HOW POWER, CASTE AND POLITICS PERVERTED SRI LANKAN BUDDHISM
Tisaranee Gunasekara
IN OCTOBER 2025, a group of Theravada Buddhist monks in Texas began a walk for peace across the United States. Led by the Vietnamese-American monk Pannakara, and accompanied by a former street dog from India named Aloka, they gained global attention on social media over their journey of nearly four months. In Sri Lanka, the monks and Aloka became popular sensations. It was perhaps the first time many a Sri Lankan Buddhist had seen a group of monks following the Buddha’s code to the letter: living a simple life, with no possessions beyond what they could carry, and walking long distances, often barefoot and through inclement weather, just as he is believed to have done.
Sri Lanka’s ruling National People’s Power (NPP) government – despite its leftist credentials, as adept at using Buddhism for its purposes as any of its predecessors – welcomed the monks and Aloka to stage another peace walk in the country. Over a week this April, they went from the sacred Sri Maha Bodhi tree in the ancient capital of Anuradhapura to the modern capital of Colombo, mobbed by the public along the way.
Almost simultaneously, a drama of quite another sort was unfolding beyond the public eye. A 14-year-old runaway from Anuradhapura was apprehended by the police with her “lover” in a lodging house in Nittambuwa, some 150 kilometres away. What would have been a tragic but standard case of statutory rape assumed a very different complexion when the girl, from a poor family and a broken home, told the police that she was raped at the age of 11 by the monk Pallegama Hemarathana – the chief custodian of the Atamasthana, eight of the holiest Buddhist sites in Sri Lanka, including the Sri Maha Bodhi complex. She alleged that she had been “purchased” from her mother for LKR 100,000 – around USD 300 today – and had since visited Hemarathana every three days.
The police sat on the case, possibly on government orders, even as Hemarathana presided over the commencement of the peace walk. The opposition and the mainstream media also remained silent. Eventually, on 22 April, the independent journalist Bimal Ruhunage lodged a complaint with the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA). It began to act on the complaint, and more details gradually emerged.
The public reaction went from incredulity to shock and anger. The authorities, even if reluctant, were spurred to act. Hemarathana was produced before a court in Anuradhapura, accused of statutory rape. The monk denied any wrongdoing and received bail with police blessings. After weeks of silence, at the end of May, the chief prelates of the Siam Nikaya – the country’s most important Buddhist order – removed Hemarathana from all his posts pending the case’s conclusion.
Sri Lanka is no stranger to clerical child sexual abuse, especially in Buddhist institutions. The NCPA has registered at least 200 complaints of child sexual abuse by Buddhist monks in the last three years. Chandana Namal Rathnayake, a former child monk turned psychotherapist, has spoken out about his experience as a survivor of clerical abuse, and done research on the pervasive silence around this issue across the Buddhist clergy and Sri Lankan society.
That silence was fractured by Hemarathana’s case. The accused in earlier cases had been ordinary monks, and it was easy to dismiss them as a few bad elements in an otherwise wholesome community. Hemarathana, as the chief custodian of the Atamasthana, was the third most important monk in the country, behind only the two chief prelates of the Siam Nikaya. He was also well known as a poet and lyricist. That a monk of such eminence and renown is embroiled in so sordid a scandal has compelled many Sri Lankan Buddhists to confront the actual state of the country’s sangha, and the glaring yet unacknowledged gap between the Buddha’s teachings and Buddhism as it exists in Sri Lanka today.
SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA was born into a society of rigid hierarchies, where caste determined the conditions of existence. But the sangha, the monastic order he created as the Buddha, was open to men and women of all castes. According to the Paharada Sutta, a discourse in the Pali Canon, just as rivers lose their former designations when they flow into the ocean, when people from any of the four varnas enter the monkhood they lose their former names and clans and become bhikkus.
Sri Lankan Buddhists believe that the Buddha’s teaching exists in its purest form only in their land. Yet caste is the basic organising principle of the Sri Lankan sangha. While there is evidence that caste discrimination had begun creeping into the sangha at least since the 13th century CE, rigid division into caste-based nikayas was instituted only in the 18th century. Kirthi Sri Rajasinha, monarch of the Kandyan kingdom – the island’s last holdout against European colonisation – issued a royal decree limiting the monkhood to men from the dominant Govigama caste. Non-Govigama monks banded together in the maritime provinces, then under Dutch control, and formed their own nikaya. Though the king banned the new nikaya, his writ did not run in these coastal areas.
There are three main Sri Lankan nikayas today – Siam, limited to the Govigama caste; Amarapura, formed to provide ordination to non-Govigama castes; and Ramanna, open to all castes. In theory, these are “separate but equal”. In reality, the Siam Nikaya enjoys unrivalled pre-eminence due to its custodianship of the Tooth Relic – believed to be the left canine of the Buddha – as well as some of Sri Lankan Buddhism’s holiest sites. Since its arrival on the island in the 4th century CE, the Tooth Relic has functioned as an essential accessory of Sri Lankan kingship. Even today, being denied access to the inner sanctum of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy or the uppermost terrace of the Sri Maha Bodhi complex is a risk no politician wants to take. This gives the two chief prelates of the Siam Nikaya considerable power over political leaders and society.
The Siam Nikaya is divided into two main chapters – Malwatte and Asgiriya. The current chief prelate of the latter is Warakagoda Gnanarathana. In 2019, with the country’s Sinhala Buddhist majority seized by anti-Muslim hysteria after Islamist bombings on Easter Sunday left more than 260 dead, Gnanarathana acted not to calm the fury but to whip it up further. Muslims “have given poison to our people, tried to destroy our people,” he preached. “Therefore, our Buddhist people must protect themselves … Some women devotees had called for Muslims to be stoned to death. I don’t say that. But that is what should be done. If such crimes were done by one of our people to that race, they will slice us. Laws will not work. Therefore, we must unite as Buddhists, as Sinhalese.”
Like in his rejection of caste divisions, the Buddha was unequivocal and unconditional in his rejection of violence. This encompassed violence in deed, word or thought, and extended even to violence in self-defence. Given this, Gnanarathana’s justification of violence against an entire community should have created a furore – especially since it came not from a rabble-rousing monk like the extremist Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, of whom Sri Lanka has plenty, but a venerated prelate at the zenith of the sangha. Yet it barely made the news.
For centuries, Sri Lanka’s monks have portrayed themselves, and been portrayed, as guardians not just of Buddhism but also of the Sinhala race and its predominant position in the island. Tolerating, justifying, advocating and, at times, perpetrating violence to protect and perpetuate this status quo is today considered not a transgression but an essential attribute of their vocation.
The historian Anne Blackburn contends that “a reformulation of the social organization and the intellectual practices of Lankan Buddhist monasticism took place during the eighteenth century.” The Indologist Richard Gombrich identifies the sangha’s confrontation with Christianity, brought to the island by European colonisers, as the moment of “the one great and sudden break in Sinhalese Buddhist history”. Both developments were significant, but they were milestones in a journey that was already in motion. If there was a “great break” in Sri Lankan Buddhism, it happened with the Mahavamsa – the island’s most renowned and influential historical record, written in the 5th or 6th century CE. Through stories as beguiling as any in Grimms’ Fairy Tales or the Arabian Nights, this epic laid the ideological basis for the transformation of the Buddha’s teachings in the Pali Canon into the Sinhala Buddhism of today, with what can be surmised to be three core ideological tenets: Chosen Land, which posits that Sri Lanka is the only home of pristine Buddhism; Chosen People, which makes the Sinhalese the protectors of this pure Buddhism; and Sinless War, which justifies mass murder in the service of that untainted Buddhism and its homeland.
