Buddhism in Sri Lanka

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism in Sri Lanka is the island's largest religion, practiced by 70.1% of the population as of 2012. That figure alone might suggest a settled, unbroken tradition. But the real story is far more turbulent: a 2,300-year arc of missionary arrivals, doctrinal battles, colonial suppression, revival movements, and violent nationalism, all playing out on an island the Buddhist world came to regard as a living holy land. How did a religion introduced from the outside become so deeply woven into Sinhalese identity that monks would eventually enter parliament and, in one notorious case, commit assassination? And how did a tradition rooted in non-violence produce movements its own scholars describe as militancy? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Arrival of the Dhamma

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  According to the Mahavamsa and the Dipavamsa, the two great Sri Lankan chronicles, Buddhism reached the island in the 3rd century BCE through the elder Mahinda and the nun Sanghamitta, both said to be children of the emperor Ashoka. The chronicles place this during the reign of Devanampiya Tissa, dated 307-267 BCE, who converted and donated a royal park to the Buddhist community. That gift became the seed of the Mahavihara tradition, the institution that would dominate Sri Lankan Buddhism for centuries. Ashoka's own inscriptions confirm he sent a Buddhist mission to Sri Lanka, though they name neither Mahinda nor Sanghamitta, a gap modern scholars treat with caution.

  Mahinda is associated with the site of Mihintale, which the source describes as one of the oldest Buddhist sites on the island. Hundreds of caves nearby survive with Brahmi inscriptions recording gifts to the sangha from householders and chiefs. S. D. Bandaranayake, writing on this period, notes that Buddhism's spread was promoted both by the state and by ordinary lay persons. By the first century BCE, according to historian K. M. de Silva, Buddhism was "well established in the main areas of settlement."

  The Mahavamsa records a striking episode from this early period: during the reign of the Sinhala king Dutugamunu, who ruled from 161 to 137 BCE, a Greek monk named Mahadharmaraksita led 30,000 Buddhist monks from the city of Alexandria in the Caucasus, roughly 150 km north of modern Kabul, to Sri Lanka for the dedication of the Ruwanwelisaya Stupa. The monk served under the Greco-Bactrian king Menander I, whose reign is dated 165/155-130 BCE. The episode illustrates how international Buddhism already was in its earliest Sri Lankan phase.

• 3. Rival Monasteries, One Island

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  For most of the Anuradhapura period, Sri Lankan Buddhism was not a single church but a competition between three powerful monastic complexes: the Mahavihara, the Abhayagiri, and the Jetavana, all based in the ancient capital. The Mahavihara was the original institution; the other two were founded by monks who broke away and proved more open to Mahayana teachings. The doctrinal stakes were high. The Mahavihara regarded Mahayana sutras as counterfeit scriptures and Mahayana ideas like Lokottaravada, the doctrine of transcendentalism, as heretical. Abhayagiri, by contrast, maintained close ties with Indian Buddhists and absorbed many of their teachings.

  Royal patronage decided which tradition held power at any given moment. During the reign of Voharika Tissa, dating from 209-31 CE, the Mahavihara convinced the king to suppress Mahayana teachings. Within decades the tables turned: the king Mahasena, who ruled from 277 to 304 CE, backed Mahayana, repressed the Mahavihara, and went as far as demolishing parts of its complex to build up Abhayagiri and a new monastery, the Jetavana. After Mahasena, Abhayagiri became the largest and most influential Buddhist institution on the island.

  The Chinese monk Faxian, who visited in the early 5th century, counted 5,000 monks at Abhayagiri, 3,000 at the Mahavihara, and 2,000 at the Cetiyapabbatavihara. He also obtained a Sanskrit copy of the Vinaya of the Mahisasaka sect at Abhayagiri around 406 CE; that text was translated into Chinese and is preserved today in the Chinese Buddhist canon as Taisho Tripitaka 1421.

  In 301-328 CE, during the reign of Kithsirimevan, the Tooth Relic of the Buddha arrived in Sri Lanka. Brought by Sudatta, the sub-king of Kalinga, and Hemamala, the relic was enshrined and made the centre of an annual procession. It became the supreme symbol of Sinhala Buddhist kingship, housed and promoted by the Abhayagiri tradition. The Mahavihara would not recover its dominant position until the Polonnaruwa period in 1055.

