NONVIOLENCE

NONVIOLENCE . Virtually every religious tradition contains some sort of injunction against taking human life. The biblical instruction "Thou shalt not kill" (Ex. 20:13, Dt. 5:17), considered normative for both Jewish and Christian traditions, is echoed in the New Testament (Mt. 5:21) and also in the Qurʾān: "Slay not the life that God has made sacred" (6:152). In the Buddhist tradition, the first of the Five Precepts mandated as part of the Eightfold Path of righteous living is the requirement not to kill. A Jain text claims that "if someone kills living things … his sin increases" (Sūtrakṛtāṅga 1.1), a sentiment that is also found in Hinduism: "The killing of living beings is not conducive to heaven" (Manusmṛti 5.48).

Despite the general agreement over the immorality of killing, however, there is a great deal of disagreement within and among religious traditions over such crucial matters as (1) how the rule against killing is justified; (2) when the rule may be abrogated; (3) whether it applies to all animate life; (4) whether it includes a prohibition against forms of harm other than physical; and (5) how central it is to each tradition.

A comparative survey of the concept of nonviolence is also complicated by the fact that the terms used for nonviolent acts and attitudes differ widely from culture to culture and from one century to the next. The words pacifism and nonviolence, for instance, are relatively new inventions in the English language. Nonviolence, a translation of the Sanskrit term ahiṃsā (lit., "no harm"), came into common English usage only in the twentieth century through its association with Mohandas Gandhi and his approach to conflict. While the term has parallels in religious traditions throughout the world, the idea is central primarily in the religious traditions found in India.

In the following survey of nonviolence in the world religious traditions, the concept can be seen as conceived in three basic ways:

1. As an inner state or attitude of nondestructiveness and reverence for life. This idea is expressed primarily in the Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions through the notion of ahiṃsā. It is also found in certain African and Native American tribal societies and in some Christian communities, including the Quakers.
2. As an ideal of social harmony and peaceful living. This concept, associated with the Hebrew term shalom and the Islamic term salām, is also found in ancient Greek religion, where gods such as Demeter and Apollo incarnated the virtues of peace. It is linked with visions of a perfect future found in Christianity and in various tribal religions.
3. As a response to conflict. A nonviolent approach to confrontation, even in oppressive situations, has been the hallmark of the Christian notion of sacrificial love, the Jewish concept of martyrdom, and the Gandhian strategy of nonviolent conflict.

Ancient India

During the Vedic period (c. 1500–500 bce), the concept of nonviolence was virtually unknown. The culture of the time was permeated with the values of a military society, and animals were widely used for food and sacrifice. The mythological accounts of Vedic gods are filled with acts of violence, vengeance, and warfare—activities in which the gods of the great epics also participated.

The first mention of nonviolence as a moral virtue is found in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (3.17.4), where the word ahiṃsā implies self-sacrifice and restraint. The Yoga Sūtra later requires it as a vow for those undertaking yogic practices. The further evolution of the concept, however, is linked with another notion that arises in the Upaniṣads, the belief in karman, that is, that one's attitudes and deeds in this life will influence one's status in the next. Acts and attitudes destructive to life are considered to have an especially bad influence. The concept of ahiṃsā, thus elevated, came into a central position in the teachings of the heterodox masters of the sixth century bce, notably Mahāvīra, the prominent figure in the Jain tradition, and Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha.

Jain Teachings

The importance of nonviolence in Jainism is due to the tradition's stark view of the law of karman : any association with killing, even an accidental one, is a serious obstacle on the path of karmic purity. For that reason, pious Jains wear masks over their faces to avoid breathing in (and thereby destroying) tiny insects, and they sweep the ground before them in order to avoid stepping on anything living as they walk. In addition, all Jains adhere to a vegetarian diet. Vegetables are also living things, of course, but certain vegetables are thought to carry a greater karmic weight, and these the Jains try to avoid. Jain monks, whose code is even stricter than that of the laity, hold as an ideal the logical conclusion of an extreme form of ahiṃsā : the completion of one's life by starving to death.