Though Sri Lanka calls itself a Buddhist country, it is specifically Sinhala Buddhism that has been the medium of its politico-social existence for at least the past century. Understanding its history, nature and repercussions, even as it continues to flow and morph, is the challenge.
ANCIENT LANKAN CHRONICLES insist that the Buddha visited the island three times to prepare the land for his teaching. These same chronicles insist, strangely, that he did not bring Buddhism to Lanka himself. That honour is reserved for the monk Mahinda – Mihindu, in the Sinhala rendering – a son of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who is said to have arrived on the island around the 3rd century BCE to convert Devanampiyatissa, the king of Anuradhapura, as well as his court and subjects.
The Pali Canon is the foundational scripture of Theravada Buddhism, and is divided into three baskets: the Sutta Pitaka (Discourses), Vinaya Pitaka (Rules) and Abhidhamma Pitaka (Higher Teaching). According to this, the Buddha’s lay adherents during his lifetime included the rulers of the Magadha and Kosala kingdoms in the north of the Subcontinent. But these kingdoms did not become Buddhist realms, nor did their kings engage in propagating Buddhism within or without their territories. In the Buddha’s teaching, propagating the dhamma is the job of monks, not kings. “Asoka was the first king to adopt Buddhism as the state religion,” argues the 20th-century scholar-monk Walpola Rahula, who played a key role in the consolidation of Sinhala Buddhism and the birth of its obnoxious offspring, the political monk. “Buddhism was the first missionary religion and Asoka was the first missionary king.”
Several modern-day scholars, among them E W Adikaram, have argued that Buddhism in Lanka predated Mahinda’s arrival, and that earlier Buddhist comers were deliberately excluded from the chronicles to accommodate the story of Mahinda’s miraculous conversion of the island. Adikaram agrees that Ashoka was the first to make Buddhism a state religion, and states that while Buddhism in Lanka would have predated Mahinda, “it was only after Devanampiyatissa’s conversion that it became the state religion of the country.”
According to Rahula, the Samantapasadika, the monk Buddhaghosa’s 5th-century CE commentary on the Vinaya Pitaka, traces another seminal break between the original Buddhist tradition and Mahinda. This is the establishment of a national rather than universal sangha, located in a particular politico-geographical space. When, in the Samantapasadika, Devanampiyatissa asks Mahinda whether Buddhism is established in Lanka, the latter replies that this will happen only when a boy born in Lanka of Lankan parents is ordained in Lanka, studies Vinaya – the monastic code – in Lanka and preaches in Lanka. Such a notion, Rahula argues, “is quite foreign to the teachings of the Buddha … True, it is that the Buddha sent forth his disciples to go about in the world preaching the dhamma for the ‘good of the many’, But nowhere had he given injunctions or instructions regarding a ritual or particular method of ‘establishing’ the Sasana in a country.”
Sasana, encompassing the Buddha’s teaching as per the Pali Canon, its practice and its practitioners, is what is generally referred to as Buddhism in English. A national sasana – and thus a national sangha, with a worldview shaped by national conditions – was the inevitable corollary of Buddhism becoming the religion of a state. The nexus between the Lankan state and Lankan Buddhism, with its many benefits to both the king and the sangha, would become set in stone over time. “Sasana constituted a fully-fledged state department,” Rahula stated. The sangha “used their influence over the masses to support the king who, in return, looked after their interests.” Hence, “we find kings, who had committed heinous crimes, honouring the sangha and sending them round the country in order to influence the people in their favour.” Rahula continues that it was “easy for the king to rule if the people were religious,” since “religions are always expected to uphold the established order and discourage innovations and revolutions.” The historian Amaradasa Liyanagamage and the political scientist Urmila Phadnis, among other scholars, also attest to the symbiotic relationship between Sinhala kings and the sangha.
The Buddha treated religion as a personal matter. He demarcated religion from secular power and accepted that each should have its own priorities and values. The turning of Buddhism into the Lankan state religion unbalanced this equation. That transformation, and with it the benefits of state patronage, caused the rapid growth of Buddhism and the flowering of a rich Buddhist culture. It also resulted in several deleterious outcomes that were amplified over the centuries and continue to plague Buddhism on the island to this day. These include a decline in the quality of the monkhood, monks’ direct intervention in politics, schisms – including the 18th-century division based on caste – and the gradual perversion of the Buddhist doctrine itself.
THE SCHOLAR-MONK Uduhawara Ananda has argued that the moral decline of the Lankan sangha can be traced back to around 5th or 6th century CE, when monks began to depart from the simple, or alpecca, life. According to Adikaram, this laxity began much earlier, around the 1st century BCE.
Based on the Sammohavinodin?, a 5th century-CE commentary on the Abhidhamma Pitaka, Adikaram points to an incident where Saddh?tissa, the king of Anuradhapura in the 2nd century BCE, ceased giving alms to the bhikkus in Anuradhapura and instead gave alms to bhikkus at Cetiyapabbata – today the sacred peak of Mihintale. When the people asked why, “he gave meals on the following day to the bhikkus at Anur?dhapura and justified his attitude by pointing out to the people the unsatisfactory manner in which the bhikkus behaved in accepting the food.” Adikaram also describes an incident mentioned in Manorathapurani, Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Sutta Pitaka, where a young bhikku fell in love with a lady of the royal household, and she with him. Both were executed.
These transgressions happened in what is regarded as the golden age of Lankan Buddhism. Adikaram and Uduhawara Ananda agree that the moral decline was caused by an abundance of material goods resulting from über-generous royal patronage. Adikaram identifies two main reasons for the growth of indiscipline: “the decadence of the power of the Sinhalese kings who were always the greatest benefactors of the sasana”, and “the entering into the order of monks of people who, however intelligent and learned they might have been, were seekers after comfort and worldly pleasure.”
The Buddha taught that monks should own only the bare essentials and not form attachments even to these. According to the historian Leslie Gunawardana, the mendicant monastic life began to change in Lanka with the “practice of endowing monasteries with property in land and irrigation works,” which he traces back to the 2nd century BCE. As a consequence, “the monastery came to represent not merely a group of resident monks but also a corporate property-owning institution,” and monks came to feel “that the land attached to their monasteries belonged to them alone.” Liyanagamage notes that “the concept of private property in the order had taken root” by the 14th century CE, making it “quite probable that the property interests of these viharas and the desire of their incumbents to retain these temporalities within their own family circles was a further factor which determined the nature of admission to the order.”
Monks’ habit of meddling in politics, including matters of royal succession, has also been traced back to the early period of Lankan history. Rahula lists several examples in his History of Buddhism in Ceylon, including an incident where monks plotted to kill the king in anger over his decision in a monastic dispute. Such meddling provided rich dividends if the sangha backed the winning side. But when the sangha-backed candidate lost, retribution followed. Just such an incident led to the first recorded schism in Lankan Buddhism, between the fraternities of Mahavihara and Abhayagiri.
