The Robe and the Sword: Why Buddhism needs protection from polarised monks

A sharp, accessible account of how religion and power intertwine in Asia, examining Buddhist extremism without losing sight of faith's deeper values

The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism is Shaping Modern Asia

By Sonia Faleiro

Published by Fourth Estate

160 pages ₹599 

  London-based journalist Sonia Faleiro’s new book The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism is Shaping Modern Asia, takes readers to Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand — all countries where the dominant religion, Theravada Buddhism, is enmeshed with nationalism, citizenship, and access to political power. It is an easily digestible introduction to the complex subject, particularly for Indians whose imagination of Buddhism might be shaped largely by their acquaintance with personalities like the Dalai Lama, B R Ambedkar, and S N Goenka.

 

In this book, one meets Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, a Buddhist monk and co-founder of the Bodu Bala Sena, whose speeches are reported to have incited Buddhist mobs in Sri Lanka to beat Muslims, loot their shops, and set their homes and mosques on fire. He also ran a campaign to ban the certification of meat products as halal. Ms Faleiro notes, “The perception that certain minority communities enjoy outsized economic success has long fueled resentment among segments of the Sinhalese majority — resentment that nationalist rhetoric eagerly exploits.”

 

The author’s attention, however cursory, to the economic aspect of the conflict, offers a useful lens to examine how the culprit here is not the practice of faith but the raw assertion of power. In a society where monks enjoy political patronage, reverence is tied to worldly influence rather than spiritual attainment. Oddly, Ms Faleiro is surprised that Gnanasara is “allowed to remain in the clergy despite committing repeated transgressions that, according to the Vinaya — the monastic code of conduct established by the Buddha himself — should automatically result in disrobing”.

 

Rules have always been tweaked for those who are close to the political establishment. Unfortunately, Ms Faleiro brings up a theological argument but does not follow it through. The Vinaya is enforced by the Sangha and not the criminal justice system. If senior monks with expertise in the Vinaya choose to overlook an offence, no court or prosecutor can fill in for them.

 

Moreover, Sri Lankan Buddhism is not a monolith. Monks on the island belong to different ordination lineages, and there is no central disciplinary authority to enforce the Vinaya. Additionally, Gnanasara is protected by his clever framing of his hateful activities as an effort to protect the Buddha Sasana — the institutional and cultural edifice of Buddhism— from Muslims.

 

This becomes difficult for his critics to push against because canonical Theravada literature predicts that the Buddha Sasana will degrade and decline over thousands of years and eventually disappear from the world until a future Buddha takes birth and teaches again. While the Buddha Sasana itself is subject to the law of impermanence, monks have a religious duty to  preserve it.

 

Ms Faleiro also writes at length about Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, founder of the 969 movement and the nationalist organisation Ma Ba Tha, who joined forces with Gnanasara to “protect Buddhism around the world”. Wirathu has floated the wild theory that Muslim men seduce Buddhist women to “overtake” the country’s Buddhist population and turn Myanmar into an Islamic state. His inflammatory speeches have led to killing and rape of Rohingya Muslims.

 

The horror that Ms Faleiro encountered in Sri Lanka and Myanmar pushed her to look critically at the religion in which she was raised. She writes, “As a Catholic, I’ve wrestled all my life with the stain of complicity within my own faith. In Europe, many churches stand tall not only as monuments to devotion, but to empires built on the backs of enslaved people and stolen lands in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.” The author’s acknowledgement of the link between colonisation and the spread of Christianity indicates that her intention here is not to malign Buddhism. She wants, instead, to expose “the entanglement of religion and power”.

 

In the section on Thailand, one meets the current king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, who established control over the Sangha Council, the governing body of Thai Buddhism, in 2018. He has the power to appoint and dismiss members at will, and gets to influence more than 41,000 temples and 200,000 monks in the country. Besides this, elite military units are under his direct command, and he has also been accused of misusing public funds to support his lavish lifestyle.

 

It is not difficult to conclude from the book that Gnanasara, Wirathu and Maha Vajiralongkorn are the kind of people from which Buddhism needs protection. Since it was first published by Columbia Global Reports, a non-profit imprint of Columbia University that aims to deliver “powerful insights in just a few hours”, it sacrifices depth in favour of accessibility.

 

On a brighter note, it does point readers in the direction of people like Abbot Zero, Sulak Rivaraksa and Dhammananda Bhikkuni who are the true protectors of the Buddha Sasana.    

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The reviewer is a journalist and literary critic. @chintanwriting