Buddhism

The Buddhist ideal of ahiṃsā, even as practiced by Buddhist monks, is not as strict as that of the Jains. Buddhists emphasize motivation as well as action, and traditional Buddhist teachings require five conditions, all of which must be present before one can be considered culpable of an act of killing: (1) something must first have been living; (2) the killer must have known that it was alive; (3) he or she must have intended to kill it; (4) there must have been an act of killing; and (5) it must, in fact, have died.

It is the absence of the third of these conditions that typically allows for some mitigation of the rule of total nonviolence in the Buddhist case. For instance, many Buddhists will eat meat as long as they have not themselves intended that the animal be slaughtered or been involved in the act of slaughtering. Armed defense—even warfare—has been justified on the grounds that such violence has been in the nature of response, not intent. To use violence nondefensively, however, for the purpose of political expansion, appears to be prohibited under the Buddhist rule.

Perhaps for this reason, the great Buddhist emperor Aśoka came to accept the principle of nonviolence only after his bloody wars of expansion. From his headquarters in what is now the North Indian state of Bihar, Asoka conquered a goodly portion of the South Asian subcontinent in the third century bce. Once in power, however, he instituted the rule of nonviolence as state policy.

Even in modern Buddhist societies such as Thailand, where kingship is a religious as well as a political role, there is a tension between the obligations of political authority and the adherence to the rule of nonviolence. In countries such as China and Japan, where Buddhism is intertwined with other religious traditions, the stringent Buddhist standards are maintained only by monks, while those in political authority rely on other religious traditions, such as Confucianism and Shinto, to justify political force.

Chinese culture has been receptive to Buddhist ideas on nonviolence, however, due to the existence of similar notions in traditional Chinese thought. The Daoist concept of wuwei ("nonstriving") connotes an ideal of peaceful living and the absence of aggression much like that conveyed by the concept of ahiṃsā.

Medieval and Modern Hindu Attitudes

Sometime after the rise of Buddhism, and perhaps because of its influence, the idea of nonviolence gained popularity throughout India and became linked with two other notions, vegetarianism and respect for the cow. Some scholars regard cow worship as a vestige of an earlier nature-goddess religion in India, but in its later, Hindu interpretation, veneration of the cow became a symbol of respect for all living beings, and by extension, a symbol of nonviolence. Despite the popularity of the concept, however, the political history of India has been dominated by military rulers, often members of the warrior caste (kṣatriya ) whose moral obligation (dharma ) includes leadership in battle.

It was Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) who brought the concept of nonviolence into the political sphere. By combining the notion of nonviolence with a traditional means of protest—dharṇā (a general strike)—Gandhi made movements of nonviolent noncooperation into instruments of significant political power. By employing nonviolence as an essential element of the consensus style of decision making traditionally practiced by India's village councils (pañchāyat ), Gandhi developed a novel method of conflict resolution he called satyāgraha ("truth force"). He applied this term both to his campaigns for India's independence and to his way of dealing with differences of opinion in everyday life.

Although Gandhi insisted on nonviolence as a general rule, he allowed for several significant exceptions. He condoned the violence required to stop snipers or rapists as they attacked, and permitted the killing of pests and wild animals that threatened his rural commune. He claimed that he preferred violence over cowardice, and he placed the battle for truth on a higher plane than the strict observance of nonviolence. Yet Gandhi also regarded nonviolence as the litmus test that would reveal where truth was to be found. In Gandhi's view, any form of coercion or intimidation was violent and to be abhorred.

Hindu and Sikh Militants

The persistence of violence in India's public life is ample testimony that Gandhi's approach was not unanimously accepted even in his own land. The movement for national independence that Gandhi led was marred by violence, including that perpetrated by Bengali nationalists inspired by Durga, a goddess to whom great destructive powers were ascribed. At the time of independence, Hindu militants led violent assaults against their old Muslim foes and, in 1948, one of them led the fatal assault on Gandhi's life as well.

