Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka  

Buddhism Betrayed?

( April 27, 2012, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Buddhism Betrayed? : Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (A Monograph of the World Institute for Development Economics Research) - Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, University of Chicago Press, 1992

Short excerpt from the chapter on the Period of Buddhist Revivalism - 1860-1915:

"There is no doubt that Sinhala Buddhist revivalism and nationalism, in the form we can recognise today, had its origin in the late 19th nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is in this earlier period that we see most clearly the contours and impulsions of a movement that acted as a major shaper of Sinhala consciousness and a sense of national identity and purpose....

from the backcover:

Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah is professor of anthropology at Harvard University and curator of South Asian Ethnology at the Peabody Museum. He is a past president of the Association for Asian Studies. His numerous books include Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Buddhism Betrayed?Given Buddhism's presumed non-violent philosophy, how can committed Buddhist monks and laypersons in Sri Lanka today actively take part in the fierce political violence of the Sinhalese against the Tamils?

Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah's Buddhism Betrayed? seeks to answer this question by looking closely at the past century of Sri Lankan history and tracing the development of Buddhism's participation in such ethnic conflict and collective violence. Tambiah analyses the ways in which this participation has, over time come to alter the very meaning of Buddhism itself as a lived reality.

Even before Sri Lankan independence, Buddhist activists and ideologues—monks and laypersons, educators and politicians - accused the British raj of "betraying" Buddhism and spoke of a need to restore Buddhism to its rightful place in the life and governance of the country. Tambiah sympathetically portrays and critically assesses the ways in which these views gave rise to discriminatory anti-Tamil policies. He details the increasingly volatile nature of the participation of monks in national politics from its first stirrings in the 1940s to its final phase, when some monks themselves become parties to violence. The successive transformations of "political Buddhism" and what some vocal Buddhist monk ideologues now conceive as an ideal Buddhist-administered society are outlined and evaluated.

Buddhism Betrayed? skilfully combines detailed scholarship with the author's own passionate plea for an end to hostilities. In the eloquent essay on the "burdens of history" in Sri Lanka that concludes the book, Tambiah examines the Sinhalese Buddhists' alleged long-term historical consciousness, with its anti-Tamil sentiments as portrayed in chronicles written by monks over the centuries, and advances countervailing evidence in Sinhalese history of tolerant assimilation and incorporation of peoples and traditions from South India.

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