Admittedly, Ven. Bodhi, in his latest essay on war, used Ukraine as an example.
However, with respect, the OP was not offered to engender discussion regarding political viewpoints about this war.
Rather, it was for sharing how people would deal with this or similar situations with respect to their Dhamma practices.
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Indeed. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s political narrative underlying an “urgent life vs death” departure from Buddhist principles seemed questionable, when he said:
But what position should we take when the aggressor shows no interest in honest dialogue, no wish to understand and respect the opponent, no genuine openness to mediation by the international community?
My impression is the international community ruled out any negotiations, imposed self-harming sanctions & used taxpayer revenues to ship weapons, many of which were swiftly destroyed, including merely upon arrival.
Another questionable idea is the following quote, because military aid, given to a side in an inevitable losing position, may increase the onslaught rather than “help them stem the onslaught”:
For us as Buddhists, this decision poses a moral quandary. While we don’t personally have to consider joining in combat on behalf of the Ukrainians, we do face the issue of moral evaluation, particularly from the standpoint of the dharma. And further, for us as Americans, we must decide whether we can morally endorse the U.S. policy of providing aid to Ukraine—including military aid—to help them stem the onslaught.
What is most terrible is two ‘nations’ of peoples who were once united at the hip, who include many of each other’s peoples, who often speak each other’s languages, will now have animosities for many generations into the future (if their physical social environment lasts that long).
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Do you think the article was free from political views?
The only defense of killing can come from a consequentialist ethical system that takes the position that minimizing aggregate preventable human deaths in the world is what should we should be aiming for. This is not the Dhamma.
If the Dhamma is consequentialist, it’s a combination of consequentialist and virtue ethics in that the actually important consequences with respect to your behavior are the kind of mental states that your behavior is born out of and reciprocally reinforce. It is not possible to kill anyone for any reason without reinforcing the unskillful mental states of aversion, ill-will, or outright hatred as well as all the attendant perceptual distortions, worldly resolutions, and wrong views that go along with those mental states.
I don’t care how many people you put on the trolley problem train tracks, the Buddha would never pull the lever. The world is swept away. It does not endure. Those people are eventually going to die anyway. What lasts is the pattern of your mind. A mind that is incapable of killing is absolutely essential to happiness and every Buddhist should protect that at any cost, “like a mother protects with her life her only child”. You can compromise your ethics, but don’t try to justify it with the Dhamma. Killing after justifying it to yourself with Dhamma would, frankly, be even worse than just shamelessly killing out of heedlessness because at least you’re not also cultivating wrong view.
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My impression is the international community ruled out any negotiations, imposed self-harming sanctions & used taxpayer revenues to ship weapons, many of which were swiftly destroyed, including merely upon arrival.
My impression is that why would the international community negotiate lightly with Russia who has been using cluster bombs , attacked civilians , plans to draft 1 million people , threatened to use the nuclear bomb and has been committing war crimes.
Hopefully Russia gets its act together and pull back from this monstrosity. This is a very complex issue and I am still contemplating on it as it goes on.
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Before Buddhists start holding NATO’s warring objectives in higher esteem than Buddhist values, they should be made aware that their minds are considered as potential weapons of “cognitive warfare”.
NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded cognitive warfare. Described as the “weaponization of brain sciences,” the new method involves “hacking the individual” by exploiting “the vulnerabilities of the human brain” in order to implement more sophisticated “social engineering.”
Until recently, NATO had divided war into five different operational domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But with its development of cognitive warfare strategies, the military alliance is discussing a new, sixth level: the “human domain.”
A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained, “While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed.
Compromising Buddhist values on a topic such as war is a very serious matter. Buddhists should consider pausing and reflecting deeply before engaging in such behavior.
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Using the mind in a war can be a very good thing. Ukraine has successfully presented the civilian perspective across the country which has cowed the Russians into limited attacks on those centres outside the main war zone.
Whether it was free of them or not wasn’t of importance to me in this setting. The question of skillfully responding in terms of Dhamma practice was – and to explore the contrary positions of the two Venerables.
