Sri Lanka

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon until 1972, occupies a singular place in the history of Buddhism: the island's Mahāvaṃsa chronicle presents it as a dhammadīpa, an "island of the Dharma," specially chosen to preserve the Buddha's teaching, and its Theravāda saṅgha claims the world's longest continuous monastic lineage. This self-understanding, forged over more than two millennia of kingship, colonization, and revival, has made Buddhism inseparable from Sinhalese ethnic identity and from state politics alike. Sri Lanka was also, for a time, home to one of colonial Asia's strongest Marxist movements and to a saṅgha that debated, more explicitly than almost anywhere else in Buddhist Asia, whether monks should engage in party politics at all. These two currents, a nationalist and restorationist Buddhist modernism on one hand and a militant secular left on the other, mostly ran in parallel rather than merging, but they intersected at several points that are of direct interest to the history of radical Buddhism, from the "political monks" of the 1940s to isolated attempts, largely undocumented, to derive a Buddhist socialism from the Dharma itself.

Buddhism in Sri Lanka

According to the Mahāvaṃsa, Buddhism was introduced to the island in the third century BCE, when the monk Mahinda, traditionally said to be a son of the Mauryan emperor Aśoka, converted King Devānampiya Tissa of Anuradhapura. Anuradhapura, and later Polonnaruwa, developed into major centers of Theravāda scholarship, and the island's chronicles, the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, cast Sinhalese kingship and Buddhism as mutually constitutive: the king's legitimacy rested on his patronage and defense of the sāsana (the Buddhist dispensation), while the sāsana in turn sanctified Sinhalese rule over the island. This dhammadīpa ideology has proved extraordinarily durable and would resurface, transformed, in twentieth-century nationalist and even radical Buddhist rhetoric. Over the following centuries, the saṅgha differentiated into several fraternities (nikāyas), of which the Siyam Nikāya, reestablished in 1753 with monks ordained from Thailand after the ordination lineage had lapsed, became closely tied to the Kandyan aristocracy and, in time, largely restricted to the high-caste Goyigama community; the Amarapura Nikāya (1803) and Ramañña Nikāya (1864) later emerged partly in response to this caste exclusivity.

European colonization brought successive disruptions. Portuguese (from 1505) and Dutch (from 1658) rule confined direct European control mainly to the coastal lowlands and involved active Catholic and Calvinist proselytization, but the interior Kandyan Kingdom remained an independent Buddhist polity until the British annexation of 1815. The Kandyan Convention of that year pledged the new British administration to protect and maintain Buddhism, but this commitment was progressively abandoned from the 1840s onward as the colonial state disestablished the sāsana, appropriated temple lands, and opened the island to Christian missionary education, producing a sense of religious dispossession that would fuel the Buddhist revival of the following decades.

The revival is conventionally dated from the public debates between Buddhist monks and Christian missionaries, most famously the two-day Panadura debate of 1873 in which the monk Migettuwatte Guṇānanda was widely regarded as having bested his Methodist opponents. News of the debate reached the American Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, who arrived in Ceylon with Helena Blavatsky in 1880 and publicly converted to Buddhism, subsequently authoring the widely used Buddhist Catechism and helping found the Buddhist Theosophical Society and a network of Buddhist schools that competed directly with the missionary system. Olcott's activity intersected with, and helped amplify, a specifically Sinhalese revivalist current centered on newly founded monastic colleges (pirivenas) such as Vidyodaya (1873) and Vidyālaṅkāra (1875), which combined traditional scriptural learning with an increasingly assertive, modernizing, and nationalist orientation. The movement's most consequential figure was the lay activist Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864–1933), who, drawing on Olcott's circle before breaking with it, propagated a rationalized, this-worldly, text-centered Buddhism, presented as scientific and egalitarian in contrast to a "backward" Christianity, while also articulating an anti-colonial Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and an idealized memory of a precolonial Buddhist golden age. Gananath Obeyesekere has termed this modernist, text-oriented, laicized current "Protestant Buddhism," a label capturing both its structural debt to the Protestant missionary culture it opposed and its emphasis on individual, rather than monastic, religious practice. Lay organizations such as the Young Men's Buddhist Association, founded in Colombo in 1898 and federated island-wide from 1919, institutionalized this modernist current well into the twentieth century.

