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War mangles words just as efficiently as it mangles bodies.
Under the unremitting gaze of the army, life became an act, to be performed for the satisfaction of the audience of soldiers.
And where there was nothing Buddhist to reclaim, there was always something Tamil to destroy.
More than with any other religion, the non-Buddhist world has a rigid idea of Buddhism, fixed along dimensions of pacific thought and lofty deeds and high detachment. I was learning, in Sri Lanka, how Buddhism was just as fluid as any other faith, just as easily poured into new and unexpected moulds.
In the mid-1990s, when the government gifted Mercedes-Benzes to two prominent monks, the cars were sent right back. They would not be accepted, it was made clear, unless the government paid for the automobile insurance as well.
In 1959, a monk extracted a revolver out of the folds of his robes and assassinated Solomon Bandaranaike, the prime minister, ‘for the greater good of the country, race and religion.’
Shrink the humanity of your
enemy, and the fighting must seem easier, more just, less complicated. Warfare consists of several psychological tricks, not least the ones you play upon yourself.