The Anuradhapura Mahavihara, or Great Temple, built in the time of Devanampiyatissa, functioned as the centre of Buddhist power, enjoying almost limitless patronage from successive monarchs. In the 1st century BCE, Gamini Abhaya – popularly known as Valagamba – was chased out by invaders from southern India only to defeat them in turn. He built the Abhayagiri temple complex and presented it to the monk Mahatissa in gratitude for the latter’s support in his efforts to regain the kingdom. Liyanagamage writes that Gamini Abhaya “never received even the blessings of the sangha in his long drawn out struggle against the Damila invaders, let alone active support and material contribution.”
The donation of Abhayagiri to Mahatissa fractured the Mahavihara’s supremacy, especially since Mahatissa had been expelled by the Mahavihara fraternity for “frequenting families of laymen,” according to the Mahavamsa. Abhayagiri soon equalled, and at times even outstripped, Mahavihara in pre-eminence. Gunawardana, citing the Chinese pilgrim Faxian’s account of his visit to Lanka in the 5th century CE, writes that by then Abhayagiri had more monks than Mahavihara. When the Tooth Relic was brought to Lanka in the 4th century, its custodianship went not to Mahavihara but to Abhayagiri.
Eventually, the rivalry grew into a schism, with the conservative Mahavihara remaining a centre of Theravada and Abhayagiri adopting a more eclectic policy, opening its doors to other strands of Buddhism such as Mahayana and Vajrayana. According to Gunawardana, there were also differences regarding textual interpretation. For instance, unlike the monks of Abhayagiri, “the commentators of the Mahavihara insisted on the superhuman characteristics of the Buddha.”
Mahavihara and Abhayagiri both used royal patronage as a weapon in their battle for pre-eminence, and this brought about Lanka’s first recorded instances of religious persecution. According to the Mahavamsa, the king Voharikatissa, a partisan of Mahavihara, burnt books and disgraced “sinful priests” of the Abhayagiri fraternity. Another king, Gothabhaya, branded the bodies of “60 monks of Abhayagiri Vihara who had accepted vaitulyavada” – believed to be an offshoot of the Mahayana tradition. During the reign of Mahasen, Abhayagiri struck back – the king is said to have persecuted Mahavihara monks, leading them to abandon their temple. All of this was just in the 3rd century CE.
The schism would end the way it began, with royal intervention. In 1165, Parakramabahu I forced Abhayagiri and Jenthavanaya, another rival to Mahavihara, to submit to the authority of Mahavihara monks.
Caste – or rather, the consciousness of it – began to creep into the sangha around the 5th century CE, Uduhawara Ananda argues. In the Manorathapurani, Buddhaghosa holds that Vaisyas – the third of the four varnas – are more suitable for monkhood. In the Samantapasadika, he records some bhikkunis – female monks – mentioning that their monk-advisers belong to the dominant castes. This was still a far cry from caste-based nikayas, but the very acknowledgement of caste within the sangha marked a departure from the Buddha’s teaching and practice.
Relic worship – and the concomitant downgrading of the centrality of the dhamma – also seems to have begun in this early period. In the Vakkali Sutta, a discourse between the Buddha and an ailing monk, when the latter expresses remorse for not having visited him for a long time, the Buddha responds, “Why do you want to see this foul body? One who sees the Dhamma sees me; one who sees me sees the Dhamma.” But a very different concept became gradually embedded in Lankan Buddhism, that of seeing the Buddha through his relics.
According to the Mahavamsa, after dwelling in Lanka for some years, Mahinda told Devanampiyatissa that he had not seen the Buddha for a long time. The bewildered king asked how the Buddha could be seen since he had “passed into Nibbana”. Mahinda replied, “If we behold the relics we behold the Conqueror.” Today, this is an uncontested and unquestionable tenet of Lankan Buddhist doctrine and practice. In 2025, when the NPP government arranged a special exposition of the Tooth Relic – a rare event – hundreds of thousands arrived to see it, driven by the popular belief that seeing the relic is like seeing the living Buddha.
M M J Marasinghe, a noted scholar of Lankan Buddhism, argues that Buddhaghosa made numerous additions in his commentaries to what was contained in the original doctrine. This included the theories of the accumulation of merit and the transfer of merit to other parties. The latter proposition had been put forward by some participants of the Third Buddhist Council, convened in Pataliputra around 250 BCE under the reign of Ashoka, “but it was rejected by the Council as unacceptable according to the Buddha’s teachings.” According to Marasinghe, the veneration of the Bodhi tree too began with another Buddhaghosa addition, a story that when a monk asked the Buddha “to leave some object to which his followers in Savatthi could pay their respects whenever he was away,” he approved “the planting of a seedling from the Sri Maha Bodhi of Buddhagaya at the entrance to the monastery at Savatthi.”
By the time the Mahavamsa came to be written around the 5th century CE, Lankan Buddhism and the Lankan sangha had moved a considerable distance from what the Buddha taught. Rahula argues that “it is impossible for any religion, when it becomes an organized body, to continue in its original form. It has to change with the times if it is to maintain its power and prestige.” But beside such inevitable evolution, “We have to admit that from the day that Buddhism was adopted as a State religion, it began to lose its original spirit of renunciation and simplicity.”
Even so, the early changes did not amount to an epistemological break between what the Buddha taught and what Lankan Buddhists believed. That moment would come with the Mahavamsa’s justification of violence, including mass murder, in the name of Buddhism. From then on, Lankan Buddhism’s adherence to non-violence, compassion and loving kindness would be conditional. Hate could be permissible depending on its object. This would cast a shadow from which Lankan Buddhism – and Sri Lanka – is yet to escape.
THE MAHAVAMSA is not the oldest extant chronicle of Lankan history. The Dipavamsa is. Written by an unknown author (or authors), it preceded the Mahavamsa by about two centuries. While its minimal use of myths, sparse style and paucity of exaggeration makes it more credible as a serious work of history, it has been cast into near-total obscurity by the flamboyant and fantastic Mahavamsa.
The Mahavamsa takes the early history of the island narrated in the Dipavamsa and other (now lost) chronicles, plus perhaps oral histories, and melds them into a unique origin story. According to this, Lanka was chosen by the Buddha himself as the sole future refuge of his teaching in its purest form. At the time, the isle was inhabited by non-humans – yakkas and nagas. The Buddha made it his mission to free the land of these inimical presences and make it habitable for humans.
The Buddha of the Mahavamsa is the antithesis of the Buddha of the Pali Canon, who said, “All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.” The Mahavamsa’s Buddha is a holy warrior who uses natural cunning and supernatural force to defeat enemies of the faith. He comes to Lanka and, instead of preaching to the yakkas, terrifies them through miracles and chases them away.
The Mahavamsa then recounts how the now-empty land came to be peopled. In India, a princess elopes with a lion and gives birth to twins, a son and a daughter. The son, Sinhabahu, kills the father, marries the sister and acquires his maternal grandfather’s kingdom. His eldest son, Vijaya, turns out to be a person “of evil conduct”. Compelled by his long-suffering subjects, Sinhabahu exiles Vijaya and 700 of his followers. Vijaya and his followers embark on a sea journey that coincides with the death of the Buddha, who, on his deathbed, tells Sakka, the head of the gods, “Vijaya, son of king Sinhabahu, is come to Lanka … In Lanka, O lord of gods, will my religion be established; therefore, carefully protect him with his followers and Lanka.”
