American Jains Make Ascetic Faith Fit Modern Life

Gillian Flaccus (AP, August 18, 2013)

Buena Park, Calif. - The ancient Indian religion of Jainism, a close cousin of Buddhism, has often been a hard sell in the U.S. with a strict adherence to nonviolence that forbids eating meat, encourages days of fasting and places value on even the smallest of insects.

Now younger Jains who resist the elaborate rituals of their parents, which include meditating 48 minutes a day and presenting statues of idols with flowers, rice and a saffron-and-sandalwood paste, are trying to reinterpret the traditions of their religion for 21st-century American life.

They are expanding the definition of nonviolence to encompass environmentalism, animal rights and corporate business ethics, flocking to veganism, volunteering alongside other faiths and learning to lobby through political internships and youth groups.

"Youth are a lot more interested in learning the why of things instead of just blindly following it," said Priyal Gandhi, an 18-year-old from northern Virginia. "I don't think we've lost the faith. I think it's about finding new ways to adapt to it."

The evolution, which is being examined in a series of conferences at a new center for Jain studies, comes as many Jains who immigrated to the West are grappling with how to mesh the belief in nonviolence, which inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., with modern life and its excesses.

Jains believe, for example, that even microbes in the air and water are sacred life and any action that impacts other living things – such as driving or using electricity – can add to bad karma.

Yet Jains, many of them top doctors, lawyers and businesspeople, use computers and cellphones and drive cars – and so they are increasingly seeking a compromise between their faith and practicality, said Whitny Braun, a bioethics and religion professor at Loma Linda University who has studied Jainism.

The faith's most recent idol lived 2,500 years ago but Jainism is much older.

"Jains are a critical part of the Indian fabric so there's ways to be a fully practicing Jain in India but here it's very, very difficult so a lot of Jains adopt the attitude of, `Well, I'm going to do the best I can,'" she said. "I'll be vegetarian or vegan, and if I can buy a Prius, I will."

Priyal Gandhi, for example, lives the life of a normal American teenager: She drives, uses a cellphone and is enrolled as a freshman at the University of Virginia this fall.

She goes to temple when she can, but for her, being Jain means the simpler things: Taking the long way to avoid trampling the grass, praying quietly at home before bed and avoiding onions, potatoes and garlic in addition to meat because root vegetables are the life source for an entire plant.

Veganism – a step beyond the vegetarianism that the faith requires – is also on the rise among young U.S.-born Jains who find it otherwise difficult to follow traditional rituals.

For the most part, elder Jains support the modified approach, but some worry their children will miss a deeper understanding without completing rituals that are so detailed that some Jains carry a small booklet with illustrated instructions.

Worshippers must shower, remove their shoes and change into loose-fitting, clean garments before approaching statues of 24 idols and must don a white mask to avoid breathing or spitting on the marble figures.

"All of the rituals have a real meaning that we're supposed to bear in mind when we're doing it. When I'm doing the cleansing with the water for the idol, my thought process is I'm also cleansing my soul that way," said Hamendra Doshi, vice president of the Jain Center of Southern California.

"The religion is much deeper than that," said Doshi, 62. "Community service is really only a very baby step."

Changes in how younger worshippers act out the faith may have a big impact on Jainism's fate here. In India, Jains account for about 1 percent of the population and the community in the U.S. counts about 150,000 followers.

The faith's Western evolution is being talked about openly and with greater urgency now that the tiny ex-pat community that arrived in the 1960s has established itself with a national umbrella organization, youth groups and more than 100 temples, including an enormous one south of Los Angeles.

This weekend, the new Center for Jain Studies at Claremont Lincoln University in Claremont hosts a two-day conference on women and gender issues that will include a presentation on sexism in Jain teachings. Another session on how to apply Jain principles in corporate ethics is planned for next year.

And in a sign that Jainism is also beginning to reach non-Indians, one of the speakers at this weekend's conference will be Sadhvi Siddhali Shree, who calls herself the faith's first non-Indian ordained Jain nun.

Shree, 29, grew up in a Catholic household and said she became a Jain nun in 2008 after seeing horrible violence as a U.S. Army combat medic in Iraq. Shree, who credits Jainism with helping her conquer post-traumatic stress disorder, is challenging Jain tradition that she feels place a monk's status above a nun's.

"If they want Jainism to spread, they need to raise women's status," she said. "There are things that need to evolve."

Shree would not be considered a true Jain nun by many more traditional worshippers, but her voice – and the other new voices – can help the faith become more relevant in today's America, said Sulekh C. Jain, of Houston, who for nearly five decades has been a leading force among U.S. Jains.

"The Dalai Lama said tradition over time, if it does not change, needs to be scrapped," Jain said. "It's really a part of growing up."

Indigenous Communities Want Religion Scrubbed From ID Cards

By Amir Tejo ("Jakarta Globe," November 28, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/38609/

Surabaya, Indonesia - A coalition of indigenous tribes urged the Indonesian government to omit a citizen’s religion from national identification cards on Wednesday, arguing that an adherence to six officials religions fails recognize their traditional faiths.

More than 700 representatives from 300 traditional communities from across the archipelago voiced their opinion during the closing ceremony of the National Congress of Faiths To One and Only God on Wednesday.

“ID cards only displays six religions, not traditional faiths,” congress chairman A. Latif said.

Indonesia only recognizes six official religions: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Catholicism and Confucianism. Some of the nation’s traditional indigenous people practice forms of animism that predate the six official religions’ dominance in Indonesia.

But practitioners of traditional religions have to choose one of the official faiths when applying for a national ID card.

“To justly accommodate the beliefs of cultural and traditional faith communities, the religion section must be omitted,” Latif said.

The congress also recommended the government institute moral education classes in the national curriculum and urged lawmakers to pass a law protecting the free practice of traditional faiths.

The Ministry of Education and Culture said it would bring the recommendations to the House of Representatives, but said it could not guarantee any action.

“The government’s authority is limited because it has to coordinate with the House of Representatives, so the government will ask for support from cultural communities,” said Gendro Nur Hadi, director of traditional faith development at the ministry.

Gendro told the assembled people that the government would not turn a blind eye to the nation’s traditional faiths.

Buddhist, Hindu Make History With Elections To Congress

By Jaweed Kaleem ("Huffington Post," November 7, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/38540/

Tuesday's elections brought two historic firsts for religion in American politics: A Buddhist senator and a Hindu representative -- both from Hawaii -- will join Congress.

Democrat Mazie Hirono beat former Gov. Linda Lingle (R), making Hirono the first Buddhist in the Senate. In Hawaii's 2nd Congressional District, Democrat Tulsi Gabbard defeated Republican opponent Kawika Crowley, making Gabbard the first Hindu in Congress.

Both elections were cheered by Hindu and Buddhist Americans, members of two faiths that share a common history that traces back to ancient India.

"These are all signs of dharmic communities being accepted in the country," said Anju Bhargava, founder of Hindu American Seva Charities. "It's all about inclusion and acceptance. The feeling that my faith and my people are accepted. Ultimately, politics comes down to 'how does it impact me?' or 'how am I included?' It will mean so much for the upcoming generations of Hindus and Buddhists."

Hirono, who was born in Japan, practices the Jodo Shinshu tradition of Buddhism. She was first elected to Congress in 2007 to represent Hawaii's 2nd District, the seat that Gabbard won Tuesday. Prior to that, Hirono served 14 years in the Hawaii state legislature and was the state’s lieutenant governor for eight years. She is also the first Asian-American woman senator and the first senator born in Japan.

“I certainly believe in the precepts of Buddhism and that of tolerance of other religions and integrity and honesty," she said when she first joined Congress.

Buddhism, which includes a widely diverse set of spiritual practices, is one of the largest religions in the U.S., but statistics vary on how many Buddhists live in the nation. Surveys have estimated the population between 1.5 and 3 million.

Gabbard, 31, was born in American Samoa, and raised by a Catholic father and a Hindu mother. She moved to Hawaii when she was 2 and in 2002, joined the Hawaii state legislature at age 21. She served in the Hawaii National Guard the next year and, in 2004, went to Baghdad to be a medical operations specialist. In 2008, she was deployed to Kuwait to work with the nation's counterterrorism trainees.

Gabbard chose to embrace the faith after her mother started practicing it when Gabbard was a teen. The congresswoman-elect, whose first name refers to a tree that's sacred to Hindus, follows the Vaishnava branch of Hinduism, which focuses on the Supreme Lord Vishnu and his 10 main incarnations. She relies upon the Bhagavad Gita as her main source of scripture.

In an interview with Religion News Service prior to her election, Gabbard said she hopes to be a bridge between cultures and nations. “Hopefully the presence in Congress of an American who happens to be Hindu will increase America's understanding of India as well as India's understanding of America," she said.

Like Buddhists, estimates of the Hindu-American community in the U.S. also vary. Largely made up of Indian-Americans, the Hindu population is between 600,000 to 2.3 million. Unlike most Hindus, Gabbard is not of Indian heritage. Her father is Samoan and her mother is a convert to Hinduism.

The two best-known Indian-Americans to be elected to office are Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who was raised Hindu but converted to Catholicism, and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was raised Sikh but converted to Methodism. Haley had both Christian and Sikh wedding ceremonies, and has said she attends Sikh services on occasion out of respect to her family's culture.

Hirono and Gabbard will join an increasingly diverse Congress. The first Muslim to join the House or Senate, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), was first elected in 2006 and reelected for a fourth term on Tuesday. In 2008, Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) was the second Muslim elected to Congress. In 2008, Rep. Hark Johnson (D-Ga.), another Buddhist, also joined Congress, making history with him and Hirono the first Buddhists to be elected to Congress.

More than a century prior, smaller religious groups also made headway into congressional seats for the first time. Lewis Charles Levin of the American Party was the first Jew elected to Congress in 1845, and represented Pennsylvania in the House. The first Mormon was John Milton Bernhisel, who joined Congress in 1851 to represent Utah. The only Sikh congressman, California Democrat Dalip Singh Saund, was elected for three terms beginning in 1957.