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The grayzone is not the best source of information to say the least. It cannot even be cited as a source in wikipedia because of issues with factual reliability.To digress yes I do agree that we all should reflect deeply about such matter and one can start with the sources of news and information we use so that we can have a common reality to start a discussion with.
This is what happens to truth tellers in times of “cognitive warfare”. While they were being censored on Wikipedia for allegedly being unreliable journalists, one of their reporters was testifying in front of the UN Security Council. Anyway, they link to the original document, so anyone can check if their report on this document is truly factual or not.
But we are digressing
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My goal is to survive and enjoy life, and I’m not attached to anything, especially not patriotism. I would simply relocate my family in the event we are threatened by war, which my family already did 40 years ago.
The way I look at it, just because I am dependent on a thing and derive benefit from it doesn’t mean I’m obligated to partake in an activity that produces that thing. For example people who say “if you eat meat you should kill the animal yourself otherwise you’re a hypocrite”, which to them I would say “following that logic, if you live in a low crime society, you should volunteer in the police force otherwise you’re a hypocrite”.
In other words, enjoying the fruits of society such as peace doesn’t obligate me to risk my safety to protect that peace, when I can freely move to another society where that peace is not threatened.
The history of humans is that of wanderers, as hunter gatherers and native tribes would follow animal migrations and moved their homes with the animal migrations which was their food source.
So no, I am not attached or loyal to a piece of land or a group of people other than my family. My only responsibility and obligation is for my actions that they are not unwholesome and that I am able to survive.
Also Buddhist monks should be less attached than me, and not bound by politics, so hearing monks arguing to defend a country is concerning.
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Just felt the need to chime in to say that if the reference to kamma that’s neither bright nor dark is a nod to “grey moral areas” in life, then I humbly suggest that that reading is somewhat mistaken.
In the sutta, that type of kamma is said by the Buddha to refer to kamma that brings about the end of kamma—so a reference to the path, implicitly at first, but then explicitly detailed as being Right View, Right Speech, etc.
With mettā.
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Completely agree. “Neither bright nor dark” does not refer to a “grey zone “. The Buddha here is referring to kamma that ends kamma as you wrote; kamma that is done while engaged in the noble eight fold path.
I think AN4.237 makes that clear.
What probably is mostly in a “grey zone” are the karmic intentions/actions done by most people, most of the time. How many intentions and actions are purely dark or purely bright?
Is driving a car purely bright or dark? Pollutants are spewed into the air; yet one is perhaps driving food to a shelter or a food pantry for people without homes.
Taking antibiotics and medications to treat parasites kill millions of beings. And yet…
If we’re distracted and not directly engaged with Dhamma practice, then much kamma appears to be mixed, dark and bright – hopefully weighted more towards the brighter side. 
Yes, this ^
My understanding is that the Buddha taught the end of suffering for each person and their individual kamma,not a system of ethics for government or other worldly matters.
The tricky thing is that as religious leaders, Buddhists are asked to give their opinion on such matters. But were the Buddha’s teachings meant to dictate actions of the masses? It doesn’t seem like they were, but to picked up and known individually by the wise. And even in predominantly Buddhist countries like Thailand, the basic ethical tenants go ignored (look at the sex trade, gun ownership, etc, there)
Being far physically from the Ukraine situation, I find a lot of samvega (possibility of major world consequences and I want to be ready for death!), inspiration for Karuna and Metta, and ultimately it has encouraged practice toward upekha.
As a practitioner, If I was living in a warzone or another situation that made killing more likely I would do what I could to leave. For the same reason, I do not own a gun. The kamma of killing (even just the mental regret if not reborn in a hell realm) is just too big to be trifled with, death and destruction will happen in samsara regardless of my actions.
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The problem with his absolutism is that it forces him into statements of unbearable naivety:
If you’re determined not to kill under any circumstances, that determination forces you to think in more creative ways to keep an adversary from taking advantage of you. You learn methods of self-defense that fall short of killing. You put more store in diplomacy and don’t look down on intelligent compromise.
Fun fact! I made the exact same argument when I was like 20.