With this tale, the Mahavamsa created the twin myths of the chosen land and the chosen race. Manufacturing the third key myth – that of sinless war – was a far taller task, especially since the Buddha taught that warriors who die in battle are destined for a not-so-salubrious afterlife. Addressing a soldier in one Pali discourse, the Yodhajiva Sutta, he says, “When a warrior strives and exerts himself in battle, his mind is already seized and debased and misdirected by the thought: ‘May these beings be struck down or slaughtered or annihilated or destroyed. May they not exist.’ If others then strike him down and slay him … he is reborn in the hell called the realm of those slain in battle.” To turn this on its head, the Mahavamsa transformed the story of Dutugemunu, who is said to have united Lanka in the 2nd century BCE by overthrowing the Tamil king Elara, into an epic of pious heroism.
The Dipavamsa has only this to say about Dutugemunu: “A prince, Abhaya by name, the son of K?kavanna, whom the ten warriors surrounded, whose elephant was Kandula, put thirty-two kings to death and alone continued the royal succession.” It expends more words extolling the virtues of Elara: “A prince, Elara by name, having killed Asela, reigned righteously forty-four years. Avoiding the four evil paths of lust, hatred, fear, and ignorance, this incomparable monarch reigned righteously.”
In the Mahavamsa, Dutugemunu is conceived immaculately, with a divine mandate to restore Buddhist rule over the island. His mother, via a craving, identifies the enemy her soon-to-be-born son is destined to defeat: “She craved to drink, while trampling on his very head, the water in which was washed the sword that beheaded the chief warrior among the Elara soldiers … The queen informed the King and the Lord of the earth asked the soothsayers. Hearing it they said, ‘The queen’s son will vanquish the Damilas’.”
The Mahavamsa does not deny Elara’s righteousness, and goes even further than the Dipavamsa in narrating how he, though a non-Buddhist, treated Buddhism with the greatest respect. But Elara’s admirable qualities are deemed irrelevant because he is an “unbeliever” and, hence, he has to be deposed and killed.
The Dutugemunu of the Mahavamsa – encouraged by his mother – yearns to do just that. When denied permission by his father to go to war with the Tamils, he retires to his chamber in anger. Asked by his mother why he is sleeping in a foetal posture, he identifies the problem as one of territory or living space, not too dissimilar to the Nazi conception of Lebensraum: “Over there beyond the Ganga are the Damilas; here on this side is the Gotha-ocean, how can I lie with out-stretched limbs?”
The Mahavamsa recounts in exhaustive detail how Dutugemunu, with the blessings and support of the sangha, defeats 32 provincial rulers and finally, in an epic battle, slays Elara. Then comes the coup de grâce. Dutugemunu, anguished by the deaths he caused, is consoled by a group of arhants – monks who have attained enlightenment. “By this act of yours there is no hindrance in the way to heaven,” they tell him, since “only one and a half men were killed here. One was established in the refuge and the other only in the five precepts. The heretical and evil others who died were like animals.”
The scholar Jotiya Dhirasekara points to a totally different version contained in Buddhaghosa’s Sumangala-vilasini, another commentary on the Sutta Pitaka. Dutugemunu, “having conquered thirty-two Tamil rulers, was anointed as king in Anuradhapura and on account of the joy he gained, he could not sleep for a month.” When consulted, the sangha advises Uposatha – a day spent in Buddhist observance – with monks chanting scripture. “The king, as he listened to the recital, fell asleep.”
In the Mahavamsa, Dutugemunu’s story continues post-death with him reborn in the highest heaven and destined to be reborn as the first disciple of the next Buddha. With this final flourish, the chronicle clinches the argument for the meritorious nature of war waged for Buddhism.
The Mahavamsa transformed the Buddhism of Siddhartha Gautama into Sinhala Buddhism, a doctrine allied to blood-and-faith nationalism. “This was the beginning of nationalism among the Sinhalese,” Rahula writes. It came with a “kind of religio-nationalism, which almost amounted to fanaticism,” where a “non-Buddhist was not regarded as a human being.”
The Mahavamsa was written around seven centuries after Dutugemunu, during the reign of Dhatusena in 5th century CE. Dhatusena came to power after a long period of political instability caused by a Pandyan invasion from southern India. The ensuing period of direct Pandyan rule in Lanka lasted for almost 30 years; Dhatusena killed the last local Pandyan king to become the ruler of Lanka.
Mahanama, a Mahavihara monk believed to have authored the Mahavamsa, was Dhatusena’s maternal uncle. According to the Culavamsa, a historical record that extends beyond the end of the Mahavamsa, Mahanama had earlier ordained his nephew. After witnessing several miraculous events centred on the young Dhatusena, he concluded that the boy was more suited to kingship than the monkhood. Perhaps Dhatusena, once a monk, was appalled at having to violate the Buddha’s strictures against harming any living being. Perhaps his warriors were concerned about their afterlife. Did Mahanama invent the myth of sinless war to comfort his nephew? Was he trying to reassure the king’s army? At this distance, only surmise is possible. Either way, for Dhatusena and for his successors, the new invention would have been of inestimable value, promising a way to remain pious Buddhists and ensure a salubrious afterlife while attending to the messy, and often violent, duties of rule.
THE NEXUS BETWEEN state and religion meant that Lankan Buddhism flourished when the state was stable and powerful. In times of turmoil – be it internal strife or external invasions – Buddhism retreated into survival mode. Though the absolute majority of the island’s people were Buddhists and Buddhism had no rival faith to contend with, it had no existence independent of the state and, arguably, no desire to develop one.
The golden age of Lankan Buddhism was coterminous with the golden age of Lankan civilisation: the Anuradhapura period, which ended when Anuradhapura was conquered by the Chola kings of southern India in 1017 CE, and the Polonnaruwa period that followed. The time after the Polonnaruwa period, which ended in 1232 CE, was one of overall decline for both. What brief periods of mutual prosperity followed from there were only interregnums in a long downward drift.
The decline was compounded by the arrival of European colonialists. The Portuguese reached Lanka in 1505 CE, and brought with them a monotheistic faith intent on conversion. For centuries, Buddhism and Hinduism had managed to coexist on the island, with Buddhism internalising many Hindu practices. Islam, which traders had brought to Lankan shores centuries earlier, also seems to have found a way to survive and thrive without entering into conflict with Buddhism. No such modus vivendi was possible with Portuguese Catholicism.
Starting in the 15th century, the Catholic popes issued a series of bulls establishing what came to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. This doctrine provided religio-legal justification for the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies to seize and occupy non-Christian lands and convert their inhabitants. While some conversions in Lanka were obviously forced, others would have been voluntary: through conviction, to gain patronage or to escape caste discrimination.
With the expansion of Portuguese rule and the concomitant spread of Catholicism, Lankan Buddhism faced a truly existential crisis for the first time. This would have increased Buddhism’s dependence on the state, but the state itself was in crisis – especially after the Kotte kingdom, the last native power to exercise unified rule of the island, was partitioned between three princes who murdered their father, the king Vijayabahu VII, in 1521 CE.
As Buddhism’s material fortunes declined, its movement away from the Buddha’s original teachings intensified. Its surrender to caste is the prime example of this.
Caste had begun to raise its head within the sangha during the Anuradhapura period. Liyanagamage contends that though the sangha was then open to all castes, it seems to have been dominated by Vaisyas. Buddhaghosa, in Sumangalavilasini, states that Vaisyas are more suited to monkhood because of their modesty and numerical preponderance. Caste consciousness became caste discrimination in the 13th century CE with the Dambadeni Kathikawatha, an official code of rules for the sangha which stipulated that novices, when being ordained, should be asked about their jati and gotra, among other things. Liyanagamage points out that an earlier code, promulgated about a century previously, was identical in many respects but did not contain any mention of caste.