The assassination in 1984 of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India was also motivated by religious concerns. Mrs. Gandhi was killed by a member of the Sikh community in retaliation for her part in ordering a military assault on the Sikh Golden Temple. The fundamental teachings of the Sikhs are not, however, violent: the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century spiritual masters who are regarded as founders of the faith are portrayed as such gentle souls that Gandhi himself claimed to have been inspired by them. But over the years the ranks of the Sikh movement swelled with members of a militant tribal group, the Jats, and Sikhs were involved in violent clashes with the Mughals, the British, and other Indian rulers. The core of the Sikh community is known as "the army of the faithful," and their symbol is a double-edged sword.

Biblical Judaism

Western religious traditions are no less inclined than their Eastern counterparts to combine violent and peaceful images of the divine. And, as in the Hindu tradition, some of the earliest images are the most violent. "The Lord is a warrior," proclaims Exodus 15:3. The utter desolation with which God destroyed his enemies indicated just how fierce a warrior he could be.

Later sections of the Hebrew scriptures temper this image with an attitude of compassion, and some even show a disdain of things military (see Ps. 20, 30, 33, 147; Is. 30). David, for instance, was not allowed to build the Temple because he had shed blood (1 Chr. 28:2–3), and the prophetic vision that nations will "beat their swords into plowshares" and "never again be trained for war" (Is. 2:4, Mi. 4:3) is one of the most vivid images of pacifism in any religious scripture.

An even more positive approach is indicated by the growing prominence of the biblical term for "peace," shalom, which appears often in the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures, especially Jeremiah and Isaiah. The term signifies not only an absence of warfare, but the presence of a spirit of well-being and harmony. In this respect, shalom is the Hebrew equivalent for the positive aspects of ahiṃsā, especially the absence of the desire to harm.

Rabbinic and Modern Judaism

Writings in the Babylonian Talmud continue this Jewish emphasis on shalom and further elaborate a series of ethical restrictions on using violence. On an interpersonal level, the absence of violence is applauded even in the face of provocation. If one is attacked, a fourth-century rabbi advised, "let him kill you; do you commit no murder" (Pes. 25b). At the level of statecraft, the rabbis did sanction warfare, but they distinguished between "religious" war and "optional" war. The former they required as a moral or spiritual obligation—to protect the faith or defeat enemies of the Lord. These contrasted with wars that are waged for reasons of political expansion and power; such optional wars are justified only if they are initiated for virtuous reasons.

During the rabbinic period, the Jewish community was also beginning to develop nonviolent forms of self-defense and resistance, both as individual and as communal actions. The confrontations with the occupying Roman government included not only militant clashes, such as the Maccabean Revolt (166–164 bce), but also nonviolent encounters, as when the Jewish community resisted Caligula's attempt to establish a statue of himself as Zeus in the Temple at Jerusalem in 40 ce. The revolt at Masada in 73 ce, although violent, involved a show of religious solidarity that culminated in mass suicide, and the rebellion led by Bar Kokhba (c. 132–135 ce) involved a kind of passive resistance that resulted in martyrdom.

The concept of martyrdom, kiddush ha-Shem ("sanctification of the divine name"), is central to the Jewish tradition of nonviolent resistance. The term implies that those who revere the divine order must be unflagging in their witness to it, even at the cost of their lives. A rabbinical council in the second century ce narrowed to three the number of offenses that one should refuse to commit even under the threat of death: idolatry, unchastity, and murder. By extension, however, martyrdom was expected in any situation where one was forced to deny the basic tenets of the faith.

In times of political oppression, the ideal of kiddush ha-Shem has served to inspire Jewish resisters to acts of courage and faithfulness even at the risk of their lives. This ideal was tested in the fifteenth century when, during the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews were persecuted for adopting a technique that amounted to passive resistance: they claimed to be Christian converts when in fact they were secretly observing the Jewish faith. In the twentieth century, faced with massive Nazi attempts at genocide, the European Jewish community adopted both violent and nonviolent forms of resistance. One of the most common responses to the Nazis, especially among the Orthodox, was based on the traditional notion of kiddush ha-Shem : they faced their opponents with dignity and faithfulness, rather than adopting any aspect of the enemy's behavior, even if it meant risking death.