Buddhism and the state were drawn still closer together around the Buddha Jayanti of 1956, the traditional 2,500th-anniversary jubilee of the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, which coincided with S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike's electoral victory on a platform of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, an event widely remembered as a "social revolution" and discussed further below. In the following decades, mainstream Buddhist institutional life was shaped by the expansion of state patronage, the growth of meditation (vipassanā) movements among both monastics and laypeople, and the increasing entanglement of Buddhist identity with the protracted ethnic civil war (1983–2009) between the Sinhala Buddhist-majority state and Tamil separatist movements, a conflict in which appeals to the island's status as a dhammadīpa were frequently mobilized to justify a unitary, Sinhala Buddhist state.

Radical Buddhism in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka presents something of a paradox for the history of radical Buddhism. Few colonial or postcolonial Asian societies combined so many of the conditions that elsewhere nurtured Buddhist socialism: one of Asia's oldest and best organized Marxist movements, a highly politicized and educated saṅgha, an influential Buddhist modernist movement, and a vigorous Sinhala print culture capable of carrying radical ideas to a broad public. On these grounds alone, a substantial tradition of Buddhist Marxism or Buddhist socialism might have been expected. Yet the surviving documentary record of any such synthesis is remarkably thin, especially set against Japan, China, or India, where comparable movements left extensive published bodies of thought. However, this scarcity should probably be read as evidence of poor archival survival and of a research literature that has not prioritized this specific question, rather than as proof that no such thought existed.

Three distinct phenomena are easily, but should not be, conflated under a single label of "radical Buddhism in Sri Lanka." The first is Buddhist social reform activism that draws on Buddhist ethics to address social suffering without developing a systemic, anticapitalist critique, of which the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, discussed below, is the leading example; these are better classified as engaged Buddhism than as radical Buddhism. The second is the presence of Marxist movements operating within an overwhelmingly Buddhist society and membership, of which the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), founded in 1965, is the clearest case: the JVP's cadres, culture, and symbolism were deeply rooted in rural Sinhala Buddhist society, and the movement drew, at least rhetorically, on Sinhala Buddhist nationalist sentiment, but this does not by itself make the JVP an instance of Buddhist Marxism in any doctrinal sense, since the movement did not attempt to derive its politics from Buddhist teaching. The third, and the phenomenon of primary interest here, comprises figures who did attempt, with varying degrees of rigor, to derive socialist or Marxist conclusions from Buddhist doctrine itself, or vice versa.

Buddhist involvement in radical politics has roots in the early twentieth-century labor movement. Dharmapāla himself, despite his own class position and his generally moralistic rather than systemic critique of poverty, praised railway strikers in 1912 for demonstrating "the national spirit among the Sinhalese" and contributed to their strike fund, and other lay Buddhist revivalists lent similar support to the labor organizer A.E. Goonesinha during the strikes of the 1920s. When the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) was founded in 1935, several monks saw no contradiction between Buddhist vocation and Marxist commitment, including Balangoda Ānanda Maitreya, who publicly welcomed the party's anti-imperialism, and Naravila Dhammaratana, who wrote regularly for the Sinhala newspaper Silumina.

Udakandawela Siri Saranankara

➣ Main article: Udakandawela Siri Saranankara

The most fully documented of these monks is Udakandawela Siri Saranankara (1902–1966; also romanized Udakendawela or Udakendawala), a Theravāda bhikkhu who studied under Tagore at Santiniketan, was imprisoned in Calcutta and exiled to Benares for anti-colonial activity in India, and returned to Ceylon in 1936 to join first the LSSP and then, at the Communist Party's 1943 founding, the new party itself, of which he became first president. He edited the Sinhala monthly Navalokaya from 1941 until his death and later led Ceylon's postwar peace movement, receiving the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1957.