Hong Xiuquan: The rebel who thought he was Jesus's brother

By Carrie Gracie ("BBC," October 17, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/38364/

Shanghai, China - Chinese history can be read as a series of peasant rebellions. One in the 19th Century, led by a man who thought he was Christ's brother, lasted 15 years and caused at least 10 million deaths. It taught the Communists lessons a century later, and is one reason why China's leaders keep a close eye on rural unrest today.

The founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party, at a Shanghai girls' boarding school in 1921, is commemorated in wax - waxwork figures around a dining table, some seated, some standing.

Mao himself is speaking, his eyes gazing off into the distance in a kind of visionary way. Some are drinking tea, some are smoking, some have fans in their hands.

At the time, they can hardly have imagined that they were men of destiny. They had to present themselves as a student group on vacation - and run away when the police came.

But these rebels ended up running China, they do not need to dwell on the miraculous good luck which brought them to power in 1949.

The truth is that for every Chinese rebellion which succeeds, there are scores which fail - like the Taiping rebellion, led by a man influenced by Christian missionaries, who declared a heavenly kingdom on the Yangtze.

Originally, all Hong Xiuquan wanted was to be part of the establishment. A village schoolteacher, he immersed himself in Confucian scholarship for the civil service exam, but he just kept failing.

"He fell into what I suppose was some kind of depressive fit and he had a vision," says Jonathan Fenby, who has written a history of modern China.

"He imagined he'd gone up to the skies and there he had met a very tall man with a long beard and thick belt who had told him to come back to Earth and eradicate the demons on Earth."

Some time later he was given a Chinese translation of the New Testament by a Christian missionary.

"He decided on reading that, that the man he had seen up in the sky was the Christian God, that he, Hong, was the brother of Jesus, and that the devils he had to exterminate on Earth were the Qing dynasty, which was then ruling China and of course was not Chinese."

The Qing emperors were Manchus from Manchuria in the north-east, so they were not ethnically Han Chinese.

They had conquered China in the 17th Century, but their glory days were over and by the mid-19th Century they were losing to the British in the Opium Wars.

The Europeans brought Christianity which, for Hong, was a convenient alternative to the Confucian creed which had rejected him.

"Seeing that everyone in high heavens scolded him, Confucius escaped down to earth with the leader of the demons," goes an account of Hong's vision, set down in writing by a follower.

"The heavenly father then sent the angels to chase after Confucius, tie him up and bring him back to the heavenly father who was exceedingly angry and instructed the angels to whip him. There was plenty of whipping and Confucius asked for mercy repeatedly."

For the most part, China's emperors had not bothered much with religions. Buddhism had become very popular at a time of upheaval in the 6th Century, but it appealed mostly to people at the bottom of society.

Christianity was one of the novelties which had come in with the colonial powers. They used gunboats to open China to trade, and shattered the image of order and invincibility cultivated by the Qing emperors. Vernacular translations of the Bible helped loosen the grip of the Confucian elites.

The Europeans saw Hong's claim to be the brother of Christ as heresy, but he was not preaching for their benefit. He accompanied his spiritual message with a political one - a vision of equality and shared land ownership. This appealed to poor farmers, who were suffering from a sense of hopelessness, according to Guo Baogang of Dalton State college.

"Peasants have a very miserable life in the middle of the 19th Century," he says.

"There's a lot of famines and unemployment, most peasants have no land. So they're very vulnerable to the utopian thinkers prescribing a perfect society as a way to escape from the existing society."

Hong and his disciples took to the road, selling writing brushes and ink and spreading the good news about the heavenly kingdom as they went. The movement grew fast in south-west China.

"When people of this earth keep nothing for their private use, but give all things to God for all to use in common, then every place shall have equal shares, and everyone be clothed and fed," Hong declared.

Jonathan Fenby describes the creed as "a strange mixture of Christianity and a primitive kind of communism". Land was to be shared, but the sexes had to be kept apart.

In many ways, he says, it was a message that was mirrored by another creed to arrive in China from outside a century later - Marxism. Mao took Marxism and bolted it on to this ancient yearning of China's farmers for land and justice.

Before Hong, similar rebellions brought an end to the Qin dynasty in the Third Century BC, the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the 14th Century, and nearly brought down the mighty Han dynasty, points out Beijing commentator Kaiser Kuo.

Peasants are "passive actors" throughout most of history, he says, but occasionally they rise up to keep the dynasty in line.

As in these earlier rebellions, many of those who joined Hong's Heavenly Army had nothing to lose. Population growth had deprived them of a stake in society. The Qing empire was a victim of its own success.

"Once you have a long peace, you see the rapid growth of the population," says Guo Baogang.

"When the Manchus came into China, the population was about 100 million. By the 19th Century, after 200 years of economic growth, the population increased to something around 400 million. But arable land, that figure was only about 30% growth. So that added all the social stress."

The promise of land for all soon brought hundreds of thousands to Hong's banner.

They swept out of the south of China up to the Yangtze, and established their heavenly kingdom there in Nanjing, with Hong as the Heavenly King and the other commanders as the King of the West, the King of the East, and so on.

Their advance against one of the greatest empires in history was surprisingly easy, says Fenby. The Qing dynasty's famous troops, the Banner troops, which had conquered China in the mid 17th Century had gone downhill.

"By the mid-19th Century these Banner troops have become dissolute, opium-smoking, corrupt, very inefficient for the most part. And the Chinese mercenaries who fought for the Qing were even worse. So I won't say the Taiping had it easy but their opponents were in a pretty terrible state."

Hong showed peasant rebellion could work in the modern age. This was one of the lessons the Communists took from the Taipings. The two rebellions in fact had much in common, but - one key difference - while Hong started lucky and got unlucky, Mao had it the other way round.

By 1860, Hong's heavenly kingdom extended across huge swathes of China and his troops were preparing to march on Shanghai. But his luck was about to run out. The Europeans had decided he was a threat to business.

So they joined forces with the Qing armies they themselves had just been fighting. In the Heavenly Capital, the Heavenly Kingdom was anything but.

As military victory turned into defeat, Hong became increasingly paranoid, his followers starved and his court spiralled into intrigue and violence.

"Hong himself retreated to his palace with his 60 or so concubines listening to music played on an organ taken from the local Christian church and the generals all fought among one another," says Fenby.

By the end of the Taiping era at least 10 million had died, some say 20 million. Eyewitnesses described the Yangtze valley as littered with rotting corpses.

No-one knows exactly how Hong Xiuquan himself died. His decomposed body was discovered in his palace by a Qing general - an ignominious end for a challenger to empire and the opening of a terrible chapter in China's cycle of fragmentation.

"If you look at the history of China from say the Taiping through to the death of Mao in 1976, no country had as bad a prolonged period of disasters, regime change, civil war, invasion, decline," says Fenby.

Perhaps all of that is over. As the Communist Party prepares to hold its 18th congress, it would certainly like to think so. It has come a long way since the first congress in the Shanghai girls' school.

But behind the mask of order and unity, China still has plenty of conflict - over land rights, corruption or injustice. There are nearly 100,000 major riots every year. No wonder Party leaders see threats everywhere and scan the horizon ready to crack down on any sign of a peasant uprising like the one which brought them to power.

Report says religion at heart of illegal ivory trade

By Jeanie Groh ("The Washington Post," September 18, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/38105/

Washington, USA - Since the ban on international trade of ivory in 1989, the ivory black market has been on the rise, and a National Geographic investigation found that demand for religious art pieces carved out of the precious material has played a considerable role.

“No matter where I find ivory, religion is close at hand,” said investigative reporter Bryan Christy, whose article, “Ivory Worship,” is included in the new edition of National Geographic magazine, released Friday (Sept. 14).

“Elephant poaching levels are currently at their worst in a decade,” Christy wrote. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) estimates that at least 25,000 elephants were poached in 2011, mostly for their ivory tusks.

Philippine Catholics use ivory to construct crucifixes, figures of the Virgin Mary and other icons. The province of Cebu is particularly known for its ivory renditions of the Santo Nino de Cebu (Holy Child of Cebu), used in worship and celebration.

Christy said the Vatican has not taken active steps to discourage ivory trade, which primarily comes from illegal sources. “The Vatican has recently demonstrated a commitment to confronting transnational criminal problems ... but it has not signed the CITES treaty and so is not subject to the ivory ban.”

“The elephant is a symbol of Thailand and is revered in Buddhism,” Christy wrote. Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha’s mother dreamed of a white elephant the night he was conceived, making ivory carvings and amulets even more valuable in some Buddhist cultures.

While China’s market for ivory is primarily secular, Buddhist carvings are incredibly popular as well.

Christy found many loopholes to gain access to ivory. In Thailand, native elephant tusks may be used for ivory under certain conditions, and ivory obtained before the 1989 ban may be traded domestically in any country in the world.

“Because this is about faith, and because faith requires suspension of disbelief, ivory traded for religious purposes doesn’t garner the aggressive scrutiny it might if it were carved into, say, chess pieces,” Christy wrote.

Religious differences push need for better understanding of Eastern religions

By Matthew Brown ("Deseret News," August 31, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37976/

Salt Lake City, USA - To explain the difference between his Hindu faith and the Christian tradition in which he was raised, Lynn Napper tells the story of a Hindu holy man who visited a grade school in India during Great Britain’s occupation.

Napper said the man, Swami Vivikananda, asked the British and Indian children: "When I count to three, I want all of you to point to where God is. One. Two. Three.”

All of the British children pointed up, toward heaven, and all of the Indian children pointed to their hearts.

The simple but poignant story also illustrates something experts say needs to take place today in the United States, where the religious landscape is becoming increasingly diverse. They say educating children and public officials about the various faiths practiced in their local communities is critical to maintaining peace and religious freedom.

“We are not going to make it as a country unless we do better educating one another about who we are,” warned Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project and a senior scholar at Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center. “It’s clear in history that unless we address the fear and ignorance we have for one another, we are going to have trouble living with each other.”

