Lessons on Buddhist extremism, nationalism and violence from Sri Lanka

A tacitly theologically sanctioned, if often inchoate, sense of Buddhist nationalism permeates Buddhist-majority societies; certainly at least those adhering to the Theravada tradition, like Sri Lanka. This identification has had a significant impact on Buddhist attitudes toward violence.

In general, Buddhists everywhere acknowledge that individuals accrue demerit through their actions. Significant demerit is accrued through violent acts, including, even, the desire to commit such acts. Murder accrues severe levels of demerit. In fact, the principle of ahimsa — nonviolence — is very much integral to Buddhist doctrine. The ahimsa ideal is one of five Buddhist “moral precepts”: abstinence from killing sentient beings, from theft, from lying, from consuming intoxicants that cloud the mind and from sexual misconduct.

But while it has been emphasized by some religious scholars that the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the foundations of Buddhism, do not support the cultivation of intimidation and violence, others insist that some traditional teachings have sought to identify exactly when the rule of nonviolence can be broken as a principled response to exceptional circumstances. Thus within the Pali Canon (or Tipitaka) of Theravada Buddhism, murder is regarded as one of the greatest sins (adhamma) a person can commit. Nevertheless, the Theravada texts provide exceptions to this prohibition on killing.

First, the intention behind such acts must be apropos. In this regard, a Sri Lankan monk involved in anti-government protests interviewed by sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer in 2000 justified his actions by arguing that there was no way to avoid violence in a time of “dukkha” — an age of suffering — especially when the Buddhist community as a whole was under threat. In such times, “violence naturally begets violence,” but the intention — defense of the welfare of the community — rendered such actions justified. Moreover, armed with a defensible just cause, believers (at least in theory) can engage in violent activity with “cool heads” and without “debased thoughts of slaughtering and killing other people” out of sheer bloodlust.

Second, tradition calls for careful discrimination in the targets of principled violence. In this respect, one popular mytho-historical Sinhala chronicle, the Mahavamsa, tells the story of how the Buddhist ruler Dutthagamani, following a brutal war with Tamil invaders, expressed anguish over of the numerous deaths and great destruction. Tradition holds that eight “enlightened” Buddhist monks comforted Dutthagamani, arguing that his actions were justified. Apart from his personal and sincere religiosity and his right intention in waging a defensive war, the deaths of non-Buddhist enemies were not important. This was because the latter were said to “possess such little virtue they are on par with animals.”

Third, tradition stipulates that care must be taken in terms of the status of the perpetrator of violence. Many Buddhist canonical texts stress the intrinsic relationship between Buddhism and the state, and there is a widespread propensity amongst Buddhist-majority states to adopt Buddhism as the official religion. The consequent high status and prestige of Buddhist monks, certainly in Theravada Buddhist countries, speaks to the notion that the state is by definition Buddhist and exists to protect Buddhism. Hence, if a monk is attacked physically by non-Buddhists, or warns that a non-Buddhist threat to the intrinsically Buddhist state exists, a catalyst for out-group violence could be set in motion.

Such an ethos is ripe for exploitation by extremists, as we shall see. But first, it is necessary to explicate what we mean by the term “extremism.”

Religious extremism unpacked

This article defines “religious extremism” as a fundamentalist belief system that legitimizes the structural violence of an in-group against relevant out-groups. This definition requires further elucidation.

First, what is fundamentalism? Malise Ruthven, in “Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction,” defined it as “a religious way of being that manifests itself in a strategy by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identities as individuals or groups in the face of modernity and secularization.” Religious fundamentalism arises not only as a reaction to a secular state seeking to “secularize and delimit the domain of the sacred” but also as a response to seemingly more assertive and competing religions and/or ethnic groups.

Second, terrorism scholars regard extremism as “hostile action” against out-groups, arguing that while physical violence is part of hostile action, the latter also includes verbal attacks, diminishment and discriminatory behavior. They are actually talking about structural violence, which has long been understood to encompass more than just physical violence. Apart from “violence that works on the body,” there is also “violence that works on the soul.”

Third, physical violence is often “latent.” To Johann Galtung, one of the innovators of the concept of structural violence, “latent violence is something which is not there, yet might easily come about.” He had in mind “a situation where a little challenge would trigger considerable killing and atrocity.” Galtung observed that “ethical systems directed against intended violence will easily fail to capture structural violence in their nets, and may hence be catching the small fry and letting the big fish” — the extremist ideologues in the background — “loose.”

