Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation homepage > Notebooks of Paul Brunton

---

Religion has hardly been successful in bringing men to the most elementary and merely negative duty of refraining from killing one another. At Ayuthia, the former capital of Siam but now overgrown by jungle, I saw a lone large statue of Gautama the Buddha sadly looking out at the ruins of the city destroyed by a Burmese army two centuries ago. And both antagonists claimed to be Buddhists! At Shanghai, I saw another Buddha statue amid the debris of a wrecked temple in the suburban district of Chapei, the scene of battle in 1937, yet both the Chinese and Japanese antagonists here were partly Buddhist, and the Buddha made non-killing a prominent tenet of the ethical code which he laid down for all his followers, for monks and laymen alike.

-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 4 : Problems of Organized Religion > # 119