Haynes and others say schools, the media and government need to foster a culture where religion matters, or violent episodes like the recent shooting deaths of six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and vandalism of mosques around the country during Islam’s recently holy month of Ramadan will continue to occur.

‘Mosaic of faiths’

One of the major contributors to the increasing religious diversity of the United States is the growing Asian-American population, according to a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Since 1965, Asian Americans have risen from 1 percent of the total United States population to 5.8 percent in 2011, or 18.2 million adults and children. “In the process, they have been largely responsible for the growth of non-Abrahamic faiths in the United States, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism,” the Pew Forum reported. “Counted together, Buddhists and Hindus today account for about the same share of the U.S. public as Jews (roughly 2 percent).”

Rev. Jerry Hirano, an ordained priest who heads the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple, has witnessed the growth firsthand. He remembers that when he was a youth, the temple over which he now presides was one of just three in Utah, and “99 percent of those who attended were Japanese Americans.”

But since the 1970s, an influx of immigrants from southeast and central Asia brought diverse approaches to Buddhism unique to their cultures and they established their own congregations. “Now there are many temples,” he said, and they have attracted converts who are not Asian-American, which has contributed to the growth.

“About half of my congregation now is not Japanese-American,” said Hirano, dressed in a black satin robe and sitting before the intricate gold altars and shrines of the temple, which symbolize the virtues of truth, enlightenment, impermanence, kindness and humility.

He said the community has come a long way since the time he remembers people thinking Buddhists were nothing more than idol worshippers or martial arts warriors depicted in the 1970s television hit “Kung Fu.”

The Pew Forum’s “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths” study shows how, seen through the lens of a Christian or a Muslim, followers of non-Abrahamic faiths could be misjudged as nonreligious or even atheist.

The survey found that Asian-Americans are less likely than Americans overall to believe in God and to pray on a daily basis. But measures such as belief in God, frequency of prayer or even attendance at worship services aren’t reliable indicators of a religion’s role in a mostly non-Christian population because faith is practiced and lived in a different way.

For example, Buddhists often view their religion in non-theistic terms — a path toward enlightenment rather than a path to God — so, it would be expected that fewer Asian-American Buddhists would say they believe in God or a universal spirit. And in fact, just 71 percent of them do, compared with 92 percent of the overall U.S. public.

Similarly, the Pew report found that ritual recitation of mantras (in both Buddhism and Hinduism) is not viewed as the equivalent of prayer to a personal God in the Christian tradition, which could explain why a smaller number of Asian-American Buddhists and Hindus than Asian-American Christians report that they pray daily.

Attendance at religious services is also higher among U.S. Asian Christians (61 percent) than among U.S. Asian Buddhists (12 percent) and Hindus (19 percent). But many Buddhists (57 percent) and Hindus (78 percent) report that they maintain religious shrines in their homes, the Pew study stated.

While most Asian-American Buddhists and Hindus maintain other traditional religious beliefs and practices — some 95 percent of all Indian-American Hindus say they celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights — many have also incorporated western traditions and holidays. Roughly three-quarters celebrate Christmas and more than a third of Hindus reported attending a religious service other than their own.

Pew researchers said that U.S. Buddhists and Hindus tend to be inclusive in their understanding of faith. Most Asian-American Buddhists (79 percent) and Asian-American Hindus (91 percent), for instance, reject the notion that their religion is the one, true faith and say instead that many religions can lead to eternal life (or, in the case of Buddhists, to enlightenment).

Where religion matters

“It is very important to understand and know the basics and how these different faiths might express their religious commitment,” said Cary Funk, senior researcher for the Asian-American study. “There are many, many religious groups in U.S. society, and the more we understand these differences the better that is.”

To reach that understanding, researchers need to formulate questions that capture the nuances and stark differences between faith traditions. Funk said asking about the salience or experience of one's faith is relevant in all religious traditions.

For John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron and a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, understanding the nuances of various faith traditions and the practices of their adherents is important in determining the impact followers have on society.

“One reason someone doing political polling would want to measure religious commitment is that it turns out to be a very powerful factor in explaining people’s political attitudes and views on social issues,” Green said. “People who have high levels of religious commitment tend to be more engaged with their faith, and we know that type of social engagement can have an enormous impact on people’s attitudes and their behaviors.”

According to the Pew study, most Asian Americans lean Democrat, with the exception of evangelical Protestants. However, more than half those same politically conservative Asian Americans support a bigger federal government offering more social services compared to 20 percent of white evangelicals in the general public.

As American society becomes more religiously diverse, the possibility of having a neighbor, student, patient, military comrade, voter or elected official from a minority faith becomes more likely, and it raises the importance of having at least a familiarity with other faith traditions.

“It’s not that we have to know everything, but certain basic information is certainly useful,” said Green, noting that most calls he receives seeking insight on the religious impact of a certain issue are from the media.

“And that’s a good thing because a lot of people get their information through the media,” he said.

But the most effective place for that education to take place is in public schools, said Haynes, who spearheaded the initial guidelines for teaching about religion in public schools without running afoul of the U.S. Constitution.

He said progress has been made in the past 20 years to offer more religion courses, but it is not keeping pace with the country’s changing religious landscape, where minority faiths are increasingly clamoring to be heard in the public square.

“Religious literacy for the sake of education is a start,” Haynes said. “But my motivation is for religious freedom and peace among people and preparing young people for a world where religion matters.”

Hirano said that increased awareness and acceptance of other faith traditions in a community also makes it easier for children in minority faiths to integrate into American society.

He recalled growing up in a predominantly Mormon culture and often participated in LDS Church youth activities taking place at the local church across the street from his home. But he also had a separate social network among his Japanese American friends at the Buddhist temple.

He senses those walls have come down more in the past 10 years, and he sees his daughter visit her friend’s church and the friend visit the Buddhist temple.

“My daughter once asked, ‘Why don’t they realize that we are not that different from them? We just try to be kind and gentle to everybody,’” Hirano said.

And in some cases former Christians embrace the new faith tradition. For Napper, his journey toward Hinduism started when he was 15 years old in a karate class where he learned to meditate. He eventually founded the Ogden Meditation Center, and his interest in the practice took him in 2001 to India, where meditation and Hinduism were born.

The retired Homeland Security supervisor at Salt Lake City International Airport grips a string of large beads in his right hand while patiently explaining some of the aspects of his practice to this reporter, who interrupted his weekly Monday visit to the Sri Ganesha Hindu Temple in South Jordan to meditate. He says what sets Hinduism apart for him is the internal rather than outward nature of worship.

“It feels good,” he says, succinctly explaining why he makes the trip from Ogden. “It’s a feeling of deeper-than-normal peace.”

Children to carry on Rev. Moon’s religious movement, but feuding could endanger the empire

By (AP, September 3, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/38002/

Gapyeong, South Korea - Unification Church patriarch Sun Myung Moon leaves behind children who have been groomed to lead a religious movement famous for its mass weddings and business interests — if family feuds don’t bring down the empire.

Moon, the charismatic and controversial founder of the church, died Monday at age 92 at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong County, northeast of Seoul, two weeks after being hospitalized with pneumonia, church officials said.

Flags flew at half-staff at a Unification Church in Seoul as followers trickled in, some wiping away tears, some wondering what would happen to a movement defined for decades by the man who founded it in 1954 and proclaimed himself a messiah.

The Rev. Moon and wife Hak Ja Han have 10 surviving children, and, in recent years, the aging Moon had been handing them power over the church’s religious, charitable and business entities.

There have been reports of family rifts. One son sued his mother’s missionary group in 2011, demanding the return of more than $22 million he claimed was sent without his consent from his company to her group. A court ruled that the money was a loan but ordered it returned, the church said.

The son, known as Preston, is still in charge of a church organization in the United States, but church officials said they have asked him to leave the job.

Moon’s death could expose further rifts within the church, said Kim Heung-soo, who teaches the history of Christianity at Mokwon University in the central city of Daejeon.

“There is a high possibility that internal discord will deepen,” Kim said.

The church has amassed dozens of businesses in the United States, South Korea and even North Korea, including hotels, a ski resort, sports teams, schools, universities and hospitals.

One expert said the church’s business prospects appear brighter than its religious future. Tark Ji-il, a professor of religion at Busan Presbyterian University, described the church not as a religious organization but as a corporation made up of people with similar religious beliefs.

The church won’t give details about how much its businesses are worth, other than to describe them as part of a “multibillion-dollar” empire.

Many new religious movements collapse after their founders die, but Tark said the Unification Church would likely survive. Its success as a religious entity, however, will depend on how smoothly it resolves any family feuds and how well Moon’s offspring rise to fill their father’s charismatic role, he said.

There has been tragedy in the family. One son committed suicide in 1999, jumping from the 17th floor of a Reno, Nevada, hotel, officials said. Two other sons reportedly also died early, one in a train wreck and another in a car accident.

Key to the church’s religious future is the Rev. Hyung-jin Moon, the U.S.-born 33-year-old who was tapped to succeed his father several years ago as head of the church.

Known as “Sean” back at Harvard, where he studied, he is more fluent in English than Korean and has signs of his father’s charisma — but with an American sensibility. His sermons, delivered in English, are designed to appeal to the next generation of “Unificationists,” the name followers prefer over the moniker “Moonies.”

He told The Associated Press in 2009 that he questioned Christianity when he was younger. But his father stood by him throughout the phase, and asked followers not to criticize him when he turned to Buddhism briefly after his brother’s death in Nevada.

An older brother, Kook-jin Moon, a 42-year-old also known as Justin, runs the Tongil Group, the church’s business arm.

The church has amassed dozens of business ventures over the years, including the New Yorker Hotel, a midtown Manhattan art deco landmark, and the Yongpyong ski resort in South Korea. It gave the University of Bridgeport $110 million over more than a decade to keep the Connecticut school operating. Moon also founded the Washington Times newspaper in 1982.