Based on our understanding of religious extremism, we can now distill seven core characteristics of the religious extremist. At the same time, we shall apply these seven features to illumine the specific case of Buddhist extremism as manifested in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka.

7 core characteristics of the Buddhist extremist

I argue that in the context of a religious in-group perceiving itself to be facing stresses and strains within a multi-religious polity, the religious extremist — as opposed to mainstream believers —would likely evince seven core characteristics.

1. Identity supremacism

First, the religious extremist tends to be intensely emotionally invested in his sectarian belief system, granting the latter precedence over universally recognized international customs and mainstream constitutional, ideological, or theological norms. In other words he is an identity supremacist, particularly strongly driven by the “pecking order impulse.” We can certainly tease out this first characteristic from Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

While Sri Lankan domestic laws officially recognize Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity, the constitution and other laws accord Buddhism the “foremost place” among the country’s religious faiths. So while the State is constitutionally required to respect the rights of religious minorities, in practice, the special political status of Theravada Buddhism has effectively relegated other religions to a secondary status in society. Likewise, a political system has emerged that is geared around communal rather than multicultural politics.

The Sinhala-Buddhist majority has historically felt threatened by the English-educated, Tamil-speaking minorities, both the Hindus and the Muslims. Legislation such as the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 (the year of independence from Britain) favored the Sinhala majority, and the introduction of Sinhala as the only official language eight years later intensified the minorities’ sense of political and socio-economic marginalization. The lack of a unified education system also exacerbated sectarian tendencies.

Researcher Robin Noel Badone Jones has reported that inside the Buddhist Power Force, or Bodu Bana Sala, or BBS, an extreme Buddhist nationalist organization in Sri Lanka, “Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and the Maldives are all cited as examples of previously Buddhist countries which have now became Muslim.” In this context, “Sri Lanka is seen as the next domino that could fall to Islamic domination,” and Sri Lankan Muslims are perceived as trying to transform Sri Lanka into the “next colony in an expanding Muslim empire sought to be established by the Wahhabi movement spreading from the Middle East, Pakistan and Malaysia.” This is particularly resonant as the Buddha himself is said to have ordained Sri Lanka as the last bastion of Buddhism in the world. And the BBS narrative of Sinhala-Buddhist identity supremacy under threat by Muslims does have some degree of traction within elements of the wider mainstream community.

2. In-group bias

The religious extremist fervently believes that his religious in-group is inherently morally superior to relevant out-groups; this is what we could term in-group bias. In-group bias is actually a facet of human nature. The Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson explained that it arises from the essential human drive to belong to “any collectivity that can be compared favorably with other, competing groups of the same category.” Hence favoritism for one’s own group is “natural.” However, the tendency is much more starkly pronounced in the case of the religious extremist.

In Sri Lanka, the leading BBS monk Gnanasara Thero, fusing the core Sinhala ethnic identity with Theravada Buddhism, declared that “it is the Sinhalese who built up its civilization, culture and settlements” and hence Sri Lanka rightfully “belongs to the Sinhalese.” In a confrontational June 2014 speech before a crowd at Aluthgama, delivered just before anti-Muslim violence broke out there, he portrayed Sinhala-Buddhists as the virtuous population “who nurtured and civilized this earth and soil, and who continued to protect the culture, civilization and values; who built 64,000 lakes.” Other BBS-aligned extremists, meanwhile, have consistently emphasized the innate generosity of the “kind and loving Sinhala people” who “openly accepted the Muslim people as their own.”

3. Out-group prejudice

Out-group prejudice goes hand in glove with in-group bias. That is, while the extremist viscerally assumes his in-group can do no wrong, he is equally fixated on the assumption that the out-group as a whole is evil, posing an urgent, existential threat to the in-group. The “out-group homogeneity effect” predisposes mainstream in-group members to assume that all out-group members are basically alike. At the same time, the “accentuation effect” impels mainstream in-group members to be tacitly biased toward information that amplifies the differences with out-group members, in the process downplaying intergroup similarities.

It is evident that in Sri Lanka, anti-Muslim prejudice in Sinhala-Buddhist extremist circles is rife. A common BBS trope is that if “Muslims were the top people in Sri Lanka, the culture would be very different” in that “we couldn’t even have Buddhist books,” as “that is not allowed in Muslim countries, they will whip a person for that.” Another BBS-encouraged narrative posits that “if Sri Lanka is a secular, multicultural state, communally minded Muslims will take advantage of the majority’s generosity in order to take over the country.”