Early Christianity

Martyrdom was an important feature of early Christianity as well, partly because it seemed an imitation of the sacrifice of Jesus, but there has been disagreement among Christians from that time to the present over whether Jesus' example of selfless love (agape) was meant to be followed to similar extremes by other members of the Christian community. Those who thought so expected that the peaceable kingdom of God that is often depicted in the Gospels would be realized in this world, and they took literally Jesus' advocacy of a nonviolent approach to conflict: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Mt. 5:44).

The early church fathers, including Tertullian and Origen, affirmed that Christians were constrained from taking human life, a principle that prevented them from participating in the Roman army. The fact that soldiers in the army were required to swear allegiance to the emperor's god was also a deterrent, since it would have forced Christians into what they regarded as idolatry.

The adoption of Christianity as the state religion by Constantine in the fourth century ce brought about a major reversal in Christian attitudes toward pacifism and led to the formulation of the doctrine of just war. This idea, based on a concept stated by Cicero and developed by Ambrose and Augustine, has had a significant influence on Christian social thought. The abuse of the concept in justifying military adventures and violent persecutions of heretical and minority groups led Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, to reaffirm that war is always sinful, even if it is occasionally waged for a just cause.

Pacifist Christian Movements

The late medieval period witnessed the rise of a series of movements dedicated to pacifism and the ethic of love that Jesus had advocated in his Sermon on the Mount. One of the first of such groups was the Waldensian community based in France and North Italy; this was founded by Pierre Valdès, who in 1170 had committed himself to a life of poverty and simplicity, and who refused to bear arms. Although Valdès was excommunicated from the church, he is said to have influenced the young Francis of Assisi, whose religious order later adopted many of Valdès's principles. Similar pacifist teachings were advocated by John Wyclif and his Lollard followers in fourteenth-century England, and in the same century the Hussite and Taborite movements in Czechoslovakia rejected all forms of violence, as did their successors, the Moravians.

The Protestant Reformation provided a new stimulus for groups that rejected the church's compromise with what it often regarded as the political necessity of military force. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Anabaptists broke away from Ulrich Zwingli's branch of the Swiss Reformation over the issues of voluntary baptism and absolute pacifism—teachings the Anabaptists affirmed and that, later in the same century, were adopted by Menno Simons and his Mennonite followers in Holland. In a tragic and ironic twist of fate, many of these pacifists were persecuted by fellow Protestants as heretics, and were burned at the stake.

Perhaps the best-known Protestant pacifist movement is the Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, which was established by George Fox in England in 1649. The nonviolent ethic of this radical Puritan movement was based on the notion that a spark of the divine exists in every person, making every life sacred. With this in mind, the Quaker colonialist William Penn refused to bear arms in his conflict with the American Indians, with whom he eventually negotiated a peace settlement.

Many pacifist Christian movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, owe a substantial debt to Christian predecessors such as those mentioned above. Others have been influenced by Western humanist and Asian pacifist thought, especially, in the twentieth century, by the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi, in turn, was influenced by Christian pacifists, including the Russian novelist and visionary Lev Tolstoi and the American Christian social activists Kirby Page, Clarence Marsh Case, and A. J. Muste. The largest Christian pacifist organization of modern times, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, was founded in England in 1914; and a number of statements urging nonviolence have been issued from the Vatican and from the World Council of Churches in response to the two world wars of this century. In the United States during the mid-twentieth century, Christian pacifist ideas played a significant role in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s nonviolent movement for racial justice, the movement against the American involvement in the Vietnam War, and in movements against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Some Christian "nuclear pacifists," however, restrict their advocacy of nonviolence to nuclear arms, whose massively destructive power, they feel, vitiates the traditional Christian defense of weaponry in a "just war."

Islam

The concept of nonviolence is not so thoroughly developed in Islam as it is in many other religious traditions, but certain parallels do exist. The Islamic concept of peace, for instance—salām —is as central to Islam as shalom is to Judaism, and plays a similar role in providing a vision of social harmony. To that end, Islamic communities have placed great emphasis on arbitration and mediation so that intracommunal conflicts will not erupt into violent confrontations.