The church also owns a professional soccer team, schools and hospitals. It operates the Potonggang Hotel in Pyongyang and jointly operates the Pyeonghwa Motors automaker in North Korea.

“Unification of South Korea and North Korea was a long-cherished ambition of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon,” church official Kim Kab-yong said in Seoul. “He invested a lot in this. We are so heartbroken that he could not accomplish this.”

Sun Myung Moon, who was born in a rural part of what is now North Korea, founded the movement after migrating south during the Korean War. He wrote in his autobiography that as a teenager he received a personal calling from Jesus Christ to carry out his work on Earth.

The church’s doctrine is a mixture of Christian, Confucian and traditional Korean values, emphasizing the importance of the family unit but also encouraging multicultural unions.

Moon conducted his first mass wedding in Seoul in the early 1960s, and the “blessing ceremonies” grew in scale over the years. He encouraged his followers to call him and his wife their “True Parents,” and often paired up the newlyweds himself before the mass ceremonies.

Richard Panzer, president of the Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, New York, called Moon “a historical figure in the history of religion.” He said Moon made an “enormous contribution to understanding of the suffering heart of God and a lot of contributions toward world peace.”

The seminary, established by Moon in 1975, is an interfaith institution with Buddhist, Christian and Muslim professors, Panzer said.

The Unification Church claims 3 million followers, though ex-members and critics put the number at no more than 100,000.

Joo Seung-ja, 64, said news of Moon’s death was hard to accept.

“I don’t know how to express this feeling,” she said. “Since he taught us true love, we will live our lives by preaching true love throughout the whole world till the end.”

Church officials said Moon’s funeral will take place Sept. 15 after a 13-day mourning period, with a massive new sports and cultural center built recently on the church’s sprawling campus accepting mourners starting Thursday.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Revolutionary Leader

By Joshua Hammer ("Smithsonian Magazine," August 29, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37959/

On a steamy evening at the beginning of the rainy season, a crowd of 10,000 packs the street outside the National League for Democracy headquarters in downtown Yangon. Volunteers pass out bottled water in the oppressive heat, while a Burmese vaudeville team performs folk dances on a red carpet. This headquarters, a crucible of opposition to Myanmar’s military junta until it was forced to shut down nearly a decade ago, is about to reopen in a lavish ceremony. At 6 p.m., a white sport utility vehicle pulls up, and Aung San Suu Kyi emerges to a jubilant roar. “Amay Suu”—Mother Suu—chant thousands in the throng. Radiant in an indigo dress, white roses in her hair, The Lady pushes through supporters and cuts a ribbon with a pair of golden scissors.

I’ve wangled an invitation to the VIP section, next to the building’s entrance. I’m soaked in sweat, overcome with thirst, and my lower back is throbbing from waiting on my feet for The Lady for nearly two hours. Suddenly, in the midst of the crush, she is standing before me, exuding not only rock-star magnetism, but also an indefinable serenity. Even in the press and tumult of the crowd, it’s as if the scene stands still. Standing ramrod straight, reaching out over admirers and bodyguards to clasp my hand, she speaks to me in a soft, clear voice. She wants, she says, to give thanks for support from the international community. She has a trip to Thailand planned in a few days—her first out of the country since 1988—and her schedule is even more jammed than usual. I ask her whether, as I’ve heard, she is meditating for an hour every morning, following the Buddhist practice that kept her calm during nearly two decades of house arrest. “Not mornings,” she corrects me. “But yes, I’m meditating every day.” Then her security team nudges her away and she mounts the steep staircase leading to the third-floor headquarters.

She and I had first met, only 16 months before, in more tranquil circumstances, before the international frenzy surrounding her escalated exponentially. The setting was the temporary NLD headquarters a few blocks from here, a dilapidated, garage-like structure watched round-the-clock by security agents. In a sparsely furnished lounge on the second floor, she had told me that she took up vipassana, or insight meditation, at Oxford University, where she studied philosophy and politics during the 1960s. The 2,500-year-old technique of self-observation is intended to focus the mind on physical sensation and to liberate the practitioner from impatience, anger and discontent.

Aung San Suu Kyi found meditation difficult at first, she acknowledged. It wasn’t until her first period of house arrest, between 1989 and 1995, she said, that “I gained control of my thoughts” and became an avid practitioner. Meditation helped confer the clarity to make key decisions. “It heightens your awareness,” she told me. “If you’re aware of what you are doing, you become aware of the pros and cons of each act. That helps you to control not just what you do, but what you think and what you say.”

As she evolves from prisoner of conscience into legislator, Buddhist beliefs and practices continue to sustain her. “If you see her diet, you realize that she takes very good care of herself, but in fact it is her mind that keeps her healthy,” I’m told by Tin Myo Win, Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal physician. Indeed, a growing number of neuroscientists believe that regular meditation actually changes the way the brain is wired—shifting brain activity from the stress-prone right frontal cortex to the calmer left frontal cortex. “Only meditation can help her withstand all this physical and mental pressure,” says Tin Myo Win.

It is impossible to understand Aung San Suu Kyi, or Myanmar, without understanding Buddhism. Yet this underlying story has often been eclipsed as the world has focused instead on military brutality, economic sanctions and, in recent months, a raft of political reforms transforming the country.

Buddhists constitute 89 percent of Myanmar’s population, and—along with the ruthless military dictatorship that misruled the country for decades—Buddhism is the most defining aspect of Burmese life.

The golden spires and stupas of Buddhist temples soar above jungle, plains and urbanscapes. Red-robed monks—there are nearly 400,000 of them in Myanmar—are the most revered members of society. Pursuing lives of purity, austerity and self-discipline, they collect alms daily, forging a sacred religious bond with those who dispense charity. Nearly every Burmese adolescent boy dons robes and lives in a monastery for periods of between a few weeks and several years, practicing vipassana. As adults, Burmese return to the monastery to reconnect with Buddhist values and escape from daily pressures. And Buddhism has shaped the politics of Myanmar for generations.

Based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince who renounced worldly pursuits and attained enlightenment beneath a banyan tree around 500 B.C., Buddhism probably took root here more than 2,000 years ago. Its belief system holds that satisfactions are transitory, life is filled with suffering, and the only way to escape the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth—determined by karma, or actions—is to follow what is known as the Noble Eightfold Path, with an emphasis on rightful intention, effort, mindfulness and concentration. Buddhism stresses reverence for the Buddha, his teachings (Dhamma) and the monks (Sangha)—and esteems selflessness and good works, or “making merit.” At the heart of it is vipassana meditation, introduced by the Buddha himself. Behind vipassana lies the concept that all human beings are sleepwalking through life, their days passing by them in a blur. Only by slowing down, and concentrating on sensory stimuli alone, can one grasp how the mind works and reach a state of total awareness.

During the colonial era, monks, inspired by the Buddha’s call for good governance, led resistance to British rule. The British scorned them as “political agitators in...robes” and hanged several leaders. The country’s liberation hero, Aung San—father of Aung San Suu Kyi—grew up in a devout Buddhist household and attended a monastic school where monks inculcated the Buddhist values of “duty and diligence.” In 1946, not long before his assassination by political rivals in Yangon, Aung San delivered a fiery pro-independence speech on the steps of Shwedagon Pagoda, a 2,500-year-old, gold-leaf-covered temple revered for a reliquary believed to contain strands of the Buddha’s hair. On those same steps, during the bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi was catapulted to the opposition leadership by giving a passionate speech embracing the Buddhist principle of nonviolent protest.

Myanmar’s generals, facing a democratic revolt, attempted to establish legitimacy by embracing Buddhism. Junta members gave lavishly to monks, funded monasteries and spent tens of millions of dollars restoring some of Myanmar’s Buddhist temples. In 1999, the generals regilded the spire of Shwedagon with 53 tons of gold and 4,341 diamonds. An earthquake shook Yangon during the reconstruction, which senior monks interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure with the regime.

The military lost all credibility during the Saffron Revolution in 2007, when troops shot dead protesting monks, defrocked and imprisoned others, and shut down dozens of monasteries. Monks appeared on the streets with begging bowls turned upside down—a symbol that they would refuse alms from soldiers. This seldom-invoked punishment was tantamount to excommunication.

Thein Sein, Myanmar’s new reformist president, has tried to repair the relationship. One of his first conciliatory acts was to reopen monasteries shut down by the junta. Among nearly 1,000 political prisoners he freed in January and February 2012, many were jailed monks who had participated in the Saffron Revolution. Senior monks say, however, that the damage will take decades to undo. “Daw [an honorific similar to ‘Madam’] Suu is released, which is good, and the government is clean, but still relations are not good,” I was told by Su Rya, the 37-year-old abbot of the Kyeemyindine monastery in Yangon, which played a leading role in the 2007 protests. “Even five years later, we still remember what happened,” he said.

Aung San Suu Kyi has invoked Buddhism repeatedly in her calls for peaceful protest and passive resistance to military rule. But like all religions, Buddhism is not free from violence. In June, the worst ethnic and religious clashes in decades erupted in coastal Rakhine State between Buddhists and stateless Muslims—whom the government has classified as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although many have lived in Myanmar for generations. Triggered by the rape and murder of a Buddhist girl and the lynching of Muslims in revenge, the violence—in which dozens died and thousands have fled—reflects the loosening of dictatorial controls in democratizing Myanmar, and a new freedom to organize along ethnic and religious lines.

When I met Aung San Suu Kyi after her release from house arrest, she spoke at length about the role that Buddhism had played during her confinement. It had given her perspective and patience, she said, an ability to take the long view. This was especially important during the last seven years of her imprisonment, when her principal nemesis was Gen. Than Shwe, an erratic, superstitious leader who harbored a deep antipathy toward her, and even reportedly used black magic rituals against her. “I don’t want to portray [Than Shwe] as a brutal, mindless personality, because I don’t know him well enough,” she told me back then, carefully. Than Shwe’s resistance to reform, and harsh suppression of the pro-democracy movement, often tested her Buddhist equanimity. “I felt...intense irritation and impatience,” she told me. “I listened to the radio every day for many hours, so I knew what was going on in Burma, the economic problems, the poverty, so many things that needed to be rectified...I thought, ‘Why are we wasting our time?’” Then she would turn to vipassana, and “24 hours later . . . those feelings would subside.”