• 4. Writing Down the Canon

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  Sri Lankan Buddhists initially preserved the scriptures, the Tipitaka, through oral transmission alone. According to the Mahavamsa, a crisis in the first century BCE changed everything: the destruction caused by the Beminitiyaseya threatened the survival of the oral tradition, and the decision was made to commit the scriptures to writing. The site chosen was the Aluvihara temple. According to scholar Richard Gombrich, this is "the earliest record we have of Buddhist scriptures being committed to writing anywhere."

  All Pali texts that survive today derive from the Mahavihara tradition. Whatever written literature the Abhayagiri tradition produced has not survived in Pali. The Mahavihara monks and their associated South Indian scholars, working between the 4th and 5th centuries CE, produced the body of commentary literature known as the Atthakatha. The most influential of these scholars was Buddhaghosa, whose work on Buddhist practice, particularly the Visuddhimagga, remains the most authoritative text in the modern Theravada tradition outside of the canon itself. His colleagues Dhammapala and Buddhadatta contributed further to this project.

  By adopting Pali as their shared scholarly language, Sri Lankan Buddhists gained a means of communicating across borders. The move opened the island's tradition to easier exchange with communities in South India and Southeast Asia. Scholars of the Polonnaruwa era, including Anuruddha, Sumangala, Sariputta Thera, and Moggallana Thera, built on this foundation. Between the 10th and 13th centuries, according to Alastair Gornall, there was a massive expansion in Pali literary composition, driven partly by fear that war and invasion could cause the teachings to disappear. Anuruddha's Abhidhammattha-sangaha became one of the most influential doctrinal summaries of the period.

• 5. Colonial Rupture and Buddhist Revival

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  The Portuguese arrived at the start of the 16th century, exploiting a fragmented island to establish Colombo as a base for the cinnamon trade. Between 1597 and 1658, a substantial portion of the island fell under Portuguese rule. Buddhist monasteries were destroyed or handed to Catholic orders. By 1592, the damage was so severe that Vimaladharmasuriya I of Kandy could not find a single properly ordained monk remaining on the island. He sent for monks from Burma.

  The Dutch succeeded the Portuguese along the coast between 1640 and 1796. They were less aggressive in forcing religious conversion, but still discriminated against non-Christians and refused to return Buddhist temple properties seized by the Portuguese. Only the kingdom of Kandy in the interior preserved Buddhism as the state religion. Even there, through much of the 18th century, the ordination lineage was broken; the religious figures who served in place of proper monks were called ganinnanses, a category that did not meet the canonical requirement of at least five fully ordained monks to perform a valid ordination.

  The successful revival of the ordination lineage came through Weliwita Sri Saranankara Thero (1698-1778), who arranged for monks to come from Thailand, founding the Siam Nikaya that persists to the present day. With backing from the Kandyan king Kirti Sri Rajasinha, the Festival of the Tooth Relic took its modern form during this period. Kirti Sri Rajasinha then issued a decree restricting Siam Nikaya membership to the govigama caste, a ruling that shaped Sri Lankan monastic life for generations.

  British forces conquered Kandy in 1815. Though the initial surrender treaty, the Kandyan Convention, promised protection for Buddhism, British policy shifted over the decades. After the 1830s, the government actively supported Christian missionary work under the influence of politicians such as Lord Glenelg and Governor Stewart Mackenzie, who served from 1837 to 1841. Missions controlled education, and passing through their schools was a prerequisite for government employment. In the second half of the 19th century, Buddhist monks fought back through public debate. The five major debates with Protestant missionaries were held in 1865, 1866, 1871, and 1873. The Panadura debate of 1873 was widely regarded as a victory for the Buddhist monk Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera.

  In 1880, Henry Steel Olcott arrived with Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society. He had been drawn to Sri Lanka by reading about the Panadura debate. After learning from monks including Sumangala Thera, Olcott converted to Buddhism and co-founded the Buddhist Theosophical Society. At the time there were only three Buddhist schools on the island; by 1940 there were 429. Olcott sponsored colleges including Ananda College in Colombo and Dharmaraja College in Kandy, and published his Buddhist Catechism in 1881, which remained in use in Buddhist schools until the late 20th century. Olcott also sat on the committee that designed the Buddhist flag.