Yet there are times when recourse to violence is permitted in Islamic law: inside Islam, it is justified as a means of punishment, and beyond Islam, as a tool to subdue an enemy of the faith. The latter situation is known as jihād, a word that literally means "striving" and is often translated as "holy war." This concept has been used to justify the expansion of territorial control by Muslim leaders into non-Islamic areas. But Muslim law does not allow it to be used to justify forcible conversion to Islam; the only conversions regarded as valid are those that come about nonviolently, through rational persuasion and change of heart. For that reason, non-Islamic groups have traditionally been tolerated in Islamic societies, and the Jews in Moorish Spain are often said to have been treated less harshly under their Muslim rulers than under subsequent Christian ones.

Muslim mystics, known as Ṣūfīs, have on occasion rejected the common notion of jihād by redefining it so that it refers primarily to an inner struggle, which they consider "the greater jihād": the conflict of truth and evil within every person. In addition, there have been overtly pacifist sects in Islam, such as the Māziyārīyah and Aḥmadīyah movements. The twentieth-century Muslim Pathans in North India, influenced by Gandhi and led by Abdul Ghaffir Khan, conducted an extensive nonviolent campaign for independence from the British. In other cases, Muslims have responded to oppressive regimes by noncooperation and witnessing to the faith even at peril of death—a form of martyrdom much like that found in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

See Also

Ahiṃsā; Gandhi, Mohandas; Peace.

Bibliography

A general overview of concepts of nonviolence in the major religious traditions is to be found in John Ferguson's War and Peace in the World's Religions (New York, 1977), and a description of the various ways religious traditions have put nonviolence into practice in conflict situations is provided in Richard B. Gregg's The Power of Non-Violence (Philadelphia, 1934); in The Quiet Battle: Writings on the Theory and Practice of Nonviolence, edited by Mulford Q. Sibley (Chicago, 1963); and in Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action, 3 vols. (Boston, 1973–1980).

Other works are specific to particular religious traditions. For the concept of ahiṃsā in ancient India, see W. Norman Brown's Man in the Universe: Some Continuities in Indian Thought (Berkeley, 1966); for early Buddhism, see David S. Ruegg's "Ahiṃsā and Vegetarianism in the History of Buddhism," in Buddhist Studies in Honour of Walpola Rahula, edited by Somaratna Balasooriya et al. (London, 1980); and for the Jain tradition, see Padmanabh S. Jaini's The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley, 1979). Later developments of the idea in Buddhism are explored in Winston L. King's In the Hope of Nibbana: An Essay on Theravada Buddhist Ethics (LaSalle, Ill., 1964) and Stanley J. Tambiah's World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge, 1976). The Gandhian approach is described in Joan Bondurant's Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton, 1958) and in my Ghandi's Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution (Berkeley, Calif., 2003).

With regard to the Jewish tradition, biblical attitudes are examined in D. Martin Dakin's Peace and Brotherhood in the Old Testament (London, 1956), and a number of works explore the rabbinic views, including Nahum N. Glatzer's "The Concept of Peace in Classical Judaism," in his Essays in Jewish Thought (University, Ala., 1978), and André Neher's "Rabbinic Adumbrations of Non-Violence," in Rationalism, Judaism, and Universalism, edited by Raphael Loewe (London, 1966). For one of the Jewish responses to Gandhi during World War II, see Judah L. Magnes's "A Letter to Gandhi," in Modern Jewish Thought: A Source Reader, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer (New York, 1977).

A useful sourcebook of Christian writings on nonviolence is War and the Christian Conscience: From Augustine to Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Albert Marrin (Chicago, 1971), and an excellent discussion of the historical development of the idea is to be found in the brief essays by Geoffrey Nuttal in his Christian Pacifism in History (Oxford, 1958). Good examples of the current discussion of nonviolence in the field of Christian ethics are James F. Childress's Moral Responsibility in Conflicts (Baton Rouge, 1982) and William Robert Miller's Nonviolence: A Christian Interpretation (London, 1964). The Islamic point of view is presented in Majid Khadduri's War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore, 1955), and comments of Muslim writers on the subject of peace and nonviolence can be found in Eric Schroeder's Muhammad's People (Portland, Maine, 1955).

Mark Juergensmeyer (1987 and 2005)