Editing Sri Lanka (section)

== 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.<ref>Bond, George D. (1988). ''The Buddhist Revival in Sri Lanka: Religious Tradition, Reinterpretation and Response''. University of South Carolina Press, ch. 1.</ref> 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.<ref>Bond (1988), ''Buddhist Revival'', ch. 1; Gombrich, Richard, & Gananath Obeyesekere (1988). ''Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka''. Princeton University Press, pp. 6–8, 202–240.</ref>

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.<ref>Bond (1988), ''Buddhist Revival'', pp. 45–47.</ref> 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.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, pp. 67–68.</ref> 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.<ref>Bond (1988), ''Buddhist Revival'', pp. 32–35.</ref> 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.<ref>Brons (2022), ''Buddha Land'', pp. 68–70.</ref> 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.<ref>Gombrich & Obeyesekere (1988), ''Buddhism Transformed'', pp. 202–204.</ref> 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.<ref>Bond (1988), ''Buddhist Revival'', pp. 63–65.</ref>

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.<ref>Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja (1992). ''Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka''. University of Chicago Press, pp. 42–43.</ref> 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.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', pp. xi–xiii, 1–4.</ref>