4. Obsession with preserving in-group purity

The religious extremist fears contamination of the good essence of the in-group through intermingling with the out-group. What psychologist Paul Rozin calls a psychology of disgust, an evolved instinct in human beings, is of relevance here. It emerged in ancestral environments in which early human groups had to be wary of rotting flora and dead fauna, within which unseen, often deadly germs and viruses gestated. Gradually, a powerful, instinctive aversion to such things evolved as an important adaptation. According to Rozin, the unconscious contagion-avoidance instinct in humans predisposes them to assume that “limited contact, however brief” with a potential source of contamination “transmits the whole of the risk.” More to the point, other scholars argue that the contagion-avoidance instinct is in play when spiritual contamination-averse religious extremists encounter supposedly “unclean” out-group members.

The banning of commingling certainly characterizes Sinhala-Buddhist extremism in Sri Lanka. Muslims residing near Buddhist statues and holy sites have been coerced to move elsewhere as Sinhala-Buddhist extremists argue that the proximity of “sinful Muslims who are killers of cows and eaters of beef” is sacrilegious. In 2014, moreover, Rev. Wathareka Vijitha Thero, a moderate monk, “was abducted, rendered unconscious, tied up and forcibly circumcised” — he claimed by unidenified Buddhist monks — because he had tried to foster closer cooperation between Buddhists and Muslims. In a separate episode a few weeks earlier, when Vijitha Thero had held a news conference to highlight Muslim grievances, BBS broke it up, with Gnanasara warning him to stop “this type of stupid treachery.” Moreover, a 2019 assessment noted multiple reports of Muslim businesses failing due to anti-Muslim boycotts. BBS monks are also leery of intermarriages between Sinhala-Buddhists and Muslims. In January 2014, Gnanasara alluded to this in warning of “extremist forces trying to create divisions, buy our lands, marry our wives and recruit our children.”

5. Low integrative complexity and dualistic thinking

The religious extremist tends to possess a low cognitive integrative complexity that results in pronounced categorical or dualistic thinking. Social psychologists suggest that categorization into binary oppositions is universal across humankind. That said, the dogmatic mindset of the religious extremist is a result of anxiety caused by perceived threat or uncertainty. This compels the extremist to divide the world into safe and threat, good and evil, life and death. While integratively complex thinking recognizes the legitimacy of different viewpoints and is capable of higher order synthesis of these viewpoints, lower integrative complexity provides little or no integration of perspectives.

In this respect, it is telling that in Sinhala-Buddhist extremist circles, a radically simplified us-versus-them narrative, revealing little in the way of integrative complexity, circulates on Facebook and other social media platforms. As Jones puts it, “The BBS offers a compelling narrative in which the Sinhala nation is at a crucial juncture for its own survival. … Heroism is needed to save the nation.” Such narratives contain strong elements of misinformation. For instance, Jones reported one apparently BBS-influenced student monk arguing, “In Tibet, they followed the peaceful way. What happened to them? In Myanmar, they followed the peaceful way. What happened to them? In Thailand, there are Muslims killing monks. Bangladesh also.”

6. Dangerous speach

Human rights lawyer Susan Benesh has defined dangerous speech as “an act of speech [that] has a reasonable chance of catalyzing or amplifying violence by one group against another, given the circumstances in which it was made or disseminated.” The possibility for dangerous speech exists in the presence of several key factors:

• a charismatic extremist ideologue with significant influence over the target audience;
• extant grievances ripe for weaponization by that ideologue;
• lack of access to countervailing information and viewpoints;
• a political and historical context of weak rule of law twinned with past inter-group
  conflict; and, particularly salient,
• speech content that linguistically dehumanizes the out-group “as vermin, pests,
  insects, or animals,” in the process legitimating supposedly defensive out-group
  violence as a moral obligation.

“Hard-mode” dangerous speech activates the aforementioned contagion-avoidance instinct, establishing an unconscious link between disgust and genocide, since these “disgusting characteristics” of out-group members “threaten to pollute the environment and must be eliminated.” “Soft-mode” dangerous speech may not directly incite violence. It is akin to what terrorism expert Ed Husain calls “mood music,” which prepares the ground psychologically for such violence downstream.