Than Shwe, who ruled the country with an iron first from 1992 to 2011, was not known to meditate. But he visited Buddhist temples often and lavished money on them, following the advice of soothsayers, who assured him that such “merits” would bolster his power. Like many of his predecessors, Than Shwe fused his Buddhism with belief in nats, or spirits, and yadaya, magic rituals performed to ward off misfortune. Such superstitions are thought to derive from an ancient form of the religion that long predated the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, introduced by Burma’s King Anawrahta in the 11th century.

Than Shwe was a frequent visitor to Bagan, the ancient capital sprawled across an arid plain on the east bank of the Irrawaddy River, about 400 miles north of Yangon. Burma’s King Anawrahta and his heirs constructed thousands of Buddhist temples and shrines here between the 11th and 13th centuries—a golden age that ended in 1287 when Kublai Khan’s Mongol warriors conquered the city.

On a hot morning, I mount steps to the plaza of Sinmyarshin Temple, an ornate 13th-century structure with a stupa sheathed in gold leaf. Than Shwe visited the temple frequently and paid to regild it in 1997. “Than Shwe’s soothsayer advised him to adopt Sinmyarshin after consulting his astrological chart,” my guide tells me. Inside, Than Shwe restored 800-year-old frescoes depicting the Buddha’s life.

In May 2009, Than Shwe’s wife, Kyiang Kyiang, attended a rededication of 2,300-year-old Danok Pagoda outside Yangon and placed a jewel-encrusted hti, or sacred umbrella, atop the spire. Three weeks later, the temple collapsed, killing about 20 workers who were rehabilitating it. “It is a sign that [Than Shwe] has done so many evil things that he no longer has the ability to make merit,” said U.S. anthropologist Ingrid Jordt at the time. Many Burmese believe that Than Shwe was so shaken by Danok’s collapse that, soon after, he released Aung San Suu Kyi and decided to step down—as a means of escaping his karmic destiny.

During the darkest days of the dictatorship, after the arrests of most secular political leaders in the 1990s, it was the monks who led resistance to the junta. These “sons of Buddha” could organize discreetly inside their monasteries and spread pro-democracy, anti-regime sentiments to the people. Perhaps the most charismatic was Ashin Gambira, now 33, a leader of the Saffron Revolution. After the junta crushed the uprising, Gambira’s monastery in Yangon was shut down and the monk was arrested and sentenced to 63 years in prison. He withstood four years of torture and beatings and was freed on January 13. Gambira promptly resumed his harsh critiques of the government. He then broke into three monasteries that had been sealed by the army in 2007 and also traveled to Kachin State in northern Myanmar to draw attention to human-rights abuses allegedly being carried out by the army in a war against ethnic separatists that resumed last year after a 17-year cease-fire. Both times he was released after a night in jail.

The physical and mental strain of prison life, along with continued harassment, took a heavy toll on Gambira. In March he reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown. The monk left the monastery, returned to layman status and moved in with his mother near Mandalay. “He does not want to speak to anybody,” she told me when I called. “He is not in good mental condition.” Gambira’s plight, supporters say, is a reminder of the tenuous nature of the government’s liberalization.

I visited Gambira’s former monastery, newly reopened, tucked away in a leafy section of Yangon. The golden spires of an adjacent temple poked above a dense grove of coconut palms and banana trees. Sitting cross-legged on the veranda of his dormitory, the abbot, also a former political prisoner, told me that the monastery is still trying to recover after the devastation inflicted by the military. At the time it was forcibly shut in 2007, “there were 18 monks, a dozen HIV patients and three orphans living here. Most have disappeared.” I asked if he was grateful to Thein Sein for the reopening. “I do not need to thank this military government for returning what belongs to us,” he told me. He was bitter about the treatment of Gambira, whom he considered a protégé. “Gambira was moved to many prisons and tortured. He has not been right since.”

Gambira is not the only monk who has run into trouble in the new Myanmar. I traveled a dirt road through rice paddies two hours outside Yangon to meet with Ashin Pyinna Thiha, 62, a prominent Buddhist scholar and political activist. A spiritual adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi and critic of the junta, Pyinna Thiha tried to instill a spirit of political activism in thousands of young acolytes at his Yangon monastery. He met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she visited Myanmar early last December, and honored Aung San Suu Kyi with a Nobel Prize ceremony at his monastery in January. Late last December, the Supreme Council of Burmese monks—47 abbots approved by the regime—banished Pyinna Thiha from his monastery and ordered him into domestic exile.

He now resides with 15 monks in a rural compound donated by a supporter. “We are out of touch here,” said the moon-faced, pudgy monk, as we gazed out on fallow fields from a thatched-roof structure, its bamboo walls decorated with photographs of Pyinna Thiha with The Lady. “Things are changing in Myanmar,” he said. “But one thing has not changed, and that is religion.”

Monks are the biggest potential organizing force in Burmese society, he explained; the government remains fearful of them. The council, he says, serves as “a puppet” of the regime, its members corrupted by privileges. “They get houses, cars,” he told me. “This is not Buddhism. This is luxury.”

Back at the reopened NLD headquarters in Yangon, Aung San Suu Kyi is reminding supporters that the struggle is far from over. Standing on the third-floor balcony of the tenement, festooned with yellow, white and red NLD banners, she tells them that the Yangon police have been bullying street vendors and urges “mutual respect” between the authorities and the people. Then she turns her attention to the crisis of the moment: crippling electricity cuts across Myanmar, the result of rotting infrastructure and the selling of most of the country’s hydroelectric power and gas to China and Thailand. As if on cue, the downtown lights go out. Enveloped in darkness, the opposition leader, again invoking the Buddhist spirit of nonviolent protest, urges the crowd to “light a candle.” The street is soon transformed into a sea of tiny, flickering flames.

Watching The Lady from the VIP section is a rising member of her inner circle, Kyaw Min Yu, 43, a founder of the 88 Generation, an organization that includes many former political prisoners. Sentenced to life in 1990 for his role as a student organizer in the 1988 uprising, he was freed in February after nearly 22 years, as part of the general amnesty. A wiry man with chiseled good looks and capable English, Kyaw Min Yu believes that his embrace of Buddhist practice saved his life in prison. Initially he was “full of rage” at his captors, he tells me after the rally; he was tortured and placed in solitary. Then, Kyaw Min Yuu found himself in the same cell as a monk, who began to teach him vipassana meditation.

Soon he was meditating for an hour each morning and evening. Other prisoners began to follow his example. “I diminished my anger and hatred, so I could see the guards as poor, illiterate men, with small brains, who understood only two things—following orders and making threats,” he said. He ended outbursts toward his guards. The beatings gradually ended, and guards who once brutalized him began to smuggle radios, food, novels and an English-language dictionary to him and to his fellow inmates. “These things helped us survive,” he told me. Even in the darkest corners of the regime’s gulag, Buddhism served as a source of light.

Amid pressures of daily life, more Koreans revive interest in shamanism

By Jason Strother ("The Christian Science Monitor," August 16, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37900/

Seoul, South Korea - The banging of drums, crashing of cymbals and blaring of a horn echo down the slope of Samgak Mountain. They’re coming from a shaman’s temple, where a goot, a spiritual rite, is underway.

The predominant religions in South Korea are the traditional Buddhist faith and a large Christian population, though a large segment of the population is not religious. Still, many are believers in an animistic spirituality that goes back thousands of years.

Shamanism is the indigenous faith of the Korean people, and although it has been diminished by centuries of influence from other religions and some repression, it is still intertwined with daily life among religious and nonreligious populations alike. And due to the pressures caused by the nation’s rapid development, many Koreans are turning to shamanism for guidance from the spirit world.

At the center of one of the temple’s rooms is a man wearing a tall hat and draped in a multi-layered red, blue, and white robe. He spins in circles, waving silk flags in one hand, a sword in another.

He is a mudang, a shaman priest. He carries on a tradition that is one of the most essential aspects of Korean culture.

“I help make people’s dreams come true,” says Tae Eul, the mudang who leads the ceremony. “I try to figure out how the energy of the universe flows through then, the gods show the way. If god commands that their problem can be solved through a goot, I will perform a goot for them.”

Tae Eul is helping a woman who has fallen on some tough financial times. He has her light candles and bow in front of an altar. He summons the gods of the mountain and sky and calls out to her ancestors. At one point during the ritual, Tae Eul stands barefoot on knife blades, which somehow do not puncture his skin.

Some observers say an intrinsic search for spiritually divined good luck is what keeps South Korea’s 50 thousand mudangs in business. That’s according to David Mason, author of Sacred Mountains, a book on Korean shamanism.

“It seems to me that many Koreans are still shamanic believers at their core, underneath. Many scholars have used this analogy, like an onion, with shamanism at the core of their psychology and then layers of Buddhism or Confucianism, then Christianity and modern scientific thinking as the outer layers,” Mr. Mason says.

Shamans haven’t always had a good reputation. During the 1970s the country's government tried to get rid of shamanism, and some Koreans view practitioners skeptically and write them off as con artists. But, Tae Eul says he sees a brighter future for mudangs like himself.

“Our lives will become increasingly fast paced in the future,” he says. “I think shamans will once again be treated with respect. We can predict the future and because of that people will appreciate us more.”

Tibetans Sacrifice Their Lives for Their Faith

By Amy Yee ("The Wall Street Journal," August 17, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37885/

Dharamsala, India - A 35-year-old Tibetan nun named Palden Choetso set herself on fire on a street corner in southwest China last November. The final moments of her life were captured by an amateur video camera. As bright orange flames engulfed her body, Choetso stood impossibly still until finally she dropped to her knees and toppled over.

