Tag Archives: Asia

Buddhist Fundamentalism

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Mano Singham wrote recently about a rise in militant Buddhist fundamentalism in parts of Asia:

Whenever I write about Buddhism in Sri Lanka and how militant Buddhists, including monks, have been leading the charge against minorities and even resorting to violence against them, western readers are often surprised. The image they have of Buddhism is that of a peaceful and contemplative religion. And they are right when it comes to the underlying philosophy of the religion.

But the real test of a religion is how they treat minority groups when their religion is the majority and the record for Buddhism is not something to be proud of. This report looks at the way that an intolerant and militant Buddhist nationalism is talking hold in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Myanmar.

Any religion can be turned into a source of militarism and nationalism. Americans tend to see Buddhism and other dharmic religions as purely peaceful, but there’s no guarantee of that.

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Where the People Are

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Via Imgur:

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“There are more people living inside this circle than outside of it.”

Pretty crazy. Time to do some Wikipedia’ing, based on my eyeballing of the countries included in the circle.

Bangladesh 161,083,804
Bhutan 716,896
Brunei 408,786
Burma 54,584,650
Cambodia 14,952,665
China (I’m not sure if this number includes Hong Kong and Macau) 1,343,239,923
East Timor 1,143,667
India 1,205,073,612
Indonesia 248,645,008
Japan 127,368,088
Laos 6,586,266
Malaysia 29,179,952
Maldives 394,451
Mongolia 3,179,997
Nepal 29,890,686
North Korea 24,589,122
Pakistan 190,291,129
Philippines 103,775,002
Singapore 5,353,494
South Korea 48,860,500
Sri Lanka 21,481,334
Taiwan 23,071,779
Thailand 67,091,089
Vietnam 91,519,289
TOTAL 3,802,481,189

The U.S. Census Bureau’s estimate of the world population is constantly increasing, so I’ll just round it up to 7.087 billion. The above total represents approximately 53.6% of the world’s population.

The above list includes six of the ten most populous countries in the world. For gits and shiggles, here are the other four:

United States 315,895,000
Brazil 198,176,000
Nigeria 170,123,740
Russia 143,347,100
TOTAL 827,541,840

The above map includes part of Russia, so that circle actually has an even higher percentage of the world’s population in it.

To offer another perspective, the above-circled area probably represents more total land area than the United States, but it also has over twelve times as many people. If I had more time, I’d compare the GDPs of the 24 countries in the circle to that of the U.S., but I’m sure someone else has done that.

For a little extra fun, someone labeled the islands of Indonesia with the European countries that have similar population numbers.

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The island of Java (53,589 sq. mi.) has about the same number of people as all of Russia (6,592,800 sq. mi.), and is about 0.8% Russia’s size.

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