Lineage thus became officially accepted in the sangha. Possibly in consequence, the Hattavanagallaviharavamsa, a 13th-century Pali work on the Hattavanagalla temple, mentions that it was written “on the direction of Anomadassi of Brahmana lineage.” In the 15th century, the monk Vimalakirti, the author of the Saddharmalankaraya – a popular compendium of tales about the Buddha’s previous births and Buddhist morality stories – outlined “the pupilary succession of his teachers, taking pains to record the family or caste to which each of them belonged,” Liyanagamage notes.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, during the Kandyan period, when the Kingdom of Kandy held out in the centre of the island against successive colonial conquests of its coast, the Upasampada – the Buddhist higher ordination rite – died out in Lanka. The sangha had degenerated to comprise only ganinnanses – men who underwent only lower ordination, many of them living in private homes and raising families. In the mid-18th century, the king Kirthi Sri Rajasinha and the monk Weliwita Saranankara led the latest of several efforts to bring Upasampada back to Lanka from Thailand – then Siam. Thus the Siam Nikaya was set up in 1753, with two chapters – Malwatte and Asgiriya.
For about a decade, ordination continued to be open to men of all castes. Then, in 1764, the king issued a royal decree limiting ordination to the dominant Govigama caste. According to the Mandarampura Puwatha, a history of the Kandyan kingdom, the king took this decision when he saw that certain monks from the oppressed castes – hina dana – paid obeisance to dominant-caste lay persons of wealth and power. Non-Govigama monks were de-robed and 32 senior monks who opposed the new rule were exiled to Jaffna, in the far north of the island.
Before the reintroduction of higher ordination, Saranankara, intent on the moral regeneration of the sangha, had formed a group called Silvat Samagama – the Pious Society. Membership was open to monks of all castes, the only criterion being good conduct. However unhappy he might have been about the king’s Govigama-only decree, he bowed down to it. Commenting on this compliance, Rahula writes, “The chief monks of the Siam sect have demeaned themselves by bowing down to the judgement of a worldly king who had scant understanding of the Buddha’s teachings.” But the sangha by this time had become too dependent on the state to be able to defy a royal decree, which probably had the backing of the aristocracy as well. As the historian K M de Silva has pointed out, with this decree, so alien to the Buddha’s core teaching, “the overriding authority of the ruler in religious affairs was demonstrated most starkly.”
By then, the Portuguese had been replaced as rulers of the Maritime Provinces by the Dutch. The British would soon follow, defeating the Dutch in 1796. Both sets of the later colonialists, as Protestants, were more tolerant of other religions. By the late 18th century, a wealthy Sinhala Buddhist middle class had come into being in the coastal areas, with many members belonging to non-Govigama castes. Some of these men organised an expedition that brought down the Upasampada from Burma at the start of the 1800s. This led to the birth of the Amarapura Nikaya, which limited its membership to non-Govigama castes. The Ramanna Nikaya, open to all castes, including Govigama monks dissatisfied with the conduct of the Siam Nikaya, was formed in 1864. The British held complete control of the island by then, having deposed the last Kandyan king in 1815.
The four varnas – an Indian creation – were present in Lanka from the Anuradhapura period. Yet the sort of extreme caste oppression normal in Hindu-dominated India seems not to have existed here. For this relative liberality, the credit goes largely to Buddhism. Given this history, it is especially ironic that Sri Lanka came to gain the dubious distinction of having the only caste-based sangha in the world. And while sangha casteism today is not as virulent as it once was – the monk Galkande Dhammananda has observed that there was a time when monks belonging to different nikayas would not even sit together – it is hard to see the Siam Nikaya opening its doors to non-Govigama Buddhists any time soon.
The growth of misogyny within the sangha, to the point of rejecting and sabotaging female ordination, was another key development. The Buddha, by allowing full female ordination, provided a way out of oppression to women of all classes and castes. A sense of liberation is palpable in the Therigatha – the Verses of the Elder Nuns. As Uduhawara Ananda points out, these verses “explain the lives they led previously, how they were oppressed within the home and in society, their insecurity.” The bhikkunis included “women who had been married, who had been severely oppressed within the institution of marriage, mothers who had lost children, wives who had lost husbands to wars, elderly and sick women, courtesans and prostitutes. … For these women, ordination offered a path to liberation.”
According to the chronicles, a bhikkuni order was established in Lanka when Ashoka’s daughter, the bhikkuni Sanghamitta, arrived on the island in the 3rd century BCE. The order grew rapidly. Going by the Dipavamsa, bhikkunis during this early period occupied a position no less honourable than their male counterparts. Like them, they also taught the dhamma publicly.
The prominence of the bhikkuni order in the Dipavamsa contrasts sharply with its position in the Mahavamsa, which gives no such prominence to the role played by bhikkunis in propagating the dhamma. That this absence was no accident can be surmised from another curious omission. According to the Dipavamsa, Dutugemunu had a sister called Mahila, who became a bhikkuni famed for her knowledge of Buddhist doctrine. Dutugemunu also invited bhikkunis from India and begged them to teach the Pali texts in Anuradhapura. The Mahavamsa, which spends 11 chapters on Dutugemunu, makes no mention of such a sister or any invitation to Indian bhikkunis. This, arguably, indicates the first stirrings of misogyny in the sangha.
The bhikkuni order died out in the 11th century, following the Chola conquest of the Anuradhapura kingdom. It was not restored. Over the next several centuries, misogynistic ideas, beliefs and practices crept into Lankan Buddhism, based on Hindu tenets of female impurity. As it was with caste, these perversions of the Buddha’s original teaching became set in stone during the Kandyan period. According to the chronicles, the Tooth Relic and the sacred Bo sapling were brought to Lanka by women. Yet, even now, women officials are banned from voting in the election to choose the lay guardian of the Tooth Relic, and women – unless they hold the presidency or are powerful foreign dignitaries – are not allowed onto the uppermost terrace of the Sri Maha Bodhi complex.
Despite this, the anthropologist H L Seneviratne contends that “Buddhism is possibly the best explanation” for why gender inequalities have typically been less oppressive in Sri Lanka than in India – or in much of the rest of Southasia. And the local bhikkuni tradition, though devalued and disregarded, still endures.
In 1996, a bhikkuni order was reintroduced by one of the five sub-chapters of the Siam Nikaya. None of the three main nikayas has recognised it so far. In 2025, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka issued a landmark ruling ordering the Department for Registration of Persons to issue a bhikkuni identity card to the nun Welimada Dhammadinna. The department’s commissioner general – a state official – had refused to do so on the grounds that the bhikkuni order is not recognised by the chief prelates of the three main nikayas.
Article 5 of the Kandyan Convention, which completed the British conquest of Kandy in 1815, accorded special protection to Buddhism: “The religion of Boodhoo … is declared inviolable, and its rites, ministries, and places of worship are to be maintained and protected.” Obviously the main concern of the sangha, or that portion of it residing in Kandy, was to ensure that it would continue to be shielded and patronised by the state, even if that state now happened to be a foreign – and non-Buddhist – one. The first rebellion against British rule broke out in 1817 mainly because the new rulers violated or ignored the undertakings given in the convention to protect the traditional privileges of the Kandyan aristocracy. In response, the British unilaterally amended the convention, removing the mention of the inviolability of Buddhism. The umbilical cord connecting Lankan Buddhism and the state was no more. For the first time since its inception, Lankan Buddhism was on its own.