Choetso is one of 49 Tibetans, ages 17 to 44, who have set themselves on fire since 2009 to protest repression in Tibet by Chinese authorities. The latest was on Monday, when two young men in their early 20s—one a monk—did so in a Tibetan region of China's Sichuan province. This spate of self-immolations among Tibetans is unprecedented.

With China not changing its policies denying true religious freedom and civil liberties to Tibetans, the self-immolations are likely to continue. This presents an uneasy quandary for Buddhists, who consider the taking of life, including suicide, taboo.

Without a doubt, Tibetans grieve over the self-immolations. No one I talked to wanted them to continue. But some reconcile the acts with their Buddhist beliefs because they are meant to serve a worthy cause, not to harm others.

Buddhist teachings provide a few examples of self-sacrifice. In the Jataka Tales, a collection of hundreds of Aesop-like homilies, one story tells of Buddha's self-sacrifice while incarnated as a hare. To feed a guest, Buddha offers his own flesh, even shaking off his fur to save any insects in his coat from death.

"Then offering his whole body as a free gift he sprang up, and like a royal swan alighting on a cluster of lotuses, in an ecstasy of joy he fell on the heap of live coals,'' the story reads. Ultimately Buddha in hare form is saved from being burned when the coals under him fail to light.

In another familiar fable, Buddha encounters a starving tigress and offers his body as food so she can save her cubs.

But these tales are just stories. The aftermath of a self-immolation in Tibet is brutal, whether or not it results in suicide. Survivors endure excruciating burns and are detained by Chinese authorities. Relatives and friends thought to be conspirators are also detained, arrested or jailed.

Are self-immolations still acceptable? "They do it out of pure motivation for the well-being of six million Tibetans," said Geshe Kalsang Damdul, assistant director of the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics here in Dharamsala, the exile home of the Dalai Lama. (A geshe degree is the highest level of scholarship in Tibetan Buddhism.) Suicide "without specific purpose, out of frustration with your life—that is definitely killing and not good," he added.

According to Buddhist beliefs, "a good re-birth depends on actions in this life," explained Geshe Damdul. "At the end, if your mind is pure, this can be a powerful seed for taking good re-birth in the next life." This sounds like a slippery slope toward justifying suicide attacks, but Geshe Damdul clarifies: "Something that harms others is a violent act. [Tibetans] could put bombs on their bodies but they've never resorted to doing that.''

Geshe Lhakdor, director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, had an unvarnished view. "Self-immolations are unfortunate but the situation in Tibet is so desperate," he said. "Those who say, 'It's against Buddhism'—that's a luxurious comment from those who don't experience any complications."

Most Tibetan religious leaders have not explicitly discouraged the acts, including Kirti Rinpoche, the exiled head abbot of Kirti Monastery. Kirti's monastery in Sichuan has been at the heart of the recent protests, with at least 18 of its current or former monks having self-immolated.

Kirti Rinpoche told the BBC late last year: "We do not have the moral authority to tell them what to do or not to do. The monks have been pushed to this great desperation and they are finding they can only express their resistance to Chinese rule by setting themselves on fire.''

The Dalai Lama says that only the Chinese government can stop the self-immolations by lifting its repressive policies in Tibet. In an interview with CNN this spring, he declined to comment when asked about the self-immolations, saying the issue was "very difficult." In other interviews he has called the self-immolators "courageous'' but questioned whether the suicides have any impact.

Still, other champions of the Tibetan cause are beginning to seriously question the tactic. The Karmapa, the highly respected head of one school of Tibetan Buddhism and a possible successor to the Dalai Lama, is one.

In an eloquent statement last November, the Karmapa said, "Most of those who have died have been very young. They had a long future ahead of them, an opportunity to contribute in ways that are now foregone. In Buddhist teaching life is precious. To achieve anything worthwhile we need to preserve our lives. We Tibetans are very few in number so every Tibetan life is of value to the cause of Tibet."

Buddhas in the West: Even Bill Clinton Turns Toward Meditation

By Andrew Lam ("Huffington Post," August 22, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37911/

Buddhism made a blip in the news early this month when the Times of India, and other major media outlets, citing an unnamed source, reported that Bill Clinton has turned to Buddhism for mental and physical well-being. The former U.S. president went as far as hiring a Buddhist monk to teach him the arts of meditation.

While this may come as a surprise to some, to many others it's only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. In the last half of the 20th century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.

I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the Magic Kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.

In October 2009, CNN reported that "programs and workshops educating inmates about meditation and yoga are sprouting up across the country." There are more than 75 organizations working with some 2,500 people, most of them prisoners, and they inspired a documentary called "The Dhamma Brothers," where inmates reached inner peace and spiritual maturity through meditation and the practice of compassion.

This was the same year that Thomas Dyer, a former Marine and one-time Southern Baptist pastor, became the first Buddhist chaplain in the history of the U.S. Army and was sent to Afghanistan to administer to Buddhist American soldiers.

Over the past quarter-century, Buddhism has become the third largest religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant. The UT San Diego newspaper estimated that there are at least 1.2 million Americans who are Buddhist practitioners, the majority of whom live in California. Other scholars estimated that number to be as high as 6.7 million.

Even if small in population, Buddhist ideas are clearly a strong influence on the cultural spheres. When the Dalai Lama visited the U.S. three years ago, for example, he was a celebrity at every American institution. One scene in particular remains memorable: the most famous monk in the world sat on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world and exploring the concept of the soul, as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.

Yet, despite Buddhism's message of inner peace and compassion, it, in its own way, is a very radical spiritual practice for its refutation of the existence of a creator. In essence, the serious practitioner aims to extinguish the self by defeating his own ego and, thereby, seeing beyond the illusion spun by the ignorant mind.

The ultimate Buddhist experience entails neither god nor self, neither "out there" nor "in here," for that membrane that separates the practitioner's being and that of the world, upon awakening, has been lifted. All that remains is ohm -- absolute awe and bliss. Imagine, if you will, Moses not turning his face away from the burning bush that is God but approaching it then fully merging with that terrifying fire. To reach spiritual maturity, the I (or ego) must -- at least in meditation -- be dissolved.

"Buddhism," writes Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions at Harvard University, "challenges many Americans at the very core of their thinking about religion -- at least, those of us for whom religion has something to do with one we call God."

As ties deepened between the two continents, as immigration from Asia continues unabated, and as the Dhamma (Buddha's teachings) spreads beyond all borders, we are entering what many thinkers and philosophers call the second axial age, an age of pluralism where the various spiritual traditions co-exist.

In these global days, no single system can exist as a separate entity, nor can its borders remain impervious to change, all exist to a various degree of openness and exchange. And the old Silk Road along which so many religious ideas traveled has been replaced by a far more potent thoroughfare: unprecedented global migration, mass communications and the information highway, which transcends geography.

I once kept on my study's wall two very different pictures to remind me of the way East and West have changed. One is an issue from a Time magazine on Buddhism in America. In it, a group of American Buddhists sits serenely in lotus position on a wooden veranda in Malibu overlooking a calm Pacific Ocean. The other is of Vietnamese-American astronaut Eugene Trinh's space shuttle flight. The pictures tell me that East and West have not only met, but also commingled and fused. When a Vietnamese man who left his impoverished homeland can come very close to reaching the moon, while Americans are becoming psychonauts -- navigators of the mind -- turning inward, trying to reach nirvana with each mindful breath, I think that the East-West dialogue has come a long, long way.

China Assails U.S. ‘Arrogance’ in Report on Religious Freedom

By Mark Mcdonald ("International Herald Tribune," July 31, 2012)


Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37852/?place=china/taiwan

Hong Kong - The United States has issued its annual report on religious freedom around the world, taking particular aim at repression and crackdowns in China, North Korea and Myanmar. China shot back that the report was “full of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance.”

“More than a billion people live under governments that systematically suppress religious freedom,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in remarks summarizing the new report.

“New technologies have given repressive governments additional tools for cracking down on religious expression,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Members of faith communities that have long been under pressure report that the pressure is rising.”

In terms of religious freedom as a human right, she said, “the world is sliding backwards.”

The report noted a rising tide of anti-Semitism around the world, “manifested in Holocaust denial, glorification, and relativism; conflating opposition to certain policies of Israel with blatant anti-Semitism; growing nationalistic movements that target ‘the other’; and traditional forms of anti-Semitism, such as conspiracy theories, acts of desecration and assault, ‘blood libel,’ and cartoons demonizing Jews.”

Four Asian countries — China, Myanmar, North Korea and Uzbekistan — were among eight nations designated by the State Department as “countries of particular concern” on religious freedom.

The China section of the new report found “a marked deterioration during 2011 in the government’s respect for and protection of religious freedom.”

It cited tightened restrictions on Buddhist clergy and worship in Tibet and Tibetan areas, saying, “Official interference in the practice of these religious traditions exacerbated grievances and contributed to at least 12 self-immolations by Tibetans in 2011.”

From the report’s separate section on Tibet: “There were numerous and severe abuses of religious freedom, including religious prisoners and detainees. Monasteries were increasingly forbidden to deliver traditional educational and medical services to the people of their communities, and official intimidation was used to compel acquiescence and preserve a facade of stability.”

Beijing continued to “severely repress Muslims” living in the Xinjiang region, and there were further crackdowns on Christian house churches, according to the report.

China issued a biting response on Tuesday, saying the U.S. report continued “a notorious practice of blatantly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, including China, in the name of religion.” A slightly condensed excerpt from the response, published as a commentary by the official news agency Xinhua:

The annual report, largely based on unconfirmed media reports and groundless allegations from outlawed groups and organizations with ulterior motives, is nothing but a political tool used by the U.S. government to exert pressure on other countries, mostly deemed as its rivals.

The U.S. practice of releasing such a report, which is full of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance, is unimaginative and even counterproductive.

Only a few members from banned cults and illegal extremist religious organizations, which engage in illegal or splittist activities under the guise of seeking religious freedom, have been punished in China strictly according to the laws.

Falun Gong followers — there are said to be tens of millions of believers in China — were said to be especially targeted for harassment and even detention in high-security psychiatric facilities for the criminally insane, although the report acknowledged that such charges were difficult to verify.

