lbb

I'm aware of the history of colonialism, but it seems like you're teetering towards being an apologist for irredentism and/or falling into the trap of trying to isolate the blame. Go back far enough, and except for some folks living in the Rift Valley, it's guaranteed that none of us are living where our ancestors started out, and we can't exactly go back. No more can the Rohingya - look at the "welcome" they've been getting in Bangladesh, even if we accept the probably-fiction that that's where they all came from. So what's the point? It doesn't matter if colonialism created the conditions; the facts on the ground right now are that Buddhist monks, speaking from a position of authority, are inciting violence against Muslims. To rescue the train from this derail and get it back on the tracks: this is a simple counterexample of various assertions about Buddhism made by OP. There have been Buddhist wars of conquest, Buddhist forced conversions, and violence done in the name of Buddhism. I'm totally uninterested in a debate about whether Buddhism serves as readily as Christianity as a tool for identity politics, because any difference is a difference in degree only. It's also debatable whether a religion, once made such a tool, really is a religion at all any more, but that's again a completely different topic. OP clearly has a romanticized view of "Asian religions", ascribing to them characteristics that could not possibly be universal in such a diverse set of belief systems.