Ukrainians, if we follow Thanissaro’s logic, should have tried harder to “compromise”. They should have learned better “methods”. Like the so-called “realists” or the die-hard “tankies”, his ideological commitment forces him to blame the invaded nation for not trying harder to appease a lying, murderous psychopath. All these forms of absolutism are ruins in the smoking wreckage of Ukrainain villages.
It’s just right there! I really don’t understand why this is so hard. Thanissaro is so committed to his moral blacks and whites that he inevitably overstates what the suttas actually say, and misses the really straightforward teaching that says this is an incomplete account of morality.
I should probably write a proper essay on it.
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Thank you for your post, Bhante. 
If you choose to do this, I believe it will be very beneficial.
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I don’t follow your reasoning here, bhante.
I don’t know whether this is actually Thanissaro’s view, but suppose he were to say, “I hold that dark kammas ought never under any circumstances to be done, and likewise, that mixed dark and light kammas ought never under any circumstances to be done (on account of the darkness in them).”
In that case, it seems to me that he wouldn’t be missing anything at all. That is, his commitment to absolutist praxis would remain intact in spite of his acknowledgment that some kammas are mixed.
He might even claim the Buddha’s support for his view, citing AN2.18 and sundry Vinaya passages about “seeing danger in even the slightest fault” or “not transgressing a training rule even to save one’s life”, etc. And if he were to espouse such an absolutist position, is there anything that could be cited in rebuttal of it?
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Being absolutist offers a simplicity when it comes to decision making. If someone is willing to break rules in the name of pragmatism, which in reality, is just selfish rationalizations, then can you ever really trust them to not break any other rule based on what their ego deems as pragmatic? Maybe stealing is now permissible if the circumstances allow it, and if stealing is now permissible, then so is killing, then you have two psychopaths slugging it out, and from their own point of view they are being pragmatic.
Being pragmatic and idealistic, is by definition, being hypocritical, it is expecting others to play by the rules, when you don’t. It’s having your cake and eating it too.
Ideals and rules exist to remove the self/ego out of the equation, pragmatism brings the ego back into the equation.
I don’t see an Arahant having a reason to kill in the first place, as there is nothing to kill for, not land nor self.
The sutta DN 26 on the wheel turning monarch seems to imply it’s ok to give things up to prevent unwholesomeness
And so, mendicants, from not paying money to the penniless, poverty, theft, swords, killing, lying, and backbiting became widespread. When backbiting was widespread, sexual misconduct became widespread. And for the sentient beings among whom sexual misconduct was widespread, their lifespan and beauty declined. Those people who lived for 10,000 years had children who lived for 5,000 years.
Would this imply that someone should give up land to prevent unwholesomeness?
It seems like material things come second to mental wellbeing. So if a psychopath wants your stuff, it seems like an ascetic would have no problem parting with it to maintain mental wellbeing.
In the end, psychopaths will meet other psychopaths, and the asuras that they are, will be occupied in violence, and thus they are destined to live in a constant state of war, hell, always scheming and looking over one’s shoulder, without peace. Just like Putin is right now locked up in his castle, and anxious.
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I don’t believe that appeasement is the only alternative to violence, is it?
… demonstrate the three characteristics.
The liberating thing about belief in reincarnation is precisely that it frees you from having to fear death, no?
Anyway, I hope your eventual essay touches on these questions 
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Missing from this discussion seems to be a recognition of the ultra-long-term vipaka of breaking the first precept even against an evil, invading enemy. Refusing to fight when such an adversary is taking over your country when viewed from a short time frame seems akin to capitulation and allowing whatever atrocities the adversary commits. But, the Buddha doesn’t teach us to focus on such short-term consequences, he teaches us to consider the eons one may likely spend tortured in the hells for killing a sentient being, such a consequence is far, far worse than allowing e.g. Putin to create a hell-on-Earth by oppressing the Ukrainian people. And, by the time one managed to break free from the hells, it seems likely that both the nations of Ukraine and Russia would have slipped so far into the depths of history that one would fail to find even a record of their existence.
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