“Some neighborhood communities reportedly were instructed to report on Falun Gong members to officials; monetary rewards were offered to citizens who informed on Falun Gong practitioners,” the report said.

The report noted that China’s central government “stated that it did not detain or arrest anyone solely because of his or her religion.”

The report found encouraging signs in China, too. Three Catholic bishops were ordained in 2011, “with the approval of both the Vatican and the official Chinese Catholic church.” Church groups were encouraged to provide social services in quake-hit areas of Sichuan Province.

In its assessment of North Korea, the U.S. report acknowledged that “little is known about the day-to-day life of religious persons in the country.” An excerpt:

Members of government-controlled religious groups did not appear to suffer discrimination, while members of underground churches or those connected to missionary activities were reportedly regarded as subversive elements. Some reports claimed, and circumstantial evidence suggested, that many if not most of the government-controlled religious organizations were created for propaganda and political purposes, including meeting with foreign religious visitors.

Some NGOs and academics estimated there may be up to several hundred thousand Christians practicing their faith underground in the country. Others questioned the existence of a large-scale underground church or concluded that it was impossible to estimate accurately the number of underground religious believers. Individual underground congregations were reportedly very small and typically confined to private homes.

Washington has welcomed recent political reforms in Myanmar, the former Burma, and Mrs. Clinton seems to have connected personally with the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. And the State Department noted the passage of “the first law in several decades to allow peaceful assembly.”

But the report also cited ongoing and widespread abuses of religious freedoms, from arbitrary arrests of Muslims to the harassment of Baptists.

Traditional Christian and Islamic holidays continued to be controlled by the authorities, the report said. Permits to build or repair mosques were said to be rarely granted; Muslims living in Rakhine State often needed to pay bribes to get permission to travel for any purpose; and ethnic Rohingya Muslims “continued to experience the severest forms of legal, economic, educational, and social discrimination.”

An excerpt from the Myanmar report:

The government continued its efforts to exert control over the Buddhist clergy (Sangha). It tried Sangha members for “activities inconsistent with and detrimental to Buddhism” and imposed on the Sangha a code of conduct enforced by criminal penalties.

The government continued the detention, imprisonment, and interrogation of politically active Buddhist monks. In prison, some monks were defrocked and treated as laypersons. In general they were not allowed to shave their heads and were not given food compatible with the monastic code, which dictates that monks should not eat after noon. They often were beaten and forced to do hard labor.

The State Department’s report on religion is separate from its annual assessment of human rights, which was published in May.

It is also not to be confused with another report, also recently issued, by the independent federal panel known as the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

RUSSIA: "Extremism" religious freedom survey, July 2012

By Geraldine Fagan ("Forum 18 News Service," July 23, 2012)


Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37792/

The development most threatening to freedom of religion or belief in the Russian Federation is misapplication of the federal 2002 Extremism Law against those the authorities dislike. Such violations have increased dramatically since 2007 under both Presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev.

"Extremism"-related religious freedom violations are now so extensive that they are here examined separately from Forum 18's July 2012 general religious freedom survey of Russia.

Legal background

Two provisions of Russia's federal Extremism Law of 2002 are typically used to criminalise legitimate religious activity. Prosecutors interpret one definition of extremism – "propaganda of the exclusivity, superiority or lack of equal worth of an individual on the basis of their .. religious .. adherence or attitude to religion" – as covering claims that a particular religion or belief is superior to others. However, the right to make such claims is a fundamental part of the internationally recognised right to freedom of religion or belief.

Prosecutors may also insist that such claims fall foul of a second definition of extremism in the Law - "incitement .. of religious discord". The Russian word for discord [rozn] has a broad definition – it may mean simply division. Yet Russia's judiciary ignores the discrepancy between this term and the far stricter corresponding wording of the Criminal Code – "actions directed at the incitement of hatred [nenavist] or enmity [vrazhda], as well as the humiliation of an individual or group of persons on the basis of .. attitude to religion" (Article 282). The Code may consequently be used to prosecute simple disagreement. When committed by an ordinary member of the public, and even if unaccompanied by violence or the threat of violence, the maximum punishment under Article 282 is two years' imprisonment.

Initially, the 2002 Law stipulated that "incitement of religious discord" had to be committed in connection with violence or the threat of violence. Prosecution of activities that had no association with violence became easier, however, when this stipulation was removed in July 2007. The overall toughening of Russia's approach towards "extremism" largely shadows repressive measures in China and various Central Asian states after their June 2001 Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism (of which Russia is a co-signatory). Yet that treaty links extremism exclusively with violent acts or the planning of violent acts, as the Council of Europe's Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) pointed out in its June 2012 critique of the 2002 Extremism Law (Opinion No. 660/2011). The Shanghai Convention is the only international treaty to which the Russian Federation is a party to contain a definition of extremism.

The 2002 Law's main mechanism for prosecuting the "offence" of criticising a religion or belief is the designation of literature containing such criticisms as extremist. Even a very low-level court may issue such a ruling. If not successfully challenged, this results in automatic placement of the offending literature on the Federal List of Extremist Materials. Once on the List, distribution is banned throughout Russia. Religious organisations associated with particular titles may also be ruled extremist. Their members are then liable to prosecution under two articles of the Criminal Code concerning organisation of extremist activity (Articles 282.1 and 282.2). The harshest punishment these articles allow is six years' imprisonment.

Aside from "extremism", the main feature of federal religious freedom policy has been the lack of such a policy. Particularly under former President Medvedev, however, officials have come to treat state-favoured organisations within the four faiths of Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism as the nation's privileged "traditional religions".

Books banned

The Federal List of Extremist Materials was first published by Russia's Justice Ministry in July 2007. As of 20 July 2012, it contained 1,359 entries. These include books and other forms of printed matter, and electronic materials such as image files, videos and websites. This figure is not exhaustive, however. A few entries appear twice, some are blank where titles have been excluded, and others list multiple items.

The Federal List is now so lengthy that thorough examination of each entry is impossible. The efficacy of banning texts is questionable (particularly in an internet age), as is whether a text can be definitively proven to have caused acts of hatred or enmity. For many items there is a defensible justification for their inclusion on the List, as their titles suggest white supremacist and/or ultranationalist content. Some of the Islamic authors listed, such as Sayyid Qutb and Abu Ala Maududi, have promoted violence. But the justification for the inclusion of other items is doubtful. For example, two texts on the list argue for peace and respect for human rights: Muslim theologian Muhammad ali Al-Hashimi's "The Personality of a Muslim"; and the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong's leaflet "Global Human Rights Torch Relay".

The 2002 Extremism Law was initially implemented against groups that might justifiably be prosecuted for extremism. One was the Islamist political movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, some of whose literature called for anti-Semitic violence, which led to prosecutions in Denmark and Germany. The methodology of Russian prosecutors in such cases was highly doubtful, however. In some trials – such as in the Siberian city of Tobolsk in 2005 - courts were not presented with proof of membership or possession of the movement's literature by those convicted, or proof of calls to violence in the literature concerned.

Since the mid-2000s, prosecutors have steadily widened their net to encompass religious groups whose beliefs do not encourage violence. Their efforts are now directed against two: readers of the works of Turkish Islamic theologian Said Nursi (who died in 1960), and Jehovah's Witnesses. As of early July 2012, 22 Russian translations of works by Nursi and 68 Jehovah's Witness titles were on the Federal List of Extremist Materials. (Banned by different courts, a few of these titles appear on the List twice.)

Nursi readers

The precise motivation for the campaign against Nursi readers is unclear, as is who is responsible for it at federal level. Broadly moderate in character, Nursi's works appeal to Muslims wishing to reconcile Islamic teaching and modernity; followers meet to discuss his works in private homes over cups of tea. Official statements – including by then FSB security service head Nikolai Patrushev in 2008 – point to government paranoia that Nursi readers form a pan-Turkic "fifth column" seeking to realign towards Turkey Muslims from among Russia's Turkic-speaking minorities, such as Tatars, Bashkirs and Kumyks. Yet some state officials also insist paradoxically - and wrongly - that Nursi's works are banned in Turkey.

The first significant ruling against Nursi readers came in May 2007, when a Moscow court declared extremist Russian translations of 14 parts of Nursi's Koranic commentary, "Risale-i Nur" [Messages of Light]. This decision relied solely upon linguistic textual analysis. It ignored powerful criticism from Russia's Ombudsperson for Human Rights, Vladimir Lukin, and even Russia's most pro-Kremlin Muslim leader, Talgat Tadzhuddin. In 2001 Tadzhuddin pronounced "Risale-i Nur" to be "far from religious extremism and fanaticism".

In April 2008 Russia's Supreme Court went on to ban Nurdzhular – a russification of the Turkish for "Nursi followers" - as an extremist organisation, although Russian Nursi readers have repeatedly insisted that no such distinct organisation exists. Raids by the FSB security service and riot police on Nursi readers' homes in disparate parts of Russia began in early 2009. To date, five Nursi readers have received prison terms of up to 18 months as alleged members of Nurdzhular; five others have received suspended prison sentences.

As of end June 2012, six more alleged Nurdzhular members are known to be under criminal investigation. In one case in Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, the FSB is seeking to secure a conviction using enforced psychiatric examination, a practice reminiscent of the Soviet era. Since early 2011, websites featuring Nursi writings have been blocked in Krasnoyarsk and Lipetsk regions.

