Buddhism and Violence: Is It Truly Pacifist?

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 4 June 2026 · Updated 4 November 2026

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Is Buddhism truly non-violent? In principle, it is among the most strongly pacifist of all the world’s religions: its first precept forbids killing, it teaches ahimsa (non-harming) toward every living being, and its core scriptures contain no notion of holy war. Yet in practice, Buddhists and Buddhist institutions have waged, blessed, and justified violence.

Both things are true, and honesty requires holding them together.

What does Buddhism say about violence?

Buddhism’s ethic is profoundly non-violent — arguably as non-violent as any religion has ever articulated. But Buddhism’s history, lived by fallible human beings and fused at times with nationalism and power, has often fallen short of that ethic. The early canon has no doctrine of righteous killing; the first of the five precepts is simply to refrain from taking life. And yet there have been warrior monks, wartime clergy who cheered on empire, and Buddhist-nationalist movements that have incited the persecution of minorities. The teaching points one way; the record is mixed. Pretending otherwise — in either direction — would be dishonest.

The ideal: a deeply non-violent ethic

Start with what the tradition actually teaches, because the non-violence here is not a vague mood — it is structural, woven into the most basic commitments of Buddhist ethics.

The first precept and ahimsa

The very first ethical training rule a Buddhist undertakes is to abstain from killing living beings. It heads the five precepts for laypeople and the monastic codes alike, and it extends not just to humans but to all sentient creatures. Behind it stands the principle of ahimsa — non-harming — which Buddhism shares with Jainism and parts of Hinduism. Compassion (karuṇā) and loving-kindness (mettā) toward all beings are not optional extras in this system; they are the heart of the path.

What the Dhammapada says

The Dhammapada, one of the best-loved early collections of the Buddha’s sayings, states the case for non-violence with unusual directness. Its chapter on violence (the Daṇḍavagga) opens:

“All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.” (Dhp 129)

“All tremble at violence; life is dear to all. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.” (Dhp 130, trans. Acharya Buddharakkhita)

The logic is moral imagination: you do not want to be killed, and neither does anyone else, so do not kill and do not have others killed on your behalf. Earlier still, in the opening chapter, the text rejects retaliation altogether:

“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.” (Dhp 5, trans. Buddharakkhita)

No holy war in the canon

This is the crucial point that distinguishes Buddhism from several other traditions: the early texts contain no concept of a divinely commanded or sanctified war. There is no Buddhist equivalent of a crusade or a jihad written into scripture, no promise that killing enemies of the faith earns a heavenly reward. Killing breaks the first precept and produces harmful karma — full stop. On this early-canon reading, the one Theravada keeps, a soldier who kills is generating unwholesome action, not earning merit. On the level of doctrine, then, Buddhism really is one of the most consistently non-violent religious philosophies humanity has produced. That is the early-canon picture, and it is not the whole of Buddhist scripture. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy records that “some Buddhist scriptures and treatises do allow for extreme cases in which compassionately motivated punishment, violence, and even war could be justified”, chiefly in later Mahāyāna sources — on Asaṅga’s bodhisattva ethics, it reports, such acts “if done with the right kind of motivation, would result in much merit for the one who carries them out” — and it adds the limit that goes with them: “in extreme cases, violence may be permissible; but hatred is never justified.”

So far, so admirable. But a page that stopped here would be flattering the tradition rather than telling the truth.

The reality: where Buddhists have fallen short

Religions are lived by people, and people are capable of betraying their own highest teachings. Buddhism is no exception. The point of recounting the following is not to single Buddhism out as uniquely violent — it is plainly less so than many traditions — but to refuse the comforting myth that Buddhists, alone among humans, have kept their hands clean.

Zen and Japanese militarism

The most thoroughly documented example is modern Japan. From the late nineteenth century up to 1945, much of the Japanese Buddhist establishment — including leading figures and institutions in Zen — actively supported the nation’s militarism and imperial wars. This history was brought to wide attention by the scholar and Sōtō Zen priest Brian Daizen Victoria in his book Zen at War (1997; second edition 2006), which draws on the writings and speeches of prominent Zen masters to show how Zen rhetoric of selflessness and “no-self” was bent to serve the war effort, and how the killing of enemies was reframed as a compassionate or enlightened act. Some Japanese Zen institutions have since issued public apologies for their wartime conduct. It is a sobering case of a tradition’s deepest concepts being inverted to bless what they should have condemned.

Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar and the Rohingya

In recent decades, Buddhist nationalism has fuelled grave violence in parts of South and Southeast Asia. In Myanmar (Burma), a monk named Ashin Wirathu became the public face of an anti-Muslim movement associated with the “969” campaign and, later, the nationalist organisation widely known by the Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha. Wirathu’s inflammatory anti-Muslim preaching earned him a notorious 2013 Time magazine cover headlined “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” Myanmar’s own government-appointed monastic authority, the Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, prohibited the 969 movement in 2013 for its unauthorised use of Buddhist symbolism, and in May 2017 declared that Ma Ba Tha had not been formed in accordance with the law governing the Sangha. The nationalist current nonetheless formed part of the climate around the persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority. After the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked a military base and up to 30 security force outposts on 25 August 2017, the security forces’ response — “immediate, brutal and grossly disproportionate”, in the words of a UN fact-finding mission — had by mid-August 2018 driven nearly 725,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh, amid mass killings and the partial or total destruction of at least 392 villages. In September 2017 the UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said the situation seemed “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. In September 2018 the fact-finding mission concluded that there was “sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution” of senior officials in the military chain of command, “so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide”, and it recommended that named senior generals be investigated and prosecuted in an international criminal tribunal for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The mission named the military as the main perpetrator. But it also found that dehumanising language against the Rohingya had for years been a key component of a campaign to “protect race and religion” spearheaded by extremist Buddhist groups such as Ma Ba Tha, a rhetoric the authorities “mirrored and promoted”, and it recorded that Wirathu preached mass public sermons in northern Rakhine in May and July 2017.

Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka offers a longer and more complicated case. Sinhalese Buddhist identity has at times been braided tightly with the island’s ethnic politics. Some hardline monks and groups — most prominently, since the early 2010s, the Bodu Bala Sena (“Buddhist Power Force”) and its monk-leader Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara — have been associated with anti-Muslim and anti-minority agitation; in 2019 Reuters reported that government ministers and Muslim leaders had openly accused Gnanasara of stirring up violence against Muslims and Christians, allegations he has denied. Politically engaged monks were also a force during the long civil war (1983–2009) between the Sinhalese-majority state and Tamil separatists: interviewing Sri Lankan Buddhists in 1997 and 1998, the scholar of religion Tessa Bartholomeusz found that many of the monks and lay people she spoke to were well known in Sri Lanka as proponents of “finishing the war”. This is not new: an ancient Sri Lankan chronicle, the Mahāvaṃsa, narrates the Buddhist king Duṭṭhagāmaṇī (Dutugamunu) waging war against a Tamil rival and, troubled afterward by the slaughter, being consoled by enlightened monks (arahants) who tell him that, despite the slaughter of a host the chronicle numbers in millions, only “one and a half human beings” had been slain — the one who had taken the Buddhist refuges and the one who kept the five precepts — while “unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts.” The arahants’ reasoning rests on denying the dead their full humanity, and the story has had a long modern afterlife. Some of the Buddhists Bartholomeusz interviewed read Duṭṭhagāmaṇī’s saga as supplying the criteria for a just war in defence of the dharma, and in 1998 a monk who was a proponent of “finishing the war” likened General Ratwatte, the architect of the government’s war against the Tamil Tigers, to the king. Yet she also found that Sri Lankan Buddhists draw on the tradition’s stories, “sometimes the very same ones”, both to argue that war can be justified and to argue that it is never acceptable.

Warrior monks in history

There are older episodes too. Medieval Japan had armed forces attached to powerful temples such as Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei — the “warrior monks” known as sōhei — who took part in the political and armed struggles of their age. The historian Mikael Adolphson has challenged the familiar sōhei image: a Monumenta Nipponica review of his The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha (2007) credits him with revealing the eighteenth-century origins of the term sōhei, and his publisher sums up his case that these forces were “in reality inseparable from the warrior class”, their negative image a construct of artistic sources, from the fourteenth century on, that were critical of the established temples. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Adolphson writes in The Gates of Power (2000), Enryaku-ji resurfaced as an independent and powerful military centre; in 1571 the warlord Oda Nobunaga, against whom the temple had allied with the Asakura and Azai clans, attacked Mount Hiei and destroyed its central hall and more than five hundred temples, and according to the interpretive text at the memorial there, more than a thousand people who had fled up the mountain from the burning town of Sakamoto and more than a thousand monks and lay people on the mountain were massacred. China’s Shaolin monastery is famous for a martial tradition whose monks at times took up arms. These cases are real, though they are better understood as institutions entangled in their societies’ politics and self-defence than as expressions of Buddhist doctrine — there is no scriptural call to arms behind them.

How to hold the two together

So is Buddhism pacifist or not? The honest answer is that the question conflates two different things: a teaching and a people.

An ethic, and the humans who hold it

As an ethic, Buddhist non-violence is real, deep, and unusually thoroughgoing. As a human community spread across two and a half millennia and dozens of cultures, Buddhists have done what every large group of humans does — including, sometimes, killing, and including the particularly grim move of justifying it in the name of the very religion that forbids it. The gap between the two is not unique to Buddhism. It is the universal gap between an ideal and the imperfect beings who carry it.

When “protecting the dharma” goes wrong

The modern cases in Myanmar and Sri Lanka share a common structure: the fusion of the religion with ethnic or national identity, so that defending “us” and defending “the dharma” collapse into the same cause. At that point a tradition built on letting go of self and hatred can be twisted into a tool for asserting both. Recognising this pattern matters, because it is also how the betrayal can be named for what it is — a departure from the teaching, not an application of it.

What this means for the tradition

It would be a mistake to conclude from these histories that Buddhism is “really” violent, just as it is a mistake to imagine it has been perfectly peaceful. The most useful response comes from within the tradition itself. Many contemporary Buddhists — including teachers in the engaged Buddhism movement — have insisted that non-violence be applied consistently, confronting injustice and even their own communities’ failures rather than retreating into private calm. That is arguably the most Buddhist response available: not to defend the record, but to measure it honestly against the precept and resolve to do better.

The teaching could hardly be clearer — by non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. The history shows how hard that teaching is to live. Holding both in view, without flinching from either, is what it means to take this question seriously. (For the foundations, see ethics in Buddhism and the five precepts; for related myths worth correcting, see common misconceptions about Buddhism.)