BUDDHISM, BEREFT of state protection and patronage, did not wither away. Over the next several decades, it experienced a remarkable resurgence, of a kind perhaps not seen since the Polonnaruwa period. The Polonnaruwa resurgence had come alongside the reinstitution of Lankan political power after the expulsion of the Cholas; but the 19th-century resurgence happened under colonial rule and without any state patronage.
This resurgence was led by bhikkus in the former Maritime Provinces. Buddhism had made a comeback in these areas once the more liberal Dutch replaced the fanatical Portuguese. The generally hands-off attitude towards local religion later followed by the British further helped its growth. By the time the British severed the tie between Buddhism and the state, monks in the coastal areas were well-used to managing without state patronage, relying instead on the generous help of the burgeoning Sinhalese middle and upper classes. For instance, the first temple in Colombo, Dipaduttamaramaya, was built in 1785, during Dutch rule, under the patronage of Thabrew Wijesiriwardhana, a government official and philanthropist. Though the Dutch had barred the establishment of new temples in the area, Wijesiriwardhana had persuaded the colonial governor to allow him to build the temple on his own private property.
The expansion of educational opportunities under British rule helped birth a new type of monk. Most hailed from the emerging elite of Sinhalese who, now freed from feudal fetters, were thriving in the capitalist economy instituted under colonial rule. This new class had studied in Christian schools, and its members were thus well versed both in Christianity and in the English language. While Westernised to varying degrees, they also retained close connections with monks and temples. The introduction of the printing press helped them gain access to ancient Buddhist texts.
Those children and young adults who chose to be ordained during this time did so out of a deep conviction of the rightness of Buddhism and a commitment to make their neglected religion shine again. For instance, Hikkaduwe Sumangala, a leader of the Buddhist revival, was baptised as per custom and studied Pali and Sinhala with a village monk. Seneviratne details how another pioneer of this revival, Kalukondayave Pannasekhara, had his primary education in a Baptist school and was able to preach Buddhist sermons to adults while still a non-ordained child aged just eight or nine, reading from Buddhist texts including such advanced ones as the Milindapanha.
Knowledgeable, articulate and confident in themselves and the rightness of their belief, these new monks were able to deal with Christian missionaries and government officials alike on equal terms. Seneviratne mentions an illustrative encounter at a railway station between the monk Hikkaduwe Sumangala and the British governor general, Arthur Hamilton: “Sumangala’s train had stopped at the station to make way for the governor’s and the governor, seeing the former, alighted and walked over, which must be considered an act of highest courtesy by a British Governor.”
A pivotal moment of the resurgence was the Panadura Debate of 1873, the culminating event in a series of debates that started in the mid-1860s. The participants were Buddhist monks and Protestant clergy. The debates – carried out first in print and then face-to-face – seem to have been both erudite and accessible, with exhibitions of both doctrinal knowledge and rhetorical skill. At the final encounter in the town of Panadura, “the discussion continued two days, before an almost breathless audience, numbering at times from five to seven thousand.” Both sides cooperated to ensure that the encounters were peaceful and orderly, intervening to calm tempers when necessary. The British editor of the Times of Ceylon, John Capper, published an account of the final debate that was highly complementary to the Buddhist side. This introduced Buddhism to many Westerners and was instrumental in the Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott arriving in British Ceylon. This, arguably, was the moment modern Buddhism came of age as a confident, cosmopolitan creed able to do what the Buddha did – engage followers of other faiths in respectful debate.
The founding of the two great Lankan monastic educational establishments of the modern period, the Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara pirivenas, marked the acme of this resurgence. Vidyodaya was founded in 1873 by Hikkaduwe Sumangala on land near Colombo donated by Andiris Perera Dharmagunawardhana, a Sinhala businessman and philanthropist; Vidyalankara was founded in 1875, also near the capital, by the monk Ratmalane Dharmaloka. Both were higher educational institutes, and both initially had identical curricula. Seneviratne describes the typical sociological dynamics of the pirivenas amid early modernisation: “The typical student in each was an able and hardworking young monk who came from the village and adapted with great success to the busy political and commercial capital Colombo.”
Olcott, who arrived in Colombo in 1880 from India, contributed to this renaissance by instituting a system of Buddhist primary and secondary public education. This functioned parallel to the Christian and Catholic educational systems and attracted the children of the new middle class. Olcott wrote a Buddhist catechism for schoolchildren that was hugely influential in forming popular notions of Buddhism. He was also instrumental in designing the Buddhist flag and in getting the governor general to declare a public holiday on Vesak – the day traditionally commemorating the birth, enlightenment and passing away of the Buddha.
It was into this ferment that the revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala made his entry. Dharmapala did not create or lead the Buddhist resurgence; it was already well underway and had achieved its high points either before he was born or while he was still David Hewavitarne. The first Buddhist printing press was set up in Galle in 1862, two years before his birth. The long Panadura debate had ended, and Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara had been founded, before he turned 12. What Dharmapala did was not pioneer the Buddhist resurgence, as a popular myth insists today, but rather divert its course.
While the Buddhist resurgence was always Sinhala-centric, since all Lankan Buddhists were Sinhalese, it was not overtly and virulently anti-Tamil or anti-Muslim until Dharmapala. It may have remained limited to the Sinhala ken even without Dharmapala, but minus his overarching influence it would not have become so deeply mired in the Mahavamsa version of Buddhism. It is perhaps indicative that the first Buddhist printing press and the first Buddhist journal on the island were called Lankalokaya, or “Lanka’s Light”, while Dharmapala’s first publication was called Sinhala-Bauddaya, or “The Sinhala-Buddhist”. And Dharmapala, the name he chose for himself, literally means “protector of the dhamma”. As the scholar Harshana Rambukwella has pointed out, “Dharmapala’s identification of Buddhism as an inextricable part of Sinhala identity … represents a narrowing of the definition of Sinhala identity, which emerged with the Buddhist revivalist movement.”
In a foreword to a 1991 book on the Panadura Debate, Ranasinghe Premadasa, then the president of Sri Lanka, wrote, “The most valuable lesson we could learn from the debate is the peaceful way of settling disputes.” This civility was lost with Dharmapala. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some other leaders of the Buddhist revival had refrained from uncivil language and explicitly warned their followers against hate. For instance, the chief incumbent of the Sri Pada temple concluded a sermon by telling his audience to exercise patience and “follow Buddha’s command of not even so much as thinking evil of those who cruelly used and persecuted them.” By contrast, Dharmapala appropriated the ongoing Buddhist resurgence and framed it within a worldview of Sinhala dominance. He regarded all who were not Sinhala Buddhists as enemies and, instead of engaging them in debate, used extreme verbal violence to condemn them.
Together with the playwright John de Silva and the novelist Piyadasa Sirisena, he recreated Lankan Buddhism as a blood-and-faith nationalism with modern trappings. The political scientist Neil DeVotta calls Dharmapala and his followers “consummate Sinhalese Buddhist supremacists” who “resorted to undisguised racism to traduce the island’s minorities.” Dharmapala, borrowing from the Theosophists, introduced the Aryan myth into Sinhala consciousness. The Sinhalese, he said, were “the sweet, tender gentle Aryan children of an ancient, historic race.” He reimagined ancient Lanka as a land of morality, a Buddhist utopia lost forever because of foreign invasions and encroachments. A police report from 1924 states that Dharmapala opened a public meeting in a temple in the town of Kalutara “with an attack on the Tamils.”