In a disturbing decision that could widen potential targets for arrest, 68 Muslim texts were ruled extremist by a court in the southern Urals region of Orenburg in March 2012, and added to the Federal List in July. They include three further Nursi titles, three editions of Said Wahf Al-Qahtani's entirely benign "Fortress of the Muslim", assorted Sufi writings, and collections of hadiths [sayings of the Prophet Mohammed]. The court ruling – which took the judge just 20 minutes to reach and came to light only in June – was issued partly on the basis of analysis by an Orthodox Christian, now a priest, whose website on Islam was itself investigated for extremism in 2008. The Council of Muftis – a major Russian Muslim organisation chaired by Mufti Ravil Gainutdin, who is publicly loyal to the Kremlin - has called the Orenburg ruling an "attempt to revive total ideological control" in Russia.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Hostility towards Jehovah's Witnesses, the second religious group most commonly targeted in Russia's counter-extremism drive, has more identifiable roots. The Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) is very hostile towards them. There is no evidence of a direct link, but the first phase of the state's sweeping campaign against Jehovah's Witnesses – 500 raids on their communities across the country – began just days after current Orthodox Patriarch Kirill was enthroned in February 2009. In Kemerovo and Sverdlovsk regions, state officials have requested analyses of Jehovah's Witness beliefs from local Patriarchate dioceses, and public prosecutors commonly enlist Patriarchate clergy as prosecution witnesses in related extremism trials.

In September 2009 a "counter-extremism" case launched on the back of one of the 500 February raids resulted in a court in the Black Sea region of Rostov ruling 34 Jehovah's Witness books and tracts extremist, as well as a ban on the local Jehovah's Witness organisation in the town of Taganrog. The court relied upon doubtful expert analysis that considered extremist references to traditional Christianity as a "false religion" and citation of Leo Tolstoy's criticism of Orthodoxy. Russia's Supreme Court upheld the ruling in December 2009, however, and courts in Altai republic, Kemerovo and Krasnodar regions have since designated a further 34 Jehovah's Witness titles extremist.

By early 2010, Russian Jehovah's Witnesses were reporting hundreds of detentions of their members while out preaching. They were typically held for several hours, searched for literature, fingerprinted and photographed, but not charged. Then, in July 2010, pensioner Aleksei Fedorin of Rostov region became the first Jehovah's Witness in post-Soviet Russia to be convicted for distributing their religious literature – a standard occurrence in the latter Soviet period. As this was a lesser, administrative prosecution, Fedorin was punished with a small fine: it was left to prosecutors to decide whether to pursue "production or distribution of extremist materials" under the Code of Administrative Offences (Article 20.29) or to prosecute under the Criminal Code (see above).

The first post-Soviet criminal trial of a Jehovah's Witness for allegedly distributing extremist literature began in October 2010 against a congregation leader, Aleksandr Kalistratov, in southern Siberia's Altai republic. While convicted in November 2011, Kalistratov successfully appealed and was acquitted in December 2011, two years after the case against him was launched. Even without a final conviction, the long-running nature of "extremism"-related cases such as Kalistratov's can itself prove a form of punishment.

Kalistratov's final acquittal was not the end of the campaign, however. The 2002 Law's empowering of low-level courts allows multiple prosecutions until a criminal conviction is reached. Begun after Kalistratov's case, two criminal extremism trials against three Jehovah's Witnesses continue in the disparate regions of Transbaikal and Astrakhan. In Astrakhan region, large portions of a key analysis in the continuing trial against Yelena Grigoryeva were found to have been copied from anti-"sect" websites, yet the judge has refused to reject this analysis as inadmissible evidence. In a third, seven-month trial in the republic of Mari El, Jehovah's Witness Maksim Kalinin was acquitted on 20 July 2012.

While some local administrations are more active than others, state-sponsored moves against Jehovah's Witnesses have now taken place in 80 per cent of Russia's 83 regions. In 2011 alone, the Jehovah's Witnesses reported 266 detentions, police raids and new administrative cases. Since late 2011, access to Jehovah's Witness websites has been blocked by courts in Buryatia, Chuvashia and Mari El republics, Altai and Transbaikal krais, Belgorod, Ivanovo, Kemerovo, Krasnodar and Lipetsk regions.

"Counter-extremism" drive unchecked

The state campaign against Jehovah's Witnesses shows no sign of abating: in May 2012 raids took place on at least 16 of their homes and places of worship in Orenburg region. Numerous further criminal investigations against individual Jehovah's Witnesses have yet to reach court. May 2012 charges against 17 named members of the outlawed Taganrog community are particularly significant, as participation in a banned extremist organisation is easier to prosecute than distribution of extremist literature.

In June 2011 Russia's Supreme Court issued an instruction seeking to soften implementation of the 2002 Extremism Law. Positively, it recommended that criticism of religious associations, convictions and customs "in and of itself should not be considered as action directed at inciting hatred or enmity". In its June 2012 critique of the 2002 Law, the Venice Commission further pointed out that, since the European Court of Human Rights protects "the freedom of the members of any religious community or church to 'try to convince' other people through 'teachings' (..) only manifestations of this freedom can be limited, but not the teachings themselves."

Such warnings are having next to no impact, however. Russia's leaders are well aware of the troubling trend in counter-extremism strategy. As recently as April 2012, then-President Dmitri Medvedev was briefed by human rights defender Georgi Dzhibladze specifically on the Jehovah's Witnesses' and Nursi readers' problems at a meeting of the Russian President's Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights. Yet the Kremlin has failed to act.

There is no reason to suppose that pursuit of "extremism" will stop with Muslim readers of Nursi's works and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Other groups now widely regarded in Russia as "non-traditional" or "sects" have already been targeted occasionally, if so far not convicted. From June 2008 onwards law enforcement agents detained, investigated or warned Baptists, Hare Krishna devotees, Lutherans and Pentecostals in connection with extremism.

In 2011 prosecutors in the Siberian city of Tomsk unsuccessfully tried to have the Russian translation of the "Bhagavad-Gita As it Is" – a key text for Hare Krishna devotees – ruled extremist. The case was dismissed in March 2012 following fierce criticism in India. This highlighted the Russian government's incoherent approach to counter-extremism, as to religious affairs more broadly (see Forum 18's July 2012 general religious freedom survey of Russia. Russia's ambassador to India even dismissed his fellow state officials in Tomsk who had initiated the case as "madmen".

Securitisation of religion

At the forefront of "counter-extremism" moves against religious believers is the FSB security service. Its officers are actively involved in most prosecutions, even purchasing a copy of the "Bhagavad-Gita As it Is" at a local Indian shop in the Tomsk case. Often, the approach of law enforcement agents is heavy-handed, with rough treatment by riot police. Some of the May 2012 raids on Jehovah's Witnesses in Orenburg region involved masked spetsnaz officers (normally tasked with roles such as counter-terrorism), including 12 who conducted a 15-hour raid on an elderly couple in very poor health.

Following raids on Jehovah's Witnesses in Taganrog, a local FSB officer told Forum 18 in March 2012 that the FSB counters "terrorism and extremism". (He refused to say which category he thought Jehovah's Witnesses fell into; Russia's 2006 Terrorism Law in any case equates terrorism with extremism.) The 2002 Law's definition of extremism is so broad that it thus allows legitimate religious activity to enter the brief of the security agencies. What lies behind this is an attitude common within the state, Orthodox Church and society that views even non-violent manifestations of "non-traditional" religious belief as a threat to the Russian nation, and therefore national security. It is increasingly reminiscent of the criminalisation of religious activities without state permission in the late Soviet period, and has negative implications for the state's treatment of other activities officials dislike, such as political opposition.

The hooliganism charges against punk group Pussy Riot for an impromptu February 2012 performance inside Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral are not a specifically religious freedom issue. But the state labelled the performance as motivated by "religious hatred and enmity" in a May 2012 police indictment against a Pussy Riot member. The indictment is notable for its equation of opposition to Orthodox Christianity with criminal activity. It accuses the group of "opposing the Orthodox world", "attempting to devalue church (..) dogma treasured and revered for centuries" and even "disparaging the spiritual foundations of the state".

European Court of Human Rights

While very slow, one possibility for redress against misapplication of the 2002 Extremism Law is the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In June 2010 Jehovah's Witnesses lodged a complaint with the European Court over Russia's upholding of the Rostov regional ban on 34 Jehovah's Witness titles and their Taganrog community (Application No. 32401/10). By March 2012, Jehovah's Witnesses had submitted a further 13 applications to the European Court centring on numerous "counter-extremism" actions by the Russian state, including raids, prosecutions and bans on literature. The Court has yet to declare these cases admissible, and if it does it will be some years before they are heard.

In spring 2011 the European Court began to consider the admissibility of a joint complaint lodged in December 2007 against the banning of various Islamic works (Application No. 1413/08). It centres on the 2004 Moscow court ruling outlawing 14 parts of Nursi's "Risale-i Nur" and a similar August 2007 ruling by Buguruslan City Court (Orenburg region) against 17 Islamic texts, including Al-Hashimi's "The Personality of a Muslim". The Court has yet to reach a decision.

North Caucasus

As with the wider religious freedom situation (see previous survey), implementation of the 2002 Extremism Law differs markedly in the North Caucasus. Numerous courts there have added materials to the Federal List of Extremist Materials, particularly Islamist insurgent websites. Yet other than Nursi readers in Dagestan, practically no "extremism"-related prosecutions of individuals have occurred.

In the North Caucasus the state's "counter-extremism" strategy is far cruder. In the republics of Chechnya and Dagestan in particular, those dubbed "Wahhabis" [Muslims adhering to a purist form of Islam critical of Sufism] - and sometimes men merely with a devout Muslim appearance - may be detained as extremists by the law enforcement agencies. Local residents report that they are frequently tortured, and in some cases disappear, allegations very occasionally confirmed by state officials.

The state's crude response to violent Islamist attacks serves only to fuel local support for the Islamists, resulting in a climate of fear in which religious freedom is severely limited.

Conclusion

So far, only a small proportion of investigations into alleged religious "extremism" have resulted in harsh criminal prosecutions. This suggests that on some level law enforcement agents are aware their targets in fact pose little danger to state security. Yet the proliferation of such cases - particularly since 2007 - points to the growth in Russia of the idea that criticism of one religion by adherents of another is a punishable offence. This idea is not challenged by state officials, who are usually anxious to contain opposition of all kinds in order to secure their own positions. In particular, it is unlikely to be countered by ex-FSB security service chief Putin. It thus represents a serious threat to prospects for freedom of religion or belief in Russia.