Book: THE ROBE AND THE SWORD: HOW BUDDHIST EXTREMISM IS SHAPING MODERN ASIA
Author: Sonia Faleiro
Published by: Fourth Estate
Price: Rs 599
A world afflicted by rabid, religious majoritarianism has, understandably, produced works — commentaries, reportage as well as scholarly analysis — on this hydra-headed affliction. Analyses, albeit of unequal depth, thus abound on Islamist fundamentalism in West Asia, Hindutva in New India, or Christian orthodoxy in Donald Trump’s America. But this global discourse is also plagued by a blind spot, one that is made apparent by Sonia Faleiro’s timely book. Buddhist extremism, despite its deepening footprint in Asia, has, more often than not, managed to evade scrutiny. The Robe and the Sword, based on Faleiro’s documentation of the human experiences of repression, history and structural conditions in three Buddhist-majority nations — Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand — seeks to fill this void.
Anecdotal accounts undergird the narrative: this is to be expected from a seasoned journalist like Faleiro. The stitching together of these diverse voices leads to unsettling but important revelations, such as the rise of Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara (picture) from a small-time crook to a magnetic force that feeds on and, in turn, disseminates toxic hatred against minorities. There is also Ashin Wirathu, the architect of Buddhist repression in Myanmar, especially against the Rohingya, as well as the troublesome entanglements among State, religion and monarchy that have given Thailand’s Buddhism its peculiar rough edges.
Faleiro resists easy or shallow causalities or convergences. Whereas colonialism, she contends, can be an overarching causal force to explain Buddhist majoritarianism in the cases of Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Thailand, which “was never colonized by a European power, never subjected to colonial extraction, nor forced to adopt Western racial or religious hierarchies”, also succumbed to the malaise.
What is of equal significance is Faleiro’s revelation of the solidarities between polarising forces that often take place by papering over crucial differences. India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has had no compunctions about accepting the hand of the ultranationalist Bodu Bala Sena of Sri Lanka even though the Buddhist-Sinhalese complex had been instrumental in discriminating against Sri Lankan Tamils who are Hindu. These linkages, Faleiro iterates, need to be seen in the form of a continuum. She writes how the Arya Samaj, the ideological precursor of the RSS, had “cast Buddhism as a shared spiritual legacy” in order to “establish India as a civlizational anchor”.
There are also redeeming features that are unearthed by this journalistic exposition: dissident monks battling to reclaim the faith are a case in point — Abbot Zero, in the junta’s vengeful sights in Myanmar, who broke Wirathu’s spell on him, is an example. What is most encouraging though is Faleiro’s willingness to cast an unflinching eye at the anomalies that lie at the heart of modern Buddhism. The subjugation of women in the monastic order — Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, is the first Thai woman monk to challenge this exclusion — is not glossed over.
Perhaps the most pertinent and fundamental question that Faleiro asks is this: in a disaggregated and violent world, Buddhism is increasingly choosing to engage with fault lines not through contemplation but action that is morally inconsistent with the core of the faith.