I’ve seen this now a few times, watching friends titter (with some embarrassment, because they know it’s inappropriate) when they hear or read news reports about “extremist Buddhists” in Myanmar. Why do they laugh? Because the image of radical Buddhists engaged in genocidal-like behavior is inconsistent with my friends’ stereotype of Buddhists as calm and meditative, focusing on the nature of the mind, on clarity and awareness.
This disconnect between our stereotype of how people of a certain religion should be viewed and how some of them behave can be disconcerting. It happens when the aggressive or hostile political acts of a subset of people of a religion conflict with the underlying premises of the faith, as practiced by the majority.
Our perceptions sometimes then rebound in a dangerous way. We extrapolate the bad behavior of a religion’s extremest members to all members of that faith.
The Aga Khan made this point with regard to Muslims in his recent address to the Canadian Parliament:
“What is highly abnormal in the Islamic world gets mistaken for what is normal.”
But it is not only about Muslims.
via Not Running a Hospital: Extremist Buddhists? Impossible!.
Earlier:
Ismailimail 