MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER TEN

Violence

All tremble at violence;
Life is dear for all.
Seeing others as being like yourself,
Do not kill or cause others to kill. (Buddha 33)

The pacifistic facet of Buddhism spans higher and farther than similar sentiments found in Taoism or Confucianism. While the latter two philosophical schools discourage contention, conflict, and war, they also admit the inevitability and necessity of violence. In the Tao Te Ching, it is said:

do not find joy in hurting people
if you must hurt someone
listen to the left
keep your heart spirit calm
and be fine-spun
you can not find the tao source of life if you enjoy being violent
and hurt people, their land, and even their animals on the land
if you live life violently
the life around you will disappear (Lao-tzu)

In Buddhism, there is no contingency for must; there is only prescription against violence and an appeal to the personal consequences. The primary concern is the “happiness” of the practitioner. He who slays others will not find Nirvana and will suffer:

If, desiring happiness,
You use violence
To harm living beings who desire happiness,
You won’t find happiness after death. (Buddha 33)

But upon deeper reflection, and after incorporating notes by the translator, perhaps the prescription is more complex than it first seems. Fronsdal notes that “violence” is not a literal translation of the word Danda. A more exact translation would be a “rod” or “stick” used to enact punishment or in combat. The connotations of punishment and combat are much more constrained than violence generally, and they become further constrained by the qualifiers “living beings who desire happiness.” This qualification suggests that there are those beings who do not desire happiness and, therefore, are not the beings the Buddhist is proscribed from using violence against.

When the two considerations are combined, those being the more literal translation and the qualification of which living beings are not to be harmed, the Dhammapada beings to echo the sentiment of the Tao Te Ching: do not seek pleasure in punishing others; in other words, do not seek revenge. Do not wield violence against those who are innocent, though those who would force your hand by their evil actions—who do not seek happiness through affirmation of existence but instead seek annihilation through actions of life denial and self-obliteration—one is not strictly advised against employing violence to protect oneself.

In short, the pacifism of Buddhism is a prohibition against being the cause or the mover of violent action, hence why the final line in the first cited stanza specifically references causing others to kill. Do not be the instigator, for:

Whoever uses violence to harm
The nonviolent and innocent
Quickly goes to one of ten conditions:
Intense pain or great loss,
Bodily injury or insanity,
Serious illness or vicious slander,
Oppression from rulers or the loss of relatives,
Houses consumed by fire or wealth destroyed.
And with the breakup of the body
The unwise one falls to hell. (34)

Here, the text is explicit, and it also discusses not only the spiritual consequences of violence in the words of karma and reincarnation, but also the present metaphorical hell created by the moral degeneration of relying on force.

He who initiates violence against or coerces others will suffer somehow. Fighting invites risk of injury and destruction, and such injuries bring with them pain and psychological trauma. Expending resources to fight or to go to war makes an individual or a state vulnerable to moral as well as literal disease as well as slander, whether that be by valid critics or political cut-throats. When violence is used as first course or recourse, the tyranny of the state becomes necessary, even asked for. Families are thereby broken up, whether by oppressive institutions squeezing out family members’ roles, or by political conflicts arising within the family. That is how households and bridges are burned to the ground. Wealth is wasted through the paying for arms and armies of violent impositions, by the now necessary expenditures on defense, and /or by the wasted time, wasted food, and the destruction of property. Thus does the individual body as well as the corpus of a society break apart and tumble into hell.

there is a time to be happy and a time to be sad
know how to differentiate between the two so you know where to
lie
sit
stand
walk
if you cultivate these virtue you will be happy
if someone is hurt be sad
treat it like a funeral
because an opportunity to enter the tao has died (Lao-tzu)

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.

Lao-tzu. “Chapter Thirty-One”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. pp.59-62