Nearly ten years ago, I was sandwiched on a sofa in Colombo between the incoming Iranian ambassador and a tubby, shaven-headed monk in saffron robes and sandals. We were waiting for an audience with Mahinda Rajapaksa (President of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015), a jolly rogue who modelled himself on Tony Blair – but with white robes, a crimson scarf, and sandals, as well as jewels on his fingers and toes.
Bored witless with waiting under the sharp gaze of his bodyguards, my eyes focused on some kitschy paintings of medieval Sinhalese warriors on top of elephants. After a week of touring government offices, I knew these were ubiquitous, though I didn’t give the tubby monk further thought.
This was my first brush with something that did not compute with my limited knowledge of Buddhism. As a child in the sixties I had seen shocking footage of Thich Quang Duc (1897-1963) – calmly immolating himself at a Saigon intersection in June 1963, in protest at the corrupt regime of South Vietnam’s president Diem. If there were any violence in Buddhism, it seemed of the self-sacrificial kind. Many of my older ‘hippy’ contemporaries dabbled with Buddhism, without knowing much about its history or its Asian cultural heartlands. The cruelties of the Vietnam War indirectly heightened the international attractions of this ‘religion of peace’.
Buddhism has two major schools of doctrine and practice. The earliest version, known as the Theravadian1, is common to ‘southern’ nations such as Myanmar (formerly Burma), Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, as well as Sri Lanka as a kind of outlier. The larger reformed school (Mahayana2) is dominant in ‘northern’ China, Tibet, Korea and Japan.
In recent years, three countries in the Theravadian camp have spawned highly militant Buddhist movements: Sri Lanka, which is 70% Buddhist, Myanmar (88%) and Thailand (93%). They feed off each other, with cross-fertilisation between Sri Lankan and Burmese monks who then influence trends in Thailand. Paradoxically, while there is a Malay Muslim insurgent problem in southern Thailand3, there is not in either Myanmar or Sri Lanka. The first two countries illustrate the paradox of a religious majority feeling deeply threatened by minorities, and then practising epic violence against them.
I visited Sri Lanka in the immediate aftermath of Rajapaksa’s final onslaught against the (Hindu) Tamil Tigers – following various failed peace gambits and to end a conflict which had begun in 1983. Some of his generals used their desktop computers to show live-feed battlefield drone footage of the final bloodbath on the Nanthi Kadal lagoon, the culmination of the army’s northern offensive in May 2009 when about five thousand Tigers were slaughtered. I met some of the survivors in army rehabilitation centres for captured child soldiers, most of them boys and girls in their late teens or early twenties, in some cases with shrapnel injuries to their faces and limbs.
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