Walpola Rahula and the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirivena

It was in the mid-1940s, however, that Buddhist political radicalism in Ceylon became a genuinely public and organized phenomenon, through the group of young, India-educated monks associated with the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirivena in Kelaniya. In 1946 the Vidyālaṅkāra monks issued a short manifesto, The Declaration of the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirivena, asserting that the monastic vocation properly included political and social action on behalf of the public welfare, a claim elaborated at book length by the Vidyālaṅkāra teacher Walpola Rahula in Bhikṣuvage Urumaya (The Heritage of the Bhikkhu, 1946), which argued that monks had exercised such a role since the earliest period of Sinhalese history and had a duty to reclaim it. The same year, radical monks founded the Lanka Eksath Bhikkhu Maṇḍalaya (Ceylon Union of Bhikkhus), which affirmed the right of monks to participate in politics and, at its 1947 convention, adopted resolutions rejecting the Soulbury Constitution as inadequate to full independence and endorsing the nationalization of transport, mines, and estates. Vidyālaṅkāra monks, including Rahula, campaigned openly for the LSSP and the Communist Party in the pivotal 1947 general election, provoking a fierce public debate, joined even by the conservative All Ceylon Buddhist Congress, over whether monks should engage in party politics at all. This explicitly leftist mobilization of monks proved short-lived: once national language politics and Sinhala majoritarian grievance displaced class politics as the dominant idiom of Buddhist activism over the following decade, the same activist-monk tradition that The Heritage of the Bhikkhu had helped to legitimate flowed overwhelmingly into Sinhala Buddhist nationalism rather than into socialism, culminating in the 1956 election of Bandaranaike, discussed further below.

Neville Wijeyekoon

➣ Main article: Neville Wijeyekoon

Writing under the pseudonym Leuke, the lay civil servant and businessman S.N.B. (Neville) Wijeyekoon published Gautama the Buddha and Karl Marx (1943), an explicit comparison of Buddhist and Marxist-Leninist metaphysics that, in its final chapters, develops an original philosophy centered on "the merging of one's self in social welfare" as the means to negate self-centeredness and achieve "mental harmony," a goal he attributed jointly to a reinterpreted Buddhism and to a socially oriented "dialectical materialism" of his own devising rather than to orthodox Marxism-Leninism. He returned to related themes, stripped of overt Buddhist and Marxist framing, in The Message of Democratic Socialism (1949) and The Achievement of Mental Harmony (1957), the latter proposing an "elite" of self-transformed individuals as the vehicle for social change. Wijeyekoon's ideas are of interest less for orthodoxy in either tradition than for the distinctive, individually worked-out synthesis they represent.

Don Charles Wijewardena

➣ Main article: Don Charles Wijewardena

Don Charles Wijewardena (1892–1956), a member of one of Ceylon's wealthiest and most politically connected families and a member of the Buddhist Committee of Inquiry, is remembered for a single sprawling book, Dharma-Vijaya, or The Revolt in the Temple (1953), published under the sanskritized pen name Vijayavardhana. The book is chiefly known as a nationalist history of the sāsana's colonial-era decline and demanded restoration, but its final chapters develop a genuine, if idiosyncratic, argument that the saṅgha's ancient communal ownership of alms anticipated communism by more than two millennia, that Soviet communism should be rejected for its violence rather than its economics, and that an evolutionary "democratic socialism," including land nationalization and cooperative farming, represented the natural economic complement to a restored Buddhist state. Widely credited with helping to articulate the ideology behind Bandaranaike's 1956 "Buddhist Revolution," Wijewardena is a minor but distinctive figure in the history of Buddhist-socialist synthesis, notwithstanding the fundamentally conservative and majoritarian character of his book as a whole.

A.T. Ariyaratne and Sarvodaya Shramadana

Buddhist social activism took a very different, and considerably less radical, turn with A.T. Ariyaratne's Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, founded in 1958 and one of the most internationally celebrated examples of twentieth-century engaged Buddhism. Ariyaratne reinterpreted the Four Noble Truths as a diagnosis of and remedy for "the decadent village," tracing rural decline to "egoism, competition, greed, and hatred" and mobilizing village volunteer labor (shramadana, "gift of labor") to meet locally identified basic needs. Like Dharmapāla's, Ariyaratne's rhetoric rested on an idealized, largely imaginary picture of a precolonial Sri Lanka free of caste and class, a picture the economist Susantha Goonatilake, reviewing the first volume of Ariyaratne's collected writings, criticized in detail as "patently false."