  Anagarika Dharmapala, who began as Olcott's interpreter, became the most globally active figure of the revival. He established the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891 with the goal of reviving Buddhism in India and restoring the ancient shrines at Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Kushinara. In 1893 he represented Theravada Buddhism at the World's Parliament of Religions. He later founded the London Buddhist Vihara in 1926. Scholars describe the revival as a form of "Protestant Buddhism" or Buddhist modernism, noting its tactical resemblance to Protestant Christianity in its use of schools, societies, newspapers, and public debate. Asoka Weeraratna later extended this European presence by establishing the first Buddhist Vihara in Continental Europe in 1957, at Dr. Paul Dahlke's Das Buddhistische Haus in Germany.

• 6. Buddhism in the Independent State

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  Sri Lanka gained self-rule in 1948 under D. S. Senanayake, the first prime minister. Senanayake and his opponents in the left-wing parties shared a vision of a secular, plural, multi-racial state. For Buddhist ethno-nationalists, this was insufficient. They believed Buddhism deserved the privileged status it had held before colonial rule, and they drew on an idea articulated by Dharmapala: that Sri Lanka was the Dhammadipa, the Island of Dhamma, and that the Sinhalese were its rightful Buddhist guardians.

  These nationalists consolidated behind S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike's Freedom Party, which defeated the ruling UNP in 1956 on a nationalist and anti-Tamil platform. The SLFP then passed the Sinhala Only Act, making Sinhala the sole official language and alienating the Tamil minority. Under Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who became the world's first female prime minister, the party nationalised most schools receiving government aid. The Catholic minority, which ran an extensive system of mission schools, strongly resisted this move.

  The monk Walpola Rahula had provided intellectual cover for political Buddhism in 1946 with his book Bhiksuvage Urumaya, drawing on the Mahavamsa to argue that the Sinhala monk had always been socio-politically engaged. In 1972 a new constitution gave Buddhism a "foremost place" in the state, and both the 1972 and 1978 constitutions made it a state duty to protect and foster Buddhism.

  The civil war that followed, running from 1983 to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, saw Buddhist sites targeted by Tamil separatists. The Tamil Tigers attacked Sri Mahabodhi in Anuradhapura in 1984 and the Temple of the Tooth in 1998. The assassination of Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike in 1959 by the Buddhist monk Talduwe Somarama, backed by another monk Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, stands as the most extreme single act of Buddhist nationalist violence. Bandaranaike had been attempting to reach a compromise with the Tamils. According to Peter Lehr, the majority of Sinhalese monks remain strictly apolitical, but they have largely stayed silent about the activities of those who are not.

• 7. Forest Monks and Women's Ordination

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  Alongside political Buddhism, a quieter movement was taking shape. From the 1950s onward, a forest tradition developed in Sri Lanka, emphasising renunciation, meditation, and strict adherence to the Vinaya. By 1973, a study by Carrithers counted over 150 forest hermitages housing around 6,000 monks. The movement traced its roots to the 19th century; Puvakdandave Pannanananda (1817-1887) was one of the first monks to establish forest hermitages that remain occupied today, including those at Batuvita and Kirinda.

  Key 20th-century figures include Kadavadduve Jinavamsa, who co-founded the Sri Kalyani Yogasrama Sanstha with Matara Sri Nanarama. This association gathered forest meditation hermitages including Nissarana Vanaya and Na Uyana Aranya. The movement also produced scholars like Katukurunde Nanananda.

  On the question of women's ordination, the original order of nuns founded by Sanghamitta died out in Sri Lanka in the 11th century. In 1996, through the efforts of Sakyadhita, the International Buddhist Women's Association, eleven Sri Lankan women received full bhikkhuni ordination at Sarnath, India. The ceremony was led by Ven. Dodangoda Revata Mahathera and the late Ven. Mapalagama Vipulasara Mahathera of the Maha Bodhi Society in India, with assistance from monks and nuns of the Korean Chogyo order. Since 2005, ordination ceremonies for women have been organized by the head of the Dambulla chapter of the Siyam Nikaya. The higher Theravada leadership in Sri Lanka has concluded that these ordinations are contrary to Buddhist discipline, and they remain contested; women who wish to live a monastic life outside full ordination may do so as Ten Precepts Angarika nuns.