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[Buddhists]shouldn't kill or be associated in any way with killing, no matter how justified and neccessary the killing may be. Given that one of the main pillars of the Icaran goverment is killing dissidents or rebels that's a problem.
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This is true, but Buddhists do manage to live in all kinds of war-torn and violent parts of the world, under governments with unspeakable stains upon their consiences.
The thing about Buddhism is that it's incredibly diverse. The form we see in the west is derived largely from very 'pure' (and do I realise how prickly that word is in this context) forms of Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism straight out of the monastaries, that focus very tightly upon meditation, non-deification of the Buddha and the quest for enlightenment.
(Although naturally the rigorous and demanding monkish disciplines have been softened up a fair bit to accomodate our western lifestyles)
However, Buddhism as it is practised by the vast majority of Asian buddhists is a far more day-to-day belief system. You pray to Buddha. you have a little statue of him on the dashboard of your tuk-tuk to ward off evil and bad drivers. You go to the temple once a week to pray, and on special days or if you want something in particular you go and offer flowers or money or whatever. It has merged and mixed and blurred with various other local religions, so that to me it looks more like Hinduism or Sikhism or some other ism I don't even know the name of.
My point is that it's very versatile- it's as versatile as the people who follow it- and like any religion (technically, I know Buddhism isn't a religion but yadda yadda yadda) it will mold and evolve and hybridise itself to fit into whatever niches it can find in its environment (ie society). Just look at the way Western Christianity has absorbed all the pagan faiths that stood in its way as it swept across Europe, and the various pre-christian cults the Romans had to incorporate into it. The western Christianity of today is actually a diverse mongrel mixture of a dozen or more different religions/ faiths/ cults/ beliefs. Compare it to African Christianity, which often incorporates all kinds of local witch-doctor voodoo stuff, or to Judaism which, even though it is effectively Christianity's 'mother' faith, is barely recognisable as such except in shared scripture.
What this means for Starhawk is that after a few dozen generations, Buddhism (or at least mainstream buddhism) in his world would probably look like some kind of bizarre Icarist/buddhist hybrid that our buddhists would have difficulty recognising, and the Icarans would be more than happy to allow.