Contesting Buddhist Narratives and Buddhists in Myanmar, and the condemnation of Buddhism by the international media can be seen as increases in suffering caused by precisely this attempt to violently or repressively defend and cling to something that is, by nature, impermanent and empty. While this discourse of alternate understandings of protecting the sasana is only just emerging publicly among Burmese monks, in interviews, some have presented ideas that differ markedly from the MaBaTha fear-based model. One Mandalay monk insisted that one could only protect oneself (and by extension, the sasana) by protecting others. Without creating an environment where others are safe, one’s own community will never be safe.45 Several others connected the defense or propagation of the sasana with an explicit motivation of spreading peace. If certain actions do not spread peace, they cannot be considered to help Buddhism.46 Of course, given the refusals described above, to acknowledge responsibility for the connections between anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence, many MaBaTha monks would say that they are conducting their work with the intention to create a peaceful society. This is why a deeper structural awareness that recognizes the unintended effects of actions is also critical to developing a response. Understanding the Effects of One’s Actions. In Theravada Buddhism generally, but in Myanmar in particular, the analysis of karmic effects is often limited to consideration of the intention driving one’s action; thus, if an action or its result is not intentional, there is no moral or karmic culpability. Indeed, when one of the authors pressed U Wirathu and others to consider the linkages between certain speech (what in the West we might call “hate speech”) and violence, and the karmic consequences on the speaker for violence that is motivated by this speech, there was rarely recognition of a karmic connection. One scholar, who identified this as a lack of “structural awareness,” has been working with Burmese monks to develop a greater understanding of how to situate this notion within Burmese Buddhist discourse (Arai 2013). There is certainly precedent in Pali scriptures that complicates this denial of responsibility based solely based on intention. Even though the Buddha emphasized intention in determining karmic consequences, he also said that one must critically examine the end results to see if there are bad side effects of one’s behavior. The example that the Buddha offers is charitable giving, where one must always critically 41