In his book If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Michael Jerryson recounts a story from Slavoj Žižek, about a worker suspected of stealing from a factory. “Every evening at the end of his shift, as the worker leaves the factory, he rolls out his wheelbarrow, which is carefully inspected. Nothing is ever found. Finally, one day, they realize what was happening: the worker was stealing wheelbarrows. With this story,” Jerryson notes, “Žižek encourages the readers to examine the issue of violence just as the factory inspectors eventually examined the theft: to step back and disentangle themselves from the subjective and more visible effects (of violence) and to turn, instead, to the contours that bleed into the background. It is easy to miss larger patterns when the focus is atomistic” (p. 14).

Jerryson's long-awaited book surpasses previous studies on the subject, and it is a welcome addition for teachers looking to diversify the content of their courses and for readers trying to make sense of Buddhist involvement in Japanese nationalism, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, the civil war and postwar fascist movements in Sri Lanka, or anti-Islamic movements in the broader Buddhist world. It also expands the definition of violence to include institutional misogyny, systematic racism, and even politically inspired suicide.

Jerryson takes Žižek's story seriously and helps the general reader see the pervasive violence in the Buddhist world (with Buddhists as either recipients or perpetuators) with new eyes. He does not single out Buddhists as particularly more violent than any other religious group, of course, but he does demonstrate clearly and with well-researched and poignant examples that the common stereotype of Buddhists as nonviolent by definition does not always hold, and thus provides a counternarrative to the “pervasive mindset that Buddhists and Buddhism are representations of peace” (p. 2). He draws on historical and textual examples from across the Buddhist world, with particular attention to Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Japan, and employs sophisticated theoretical reflections to force readers to ask tough questions about their own interests in Buddhist teachings and practices.

The book begins with a theoretical interrogation of the concept of ahiṃsā (nonharm) and then moves on, drawing on work by Talal Asad, Michael Tausig, and others, to offer a rebuttal of common defenses of Buddhist promotion and justification of violence. Through the book, Jerryson shows that the seemingly straightforward promotion of nonharm is regularly given nuance in certain Buddhist contexts and that intention is as important as action. For example, he notes that “the Fourteenth Dalai Lama repeatedly has said that the Tibetans who self-immolate are not violating the rule of ahiṃsā. As long as Tibetan Buddhist self-immolaters retain a calm state of mind and are not psychologically impaired, they are not harming themselves or others. In short, Tibetan Buddhist self-immolation is not violent” (p. 28). After reflecting on nonharm, Jerryson shows that the many examples he provides of Buddhists promoting war, sanctioning and participating in torture, justifying xenophobia and jingoism, or supporting dictatorships cannot be simply dismissed as “not true Buddhism.” Furthermore, he argues quite convincingly that to “reduce [Buddhists’ involvement in violence to] their involvement to purely politics dismisses their self-ascribed motivations and intentions” (p. 3). He also offers a criticism of the “world religions paradigm,” which reduces the complexity of Buddhist acts and responses to violence.

The book's introduction provides the ideal basis for a discussion by eager university students who sign up for introductory Buddhism courses thinking that they will learn some worldly wisdom, see photos of Zen rock gardens and sleepy Buddha statues, and practice some meditation. It forces readers to ask themselves tough questions about their own motivations for undertaking a study of Buddhism and Buddhists about how inconvenient Buddhist teachings are quietly ignored.

The book comprises six chapters. Three look at the ways in which Buddhists have caused or promoted violence, and three at the ways in which Buddhists have been the victims of violence and their responses. Jerryson sums up many of the broad examples he uses well, but then he ends the passage with a gruesome specific example:

What I found particularly novel about Jerryson's book in comparison with previous studies of Buddhist violence is that he includes gender discrimination and blasphemy as examples of pervasive and structural violence. He shows convincingly that “violence is not simply a physical act, or an external act.” In chapter 3, he looks at the prevention of women from being ordained as bhikkhuni as an example of widespread gender-based harm. In chapter 6, he introduces the reader to the “Knowing Buddha Organization” in Thailand, which sees its duty as protecting Buddhist societies against foreigners who buy and sell Buddhist art.

Jerryson should be lauded for the direct ways in which he incorporates his own experience working in the conflict zones of southern Thailand—research that he undertook as part of his dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and that later turned into a bookFootnote ¹—where he was embedded with Buddhist military “chaplains” and faux monks who were armed and serving as covert agents of the state to defend what they saw as the Muslim threat against Buddhism. He acknowledges that he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder during this research. His compassion for both the Muslims and Buddhists he worked with during this time is moving and compelling. In chapter 5, Jerryson not only documents trauma, but also shows particular paths for a better future by showing how Buddhists cope with violence in southern Thailand (and other places). Writing with Wattana Prohmpetch and David A. Kessler, he reports on a long-term study of Muslim-Buddhist strategies for preventing violence and working through trauma.

Jerryson moves far beyond his expertise in Thailand, though, and I learned much from the examples he draws from Tibet and Taiwan in particular. In the latter, for example, he looks at the curious case of Buddhist attitudes toward the killing of cockroaches. Drawing of the work of Mireille Mazard, he writes, “Some of her informants express delight in the killing of cockroaches and Mazard finds that many Buddhists have difficulties seeing cockroaches as ‘sentient.’ Even though Buddhists will admit that insects have a Buddha-nature, there is a general disregard of their consciousness” (p. 90). It is through a wide diversity of evidence that readers begin to get a broad picture of the Buddhist thinkers and their responses to acts of violence.

The one criticism I have of this book is in chapter 1, where Jerryson surveys Buddhist textual sources for justifying or even promoting violence. This work has been previously taken up by scholars such as Tessa Bartholomeusz, Alan Sponberg, and others (which Jerryson knows and cites). While Jerryson certainly expands on their work, I found that a general lack of discernment between languages, historical contexts, genres, and rhetorical styles in premodern textual history. Comparing narrative, systematic, commentarial, homiletic, cosmological, metaphysical, and documentary texts across two thousand years and multiple languages relatively haphazardly would frustrate any scholar of Buddhist texts. Moreover, he does not engage in any real reader-reception history to see how these texts have been actually collected and taught or how they were or were not extensively the subject of vernacular commentaries and incorporated into sermons. However, Jerryson is not a textual scholar, and this was not his aim; he is an anthropologist and religious studies scholar, and this is where he shines. He is provocative politically and socially and thought-provoking theoretically. There is a danger that Jerryson's study is so broad that each example could be picked apart by experts in individual languages, textual genres, or historical periods, but for an introduction to the subject, readers would be hard-pressed to find a better book to launch their research and start productive and important discussions not just about Buddhist pasts, but also Buddhist futures.