Rambukwella writes that “Dharmapala was heavily influenced by the Mahavamsa narrative” and points to Dharmapala’s article ‘Buddhism Past and Present’. “In the year 237 B.C. the Tamil invader Elala [or Elara], usurped the Sinhalese throne,” Dharmapala writes. “The Tamils fiercely antagonistic to Buddhism, committed acts of vandalism in the sacred city of Anuradhapura … The war that Gamini Abhaya waged with Elala was of a religious character.” After Gamini Abhaya pushed out the invaders, “free from foreign influences, untainted by alien customs, with the word of the Buddha as their guiding light, the Sinhalese people lived a joyously cheerful life in those bygone times.” Dharmapala exhorted young Buddhists to “enter into the realms of our king Dutugemunu in spirit and try to identify yourself with the thoughts of that great king who rescued Buddhism and our nationalism from oblivion.”
Dharmapala’s Mahavamsa-inspired Buddhism was, in essence, a retrogression into the past – most of it imaginary. In this, as in its ethno-nationalist chauvinism, it was – and remains – the Buddhist counterpart of India’s Hindutva movement. Just as Hindutva defines Indian national identity in terms of Hinduism, Dharmapala defined the Lankan equivalent in terms of Buddhism. The historian Robert E Frykenberg has pointed out that, just as Hindutva dreams of doing with India, Dharmapala wanted to reduce Lanka to “One Nation (in One State), One Culture, One Religion, and One Language” – a majoritarian utopia in which all minorities would be disempowered or banished. This vision has haunted Sri Lanka from the moment of its independence from British rule in 1948.
THE PROJECT OF recreating the sundered umbilical cord between Buddhism and the state began on the eve of the island’s independence. The chief prelates of the Malwatte and Asgiriya chapters demanded that the Independence Act include constitutional protection for Buddhism, else they would boycott the independence ceremony. This attempt at blackmail came to nothing since D S Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, ignored the threat. As the political scientist Urmila Phadnis states, Senanayake was a “devout Buddhist and one of the foremost patrons of the Ramanna Nikaya,” but he “all along believed that religion was a personal matter and the State should adopt a secular attitude towards it.” In October 1951, at the fourth annual congress of his United National Party (UNP), Senanayake reiterated his position: “To label Buddhism as a state religion or to label Lanka as a Buddhist State does not advance the interests of either the religion or the country.”
The Left parties, bested by the UNP in the country’s first post-independence election and now functioning as the main opposition, were even more committed to the concept of a secular state. This de facto consensus in favour of secularism left those monks who wanted a restoration of the nexus between state and religion with nowhere to turn. Briefly, that seemed to be the end of the matter. In the 1952 parliamentary election, none of the contenders paid much attention to religion. The 1953 Hartal, a popular uprising organised by the Left, shifted the political focus even further to socio-economic rather than religious questions.
But appearances proved deceptive. Unseen by most, a religious tsunami was in the making. Its origin was a debate that began in the mid-1940s on the role of the sangha after the end of colonialism. The combatants were the two premier Buddhist educational institutions, Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara, which, as Seneviratne points out, both saw themselves as Dharmapala’s legatees. Dharmapala had developed an economic and a political prescription for the restoration of the lost Sinhala Buddhist utopia. The economic part called for rural development and the political for the renewal of the Sinhala-Buddhist nation. “Vidyodaya embraced the sober and pragmatic economic one,” Seneviratne writes, “and Vidyalankara the ideological and uncompromisingly cultural one which by definition was nationalist.” Vidyodaya opposed the involvement of the sangha in politics. Vidyalankara monks claimed that bhikkus should be politically active and provide leadership to the soon-to-be-independent state.
In 1956 – celebrated as the year of the Buddha’s 2500th birth anniversary – the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress (ACBC) released ‘Betrayal of Buddhism’, the report of a commission it had appointed to look into Buddhist grievances. The ACBC had earlier pushed for a government-appointed commission for the purpose, but the idea found no takers across the political spectrum. A key proposal of the report was the replacement of English with Sinhala as the country’s sole official language.
The idea threatened to marginalise and discriminate against the country’s Tamil minority. Their proficiency in English – the legacy of an excellent missionary education system in the Tamil-dominated areas – gave them an advantage in government employment, which offered the best path to socio-economic advancement in a country that then had only a small private sector. The ACBC’s proposal, if implemented, promised to enable the Sinhalese to dominate the state sector. It would also force Tamils to use Sinhala, a language few of them had any knowledge of, in dealing with the state and its organs, from the police and the courts to schools and hospitals. Perhaps even more pertinently, such a policy threatened the gradual disappearance of the Tamil language in Sri Lanka, just as the imposition of English on Ireland by the British led to the near-disappearance of Irish Gaelic, one of the oldest written languages in Europe.
Up to that point, all the major political parties had supported language parity, with the recognition of both Sinhala and Tamil as national languages. This changed in 1956. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which had split off from the UNP in 1951 and failed to do as well as expected in the 1952 election, needed to outflank the UNP and outdo the Left parties strengthened by the successful Hartal. With the next election approaching, the SLFP’s leader, S W R D Bandaranaike, accepted the ACBC report and promised to make Sinhala the sole official language within 24 hours if he came to power. He also placed the sangha at the apex of his new organisational concept, the Pancha Maha Balavegaya – the Five Great Forces – which mobilised the monolingual Sinhala middle and lower-middle classes against the Westernised elite supposedly in control of the UNP. His supporters hailed him as a modern Dutugemunu.
Unlike in 1948, in 1956 the pressure to push the state in the direction of Sinhala Buddhism did not come from the chief prelates of the nikayas. Now the driving force was a younger cohort of mostly monolingual monks led by the chief incumbents of various urban and rural temples. They formed an all-monk organisation – the Eksath Bhikku Peramuna, or United Bhikku Front – to campaign for the Bandaranaike-led Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) coalition. These monks based their political activism on a concept introduced by Vidyalankara monks in their debate with Vidyodaya: the progressive monk, a bhikku who would use his monkhood, or mahanakama, to propel “pro-people” reforms.
This sobriquet might have seemed accurate in the 1940s, when Vidyodaya monks helped lead the struggle to secure the Free Education Act, resulting in a system of universal free education. But by 1956, a sea change had taken place. The progressive monks, who embraced some form of socialism, juxtaposed the rich-poor divide with the island’s ethno-religious divide, equating the pro-imperialist, capitalist enemy with the country’s minorities and non-Buddhist Sinhalese. They claimed that a vote for the UNP would be a vote for Catholicism, and a vote for Bandaranaike’s MEP a vote for Buddhism. They were also totally opposed to linguistic parity and insistent on “Sinhala only”.
The MEP won a majority in parliament, though it took only about 40 percent of the national vote. The new government swiftly enacted the Sinhala Only Act, ignoring Tamil protests. This spurred a rapid degeneration of Sinhala–Tamil relations, leading to Sri Lanka’s first anti-Tamil pogrom in 1958.
