varnam

�??This government must act to crush the Tigers, They are not the representatives of the Tamil people. The government must destroy the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)�?�

The person telling this is Venerable Ellawala Medhananda, MP and head of the all-Buddhist monk National Heritage Party of Sri Lanka. One would think that being Buddhists they would preach peace and light candles like the secular types in India.

�??When the Pentagon was attacked, what did the Americans do? They went and bombed Iraq (sic), so our government must adopt a similar attitude when dealing with separatist movements,�?� Medhananda said in his native Sinhala.

�??If it means war, no one should have a problem with it,�?� he added. �??Affairs of the state and religion are two different things. Buddhism does not teach us to keep quiet and pretend to be blind to all the injustices in the world. It is not a philosophy that teaches us to be timid and scared.�?�

�??We follow the middle path, that�??s what the Buddha wanted us to do. We are not fundamentalists or extremists, we tread a path of non-violence,�?� said Medhananda. �??But that does not mean Buddhists can�??t act in self defence.�?�

�??If the peace talks are not yielding the desired results - and the next best thing to do is to go back to war�?� [Time to crush Sri Lankan rebels, say Buddhist monks]

Violence and Buddhism maybe something difficult to visualize together, but Tibet's largest prison sanctioned by the fifth Dalai Lama had instruments of torture.

It was King Songtsen Gampo who embraced Buddhism in Tibet and moved the capital of Tibet to Lhasa. When he inherited the throne, he increased his military forces and embarked on an empire expanding mission and according to The Fourteen Dalai Lamas: A Sacred Legacy of Reincarnation, he was a terror.