More importantly, Sarvodaya Shramadana's critique of capitalism has remained rhetorical rather than systemic: Goonatilake calculated, citing the political scientist Estelle James, that some 94 percent of Sarvodaya Shramadana's resources came from abroad, and documented how such foreign-funded non-governmental organizations, Sarvodaya Shramadana prominent among them, effectively absorbed welfare functions vacated by a state retrenching under IMF- and World Bank-driven structural adjustment after 1977, operating in practice, in his own phrase, "as a normal capitalist enterprise working on commercial criteria." Sarvodaya Shramadana is accordingly best classified as engaged rather than radical Buddhism, illustrating by contrast how conformist and accommodationist much of institutionalized twentieth-century engaged Buddhism became even where it retained radical-sounding rhetoric. The review itself became a minor episode in this history: according to a note appended by its editors, Ariyaratne petitioned Sri Lanka's president directly over Goonatilake's criticisms, after which Goonatilake was reportedly barred from leaving the country and from writing further on the movement, an illustration of Sarvodaya's political reach notwithstanding its formally non-governmental status.

Buddhist violence

Beyond these individual cases, Sri Lanka's twentieth and twenty-first centuries also produced a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist militancy running in a very different direction from any of the above, including monastic involvement, prominently that of the Kelaniya incumbent Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, in the 1959 assassination of Bandaranaike; the 2004 electoral debut of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (National Heritage Party), which fielded some 260 monk candidates and won nine parliamentary seats on a platform of restoring a Buddhist state; and, in more recent decades, organizations such as the Bodu Bala Sena, whose monks helped incite anti-Muslim violence in Aluthgama in 2014 and Digana in 2018. These lie outside the RBP's definition of radical Buddhism, which concerns the left rather than nationalist militancy, but they form part of the same broader history of the politicized twentieth-century saṅgha from which the LEBM, Wijeyekoon, Wijewardena, and Saranankara also emerged, and they are noted here for context.

Literature in English

• Faleiro, Sonia (2025). The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism Is Shaping Modern Asia. Columbia Global Reports. [A journalistic survey of Buddhist nationalist militancy across Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand; its Sri Lankan material centers on the Bodu Bala Sena and the anti-Muslim violence at Aluthgama (2014) and Digana (2018) rather than on the RBP's left-wing definition of radical Buddhism, but useful for the nationalist-militancy context noted at the close of the section above.]
• Grant, Patrick (2009). Buddhism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka. State University of New York Press. [A literary-critical reading of Dharmapāla, Walpola Rahula, and President J.R. Jayewardene as successive attempts to reconcile Buddhist self-representation with the modern ethnic conflict; its chapters on Dharmapāla and Rahula are the most relevant here.]
• Seneviratne, H.L. (1999). The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press. [An anthropological history of twentieth-century monastic activism centered on the Vidyālaṅkāra tradition, Walpola Rahula's The Heritage of the Bhikkhu, and their transformation into the "new Buddhism" of later social-service and political monks. Essential background for the Vidyālaṅkāra group and for Saranankara.]
• Harris, Ian, ed. (1999). Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia. Cassell. [Includes Tessa Bartholomeusz's chapter "First Among Equals: Buddhism and the Sri Lankan State" (pp. 173–193), a concise survey of Buddhism's constitutional and political role in independent Sri Lanka.]
• Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja (1992). Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press. [The fullest scholarly account of the entanglement of Buddhism with Sinhala nationalism, party politics, and ethnic violence from the 1940s through the 1980s; contains the most detailed available discussion of the Vidyālaṅkāra monks, Udakandawela Saranankara, and Don Charles Wijewardena.]
• Jayawardena, Kumari (1979). "Bhikkus in Revolt". Four-part series. Lanka Guardian 2.2 (15 May): 16–18; 2.4 (15 June): 13–14; 2.5 (1 July): 10–11; 2.6 (15 July): 7–9. [The foundational account of the labor movement's Buddhist sympathizers and of Udakandawela Siri Saranankara's career in particular, drawn in part directly on his own autobiography; nearly all subsequent English-language writing on Saranankara, including Tambiah (1992) and Pieris (2020), derives from this series. See the dedicated biography page for detailed use.]

Literature in Sinhala

(To be added.)

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Sri Lanka". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 31 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Sri_Lanka.