"When pacifists, or people trying to limit war, decide to forget that some men thoroughly enjoy war, they are making a bad mistake."

Doris Lessing "Alfred and Emily" p. 252.

"Women and children experience war and its nightmare. Their wardreams share with dreams of other kinds that they are occurences full of blown sand seaward foam in which disappearance fields expression. If fire drives out fire so does pity pity beside."

Susan Howe, "Frame Structures" p. 7

*****

Early during the Buddha's ministry, among men who had given up property to be with him, to be heroes who could give up desire, a conflict arose. The Buddha had restricted possessions to a bare few--a patchwork robe (so that one monk could not have a finer castoff than another), medicine, a begging bowl--and his followers had begun to quarrel over who had the finer bowl. Projections and accusations flew. The Buddha instituted a rule, among those most ambitious and perhaps prescient men, that bowls were to be circulated, passed on after a fortnight.