Book Review: When Buddhist monks choose the path of violence

Sonia Faleiro’s new book, The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism Is Shaping Modern South Asia, examines the increasing use of violence in word and deed by Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand. There are many and various religious groupings across the world that support nationalist aggressions against minorities in their own countries, but the Buddhist case is presented as especially disturbing because the common perception of Buddhism is as a religion of non-violence. Pankaj Mishra’s insightful blurb nails the nub of Faleiro’s inquiry, pointing to “...the social-economic shifts that make even an ancient spiritual tradition devoted to renunciation hospitable to modern fanaticism.” Faleiro provides a historical backdrop for her arguments and presents us with incidents, movements and the formation of radical right-wing political groups from the recent past. This gives the book an immediacy that most exploratory disquisitions lack. What we have in our hands when we read this book is the best of both journalism and analytic thinking.

Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand is the older, austere Theravada form, very distinct from the more complex tenets and flamboyant practices of the Mahayana and Tantra schools which prevail in Nepal, Tibet and all the way across eastern Asia through to Japan. In all these diverse cultures and societies, Buddhism maintains the sanctity of a strict monastic order. Monks and nuns are revered and live lives of simplicity and renunciation outside society—praying, meditating and immersing themselves in the holy texts. For the lay community, feeding a monk each day accrues as much religious merit as donating to a monastery or temple.

Hence, it can surprise us when monks choose to advocate violence and get involved with politics, governance and avenues of exercising power. More so when the creed they espouse is predicated on non-injury to others. Faleiro tells us when and how monks in Sri Lanka turned the ethnic and nationalist energies unleashed and nurtured during the long and bloody civil war on to Muslims and Christians. The newly purged Sri Lankan nation that rose like a phoenix after 2009 did not put aside the divisive emotions that had fuelled that conflagration. Monks led the hate-filled speech and calls to kill, loot and burn, secure in the impunity provided by a ruling party that was not only complicit but actively involved in the communal violence.

Sinhala people were fed a narrative of victimhood: Tamils, Muslims and Christians were marauding outsiders who enjoyed deeply rooted privileges and entitlements they did not deserve. Buddhism was turned into a central element in Sinhala identity and charismatic (if corrupt) monks and powerful (and equally corrupt) political families joined forces to ensure that a miasma of fear and insecurity continues to hang over the island.

Myanmar’s monks encouraged and joined a similar nationalism that called for ethnic and religious cleansing, focused primarily on the Muslim Rohingya population. While monks also led the resistance against authoritarianism, what took root were nationalist movements that aligned themselves with exclusionist policies of the military junta that has controlled the nation for decades. Faleiro points to Aung San Suu Kyi’s failure to support democratic movements in the country as a crucial factor in their suppression and erasure.

In Thailand, an entrenched monarchy with absolute powers has kept monks out of the political realm but they flourish as gatekeepers of an opulent religion based on donations even as they themselves violate the most basic rules of monastic life.

In her Introduction, Faleiro reminds us of the courageous Buddhist monks from south and eastern Asia who performed self-immolations to draw attention to injustice, how they appeared as conscience keepers to the world by living out the ultimate Buddhist injunction of sacrificing oneself for the good of others. But she also tells us about cruel hierarchies within the monasteries and, more particularly, about the patriarchal practices that keep nuns away from scholarship and other advancements within the system. It appears that all religions have failed in history. Certainly, when they become institutionalised and respond through the ages to the world, they seem unable to maintain the ennobling thoughts and practices that were so profoundly their inspiration when they functioned as small cultic groups with a teacher in their midst.

The historical Buddha, Siddhartha, lived at a time when the great river plains of the northern subcontinent were undergoing both political and spiritual transformations. Vedic religion, by now heavy with ritual and in control of priests, was being challenged by more individualised searches for the truth. Asceticism and meditation and other kinds of quietism grew popular as spiritual practices. The Upanishads, composed around the same time as Siddhartha and Mahavira were preaching their new creeds, rejected ritual and religious mediators and explored self-knowledge and the possibility of an eternal soul. All of these new doctrines placed ahimsa at the centre of their understanding of spiritual development, so the idea of non-injury is hardly unique to Buddhism.

Faleiro frames her argument (that militant Buddhism is a recent and highly volatile player in current Asian politics) carefully and her research and authorial position are equally circumspect. I find her book to be politically sharp but also very moving as a story of dissent and resistance. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in South Asian nation states that are all moving simultaneously but separately towards deeply riven polities and communally fractured, flailing democracies.

We can even take a step back and consider the larger and less immediate context for an inquiry such as hers: how it is that men (and it is almost always men) who have taken religious vows to spread peace can embrace violence? This question could be asked of any of the monks, priests and saints who incite violence each day in some corner of the world. Every religion has its fanatics. Every religion also has its quietists, its mystics lost in divine love, its ordinary people who live in peace and tolerance with those who are unlike them. Non-violence is not specifically a Buddhist virtue. Nor is the propensity for violence an exclusively Islamic vice, as popular rhetoric would have us believe.

The larger question (which Faleiro briefly touches upon in her introduction when she speaks of the patriarchal structures within Buddhism) is this: why have our religious identities and expressions of religious faith become inextricably entangled with muscular narratives and performances of aggressive masculinities? Why are women locked up in homes or nunneries? Why do men get to speak for us all?

C.M. Naim, who taught Urdu and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago and espoused a liberal, tolerant and inclusive Islam, talked of his upbringing in Uttar Pradesh around the time of Partition. In an essay titled A ‘Hyper-Masculinised’ Islam? (2024), he said that he learned his religion from the women in his family whose practices and faith “...did not reflect any self consciousness that was imbued with power and authority. On the contrary, they expressed, on the part of the practitioners, a profound sense of humility...The diminution of the women’s role has removed the poetry, ambiguity and humility that my generation commonly experienced, from the religious experience of my young students.”

The problem is not the monk who carries the sword, it is the man who has been taught that it is not love or compassion that has made the world safe, it is hatred. Faleiro’s book encourages us to ask deeper and wider questions about the political violence that shadows our times.

Arshia Sattar is a writer and translator based in Bengaluru.