object, or Other

1EncyclopediaofReligion,2ndedition,s.v.Asceticism.

2JamgnKongtrulLodrThaye,CallingtheGurufromAfar,2nded.,trans.ErikPemaKunsang,IanSaudeand
MichaelTweed(Kathmandu:RangjungYesheTranslations&Publications,2001).

3TheDhammapada,Chapter1:TheTwinVerses.

4SouthAfricanConciseOxfordDictionary,s.v.violence.
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(whether perceived as external or internal), to receive it. Without a self-and-other construction,

aggression has nowhere to hang its hat.
The otherization (Harding 2003:16) implicit in violence is preceded by a judgement of good or bad,
right or wrongwhat Harding (ibid.) calls the dualistic concepts that interpret all experience in
relation to the perceived help or harm it does to an unexamined self. Significantly, the Tibetan word
for dualistic thinking, lhadre, literally means god/demon (ibid.). The implication is that perceiving
the world in terms of helpful and harmful forces is itself the problem.
Chd recognises the Other as a projection of the subject. Its genius lies in its ability to appropriate the
very habit of othering in the service of undermining it. This device exemplifies the so-called skillful
means of Vajrayna: its embrace of human neuroses in order to liberate the potent, potentially
liberating energy that is understood to have stagnated in the dead end of ego-attachment.
Slavoj iek (2002:110) reminds us that the construction of the enemys image is always performative.
Invoking Emanuel Kants category of einbildungskraft, or (as iek translates the term) the
transcendental power of imagination, he points to the necessity of constructing an image of the enemy
so that the threat may be imaginatively strategised. The skillful means of Chd is to embrace the
performative construction of the enemy-as-imagebut where conventional strategies go on to
distinguish positive from negative conceptions in order to cultivate the former and vitiate the latter,
Chd creates an imaginary of accommodation. Its welcome and inclusion of the undesired might
fruitfully be viewed as a template for our relations with the Other in the world.
How can this view help us with our global violence problem? Here, I turn to the popular scholar Karen
Armstrongin particular, her book The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha,
Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah. The time to which Armstrong refersbetween 900 and 200 BCE
is generally characterised as the Axial Age, for it was then that many of the worlds enduring
religious and philosophical traditions came into being. Armstrong (2006:xii) names, specifically,
Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, monotheism and philosophical rationalism, all of which
emerged during this same period in quite unrelated regions of the planet.
The Axial Age was one of unprecedented warfare and violence; indeed, the first catalyst of religious
change was usually a principled rejection of the aggression that the sages witnessed all around them
(Armstrong 2006:xiv). Their collective insight was that violence could only be effectively challenged at
the individual levelspecifically, by turning human attention from external conditions to an internal,
experiential reality (Armstrong 2006:xiii). More than two millennia later, Carl Jung (2014:par.126)
reframed this understanding in the proposition that internal experiences, when ignored, emerge in the
guise of external circumstance.
Sadly, the leap from academic understanding to personal transformation raises questions that, as
encyclopaedist (and, incidentally, UCT alumnus) Anthony J.N. Judge (1979) points out, flowbeyond
thecategoriesandstructureswhichcannormallybeusedtocontainandordersuchconsiderations .
With due caution, Judge suggests that we might consider turning to the now-unfashionableperhaps
even embarrassingnotion of wisdom. Amongst those tendencies that work against wisdom in the
realm of governance and policy-making, he identifies exclusionary tendencies eerily similar to those
characteristic of violence: inter alia, an inability to integrate diverse viewpoints, and a reflexive
tendency to reject, ignore, or misrepresent opposing views. Especially relevant to the academic
endeavour are Judges points regarding a tendency to drown insights within lengthy papers and
[b]oring, repetitive, self-defeating debates verging on conceptual incest (with all the consequences of
inbreeding) (ibid.).
In seeking a path of action in light of these difficulties, Judge (1979) notes that knowledge generation is
conventionally structured along exclusivist lines, such that innovations are assumed to supplant or
invalidate previous findings. Interestingly, Judges challenge to this patterned worldview entails the
development of what he calls configurations: juxtapositions of irrelevant or opposing
perspectives [arranged so] as to respect the felt distance between them, recognising links of
sympathy or antipathy.
Judges configurations call to mind Richard Kearneys (2003:68) discussion of hospitality and
hostilityboth of which, he points out, derive from the same Latin root. Citing Derrida, Kearney
(2003:689) proposes that the hosts right to discriminate between who is and is not welcome in her
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territory entails at least some degree of violence. Here, the Chd approach of unconditional
inclusiveness precludes such violence at the outset. The demons, rather than being identified as
threatening and thus unwelcome, are embraced and indulged.
If nothing else, such a departure from predictable convention moves the action to a different gameboard
one on which the dominion of hostility and the inevitability of reaction are no longer assumed.
Importantly, the demons are not visualised as disappearing after having sated themselves. Rather, the
practitioners relationship with them is radically altered (Harding 2003:42). Chd is not a cunning,
spiritually correct strategy for eliminating the enemy after all. It is an invitation to a transformative
process that involves self, other, and the situation as a whole. I argue that it is only by means of such
radical and inclusive transformationnot by eliminating the troublesome ego, but by revising ones
relationship with itthat human violence can be effectively addressed. In Kearneys (2003:81) words,
[h]ere the very ipseity of the self expresses itself, paradoxically and marvellously, as openness to
others.
Susan Sontag (2004:1) has observed, in the context of torture perpetrated by Americans at the Ab
Ghraib prison in Iraq, that whether or not a given individual has performed an atrocity is not the point.
Rather, the systematic condoning of such acts confers culpability on every member of the society that
permits them. I would like to believe that, as academics, we can find it in ourselves to challenge
fragmentation, territoriality, and exclusivity in our own world. For to continue to view religious
violence as a problem out there, safely distanced from our own presumably more civilised and
discerning worldview, is merely to perpetuate the very thinking that fuels brutality the world over. To
begin unravelling the exclusionary strategies that routinely distort the human enterprise will require the
courage to examine the war between perceived right and wrong nested within our own worldview. But
as the Buddhist teacher Pema Chdrn once remarked, when a student complained that her recipe for
personal transformation took too long to accomplish, What else are you going to do with your life?5
Lest we dismiss disciplined self-examination as solipsistic and thus ineffectual, we might hearken to
Richard Kearneys (2005:90) observation that visionaries on the order of Moses, Socrates, Confucius,
and the Buddha were all beings who began at the beginning, taking one step at a time, little by little,
without end. Like them, he suggests, we might perform small actions that ripple and radiate out to
include a larger, even global, constellation of relations with others, allies and adversaries alike.
In conclusion, I submit that Chd offers us a crucial insight: namely, that the roots of violence are
nourished in our personal fixation on the valorisation of the self at the expense of the other.
Accordingly, the continued otherization of violators on both sides of any given ideological divide will
predictably undo even the best-intended and -conceived solutions to the problem of violence.

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