Buddhism and ‘Violence’

This chapter explores how ‘violence’ is understood in the context of the well-known medieval Japanese historical war chronicle The Tales of Heike, a text that was disseminated by Buddhist monks and hence deeply suffused with Buddhist values and ideals. It argues that rather than treating violence as an abstract principle, it is within a set of broader questions to do with killing, death, self-sacrifice and salvation that we can decipher what violence means within the Buddhist epistemic framework of medieval Japan.