Dangerous speech in both modes is clearly observable in Sri Lanka. Although soft-mode proliferates, BBS mainstay Gnanasara has not been averse to engaging in hard-mode dangerous speech as well. On 15 May 2019, he explicitly “called for the stoning to death of Muslims,” while propagating an “unfounded allegation that Muslim-owned restaurants put “sterilization medicine” in the food of Sinhala-Buddhist customers “to suppress the majority Sinhalese Buddhist birthrate.” Earlier, in a 15 June 2014 speech, he declared, “[In] this country we still have a Sinhala police; we still have a Sinhala army. After today if a single Marakkalaya [Muslim, in context used derogatorily] or some other paraya [alien, outcast, also a derogatory term] touches a single Sinhalese . . . it will be their end.” This speech is believed by ground observers to have contributed to the immediately following anti-Muslim riot in Aluthgama where four people were killed and more than 100 Muslim-owned businesses were destroyed.

7. Drive for political power

Finally, the religious extremist is characterized by his quest for the power to transform the wider political and social system in ways that conform to his vision of how a divinely sanctioned order should appear. Controlling the levers of power would facilitate the desired domination and other forms of structural violence that may be authoritatively imposed upon disbelievers. Fundamentalist extremists are driven by the desire for certainty and, concomitantly, for the power to enforce that certainty on others. The quest for power is also related to the extremist belief than the in-group faces an existential crisis in its cosmic struggle with the out-group This obsession with power and control explains why the religious extremist is anti-democratic, anti-pluralist, authoritarian, well capable of rejecting the rule of law while adhering to an ends-justify-means philosophy.

We noted earlier that in the Theravada Buddhist tradition there is a close association between the state and the sangha and, consequently, senior monks enjoy high social prestige and political influence on national matters, including shaping state policy toward non-Buddhist out-groups. Such traditions have been weaponized in Sri Lanka, where the Sinhala-Buddhist extremist drive for power permeates the polity. The Berlin-based NGO Democracy Reporting International argues that the failure of the government, especially under former presidents Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to act against Sinhala-Buddhist extremism hints at the tacit acquiescence of the political elites. BBS, for its part, has been largely loyal to the Rajapaksas’ political party. However BBS is also linked to a monk-run political party named Our People’s Power Party (OPPP). In August 2020, Gnanasara Thero was nominated by OPPP party members to fill its National List seat.

(Gnanasara, who had been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment by the Court of Appeal on 8 August 2018 on four contempt of court charges, was released from prison on 23 May 2019, having been pardoned by another previous Sri Lankan president, Maithripala Sirisena, following the terrifying ISIS-claimed Easter bombings in Colombo and other cities.)

Such strong BBS political influence on the Sri Lankan state and political arena is expressed in structural violence against the Muslim minority in various ways. Also in 2019, local politicians and civil society groups complained that the construction of Buddhist shrines by Buddhist groups and even the military in the largely Hindu and Muslim Northern and Eastern Provinces was a form of “religious intimidation, as some shrines were built in areas with few, if any, Buddhist residents.” The NGO Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice observed that the “readiness of the police to pursue spurious complaints against artists perceived to have insulted Buddhism” contrasted starkly with “the shocking lack of action against the hate speech of Buddhist extremists,” especially those who have “incited physical violence against Muslim communities and other minorities in Sri Lanka in recent times.”

Long before the bombings, in March 2013, the BBS forced Sri Lanka’s council of Muslim scholars to abandon the authority to administer halal certification of meat, though this had been the practice for decades. Sinhala-Buddhist extremists viewed halal certification as a profit-making enterprise for the Muslim community, empowering the latter to build more mosques and purchase the affections of Buddhist women.

Conclusions and a further research agenda

In this essay we have sketched out the key features of Buddhist extremism in the Theravada Buddhist-majority country of Sri Lanka. We have shown that despite its general image of being a nonviolent, pacific faith, when one scrutinizes both Buddhist traditions and real-world experience, it is clear that, in the manner of other faiths such as Islam, Hinduism and Christianity, adherents to Buddhism have both justified and engaged in out-group violence.

It is notable that Gnanasara Thero himself alluded to the overlap amongst Buddhist, Hindu and white supremacist narratives when he asserted in 2019 that his ideology was influenced by the Hindu right-wing group Shiv Sena, the British National Party and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen — all of whom have made incendiary remarks on Islam and Muslims.

Religious extremist movements network with and influence one another. For instance, it is well known that two Theravada Buddhist extremist figures, Sri Lanka’s Gnanasara and Myanmar’s Ashin Wirathu, institutionalized ties in a memorandum of understanding in 2014. It may be worth tracking the evolution and effectiveness of such transnational collaboration between extremist entities. Systematic mapping of the key nodes of extremist ecosystems of interlocking social movements and institutions, charismatic influencers, political parties and social media platforms would be a valuable first step in designing effective counterstrategies.