The following year, as he struggled to contain the maelstrom he had unleashed, Bandaranaike was assassinated by a radical monk convinced that he was being unduly conciliatory to the Tamils. This led to a brief backlash against monks in politics, but by then the damage was done. From the chrysalis of the progressive monk a very different animal had emerged: the patriotic monk, a bhikku whose guide was not the Pali Canon but the Mahavamsa, whose main task was not spiritual salvation but the salvation of the country, nation and religion from internal and external threats – minorities and their supposed foreign backers. Sinhala Buddhism, birthed by Mahanama and recreated for modern times by Dharmapala, was now in the saddle.
In 1972, a left-wing government led by Bandaranaike’s widow, Sirima Bandaranaike, officially re-established the state–religion nexus via Article 6 of a new republican constitution. It gave Buddhism “the foremost place” and made it the duty of the state to “protect and foster the Buddha Sasana”. This created an even more enabling environment for the politicisation of the sangha.
In 1957, monks played a key role in scuttling the Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam Pact, an attempt to resolve the language problem via decentralisation and regional recognition for the Tamil language. The role was reprised in 1965, this time to scupper the Dudley–Chelvanayakam Pact. In 1987, monks played an equally pivotal part in opposing the Indo-Lanka Accord, agreed to by Sri Lanka under Indian pressure, and its outcome in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka, which stipulates provincial devolution. These aimed to resolve the country’s ethnic problem politically and end the civil war that had broken out after another anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983. Since then, monks have made it their “duty” to obstruct any new proposal for sharing power with the minorities. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s attempt as president to end the conflict via a devolution package in the early 2000s had to be abandoned due to opposition from the chief prelates of the three nikayas. In 2023, during his time as president, Ranil Wickremesinghe tried to fully implement the 13th Amendment, but this was also abandoned due in part to protests by the sangha.
By the dawn of the new millennium, the more radical monks began to toy with the idea of direct political power. Gangodawila Soma, a wildly popular preacher and nationalist monk, formed an organisation to bring about “clean” politics and expressed interest in contesting the next presidential election. His unexpected death in December 2003 led to an outpouring of grief, which spurred the creation of a supposedly monk-led party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya, in the hope of riding a wave of sympathy to gain power. The party promised to turn Sri Lanka into a Dharma Rajya – a Righteous State – but it fared poorly at the polls in 2004.
That ended the sangha’s attempt at de jure rule, but its interventions in secular affairs continued apace. Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected as president in 2005, with heavy backing from the monks, on a platform of political and cultural nationalism. The civil war resumed in 2006, with Rajapaksa promising to end it through military victory rather than negotiation. That end came in 2009 with the annihilation of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) alongside tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. Soon afterwards, a government politician put up a banner in the heart of Colombo asking Rajapaksa to complete the task left half-done by Dutugemunu – that is, driving Tamils off the island altogether.
Burnishing his credentials as a second Dutugemunu, Rajapaksa attempted to change the ethno-religious composition of Sri Lanka’s Tamil-dominated North and East through state-driven Sinhala colonisation, the setting up cantonments for Sinhala military families and building Buddhist temples. In the devastated Vanni region, the army rebuilt the Tamil village of Kokachankulam as Nandimithragama – named after Nandimithra, Dutugemunu’s chief warrior, who the Mahavamsa says began his martial career by tearing asunder Tamil soldiers who desecrated sacred Buddhist monuments. A giant statue of Nandimithra completed the transformation.
Rajapaksa suffered a shock defeat in the 2015 presidential election at the hands of a broad oppositional coalition that included minority parties and several prominent monks. But the sangha never really abandoned the Rajapaksas, and in 2019, with monks campaigning for them within and outside temple premises, the family won back the presidency with Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
His disastrous presidency, which ended in 2022 with economic collapse and a mass uprising, fuelled a new popular demand for the sangha to stay out of politics. Sidelined by his successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, the monks made several attempts to reignite Sinhala Buddhist passions but failed. They also failed to tar the NPP as “anti-Buddhist” in 2024, when it won the presidency and a sweeping majority in parliament.
In a sharp departure from its reputed secularism, the NPP government has built close connections with the chief prelates, especially of the Siam Nikaya, and has been careful not to enact any of its election promises that the sangha opposes. Most political monks have opted to stay out of the limelight since the change of government, but the sangha’s indirect influence on politics remains – and this relative withdrawal from the fray is likely to be as ephemeral as the previous ones as long as Buddhism in Sri Lanka remains Sinhala Buddhism, shaped by the Mahavamsa, instead of the Buddha’s intended sasana as in the Pali Canon.
“SUPATIPANNO BHAGAVATO savaka sangho…” is a stanza that most Sri Lankan Buddhists recite almost every day. Part of the Dhaggaja Sutta in the Pali Canon, it has the Buddha expounding the qualities of the sangha, defined by good conduct, upright conduct, wise conduct and dutiful conduct. Most Sri Lankan Buddhists know that many monks do not possess even one of these qualities. For decades, they have ignored the growing gulf between the Buddha’s teachings and monks’ lived reality, comforting themselves with the thought that they were worshipping the sacred robe and not its wearer. With the Hemarathana scandal – the nature of the victim, the crime and the alleged perpetrator taken together – this cognitive dissonance has become unsustainable. The realisation has begun to dawn that the sasana can be endangered not only from without but also from within, not just by enemies of Buddhism but also by monks who violate the Vinaya with such regularity and insouciance.
The sangha’s predominant reaction to the scandal – public silence, from the chief prelates on down – is only exacerbating the crisis. A few monks have spoken out openly and reflectively on the issue, but others have tried to dismiss it as either a bagatelle or a conspiracy. “Monks in charge of these sacred sites like the Atamasthana, how much of a service have they rendered to the country?” the extremist Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara said before the media in June. “Errors happen. Who doesn’t make errors? … We will settle this. No one needs to get worked up.” Akmeemana Dayarathana, head of the ultra-nationalist party Sinhala Ravaya, has attempted deflection via a petition to the United Nations urging that Sri Lanka repeal a Muslim personal law on marriage, arguing that it creates differential treatment on the age of consent.
The monk Agalakada Sirisumana, a professor at the University of Colombo, also weighed in with a list of the historical enemies of the nation and the faith. “When we look at Lankan history, this country was built through a partnership between pious Buddhist people and monks,” he said. The Cholas, the Western powers and then the LTTE had tried to break up that relationship but failed. “Now the descendants of Vasawarthi Maraya” – the god of death – “are using social media to attack the robe and the bhikku sasana. If the sasana falls, it won’t be monks who are destroyed but the great culture of this country.” He warned, “This society will become like Afghanistan.”
“Abide by the Dhamma, live uprightly in the Dhamma, walk in the way of the Dhamma,” the Buddha told his disciples in his last days, as per the Pali Canon. He also detailed the causes that would lead to the preservation of his sasana. State patronage, political protection, violence and holy war do not feature among them. Most of what is the norm in Sinhala Buddhism, starting with its foundational myths, does not feature anywhere in the Buddha’s original teachings. Yet these perversions form the waters of the Sri Lankan sangha, and of Sri Lankan existence. Hemarathana, accused of child rape, and Gnanasara – who has declared, “Don’t ask me about righteous Buddhist conduct or doctrine, ask me about groups which are trying to destroy Buddhism” – are the inevitable fruits of these perverted waters. Until and unless the aberrations inherent in the millennia-long transformation of the Buddha’s dhamma into Sinhala Buddhism are seen for what they are – corruptions – the spiritual degeneration of the sasana in Sri Lanka will be unstoppable.
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