2.1. Approach, perspective, and sources

To start with, what do I mean by Buddhism? I take Buddhism to consist of actors, texts, practices, and much else, entwined in a process of action and reflection. It has dominant and peripheral readings. It has different “careers” in different places, growing, changing, and being transformed in different ways across space. What I focus on in this piece is limited to one particular, if dominant, reading of Buddhism.

The way Buddhist actors draw on Buddhism to construct constitutional order can be studied from different perspectives. Since my aim is to uncover the motives behind Buddhist primacy, I try to understand the work of these actors from their own perspective and that of the worldview they adopt. This is an ideological or affective account, and this is why a central source for this piece is Amarasekara’s book: it offers a sense of how he thinks of his own positions. With this account in place as a foundation, I turn to the architecture of Buddhist primacy to suggest what makes it such a persuasive, powerful ideology.

My perspective is different from the institutional account of Buddhism and constitutions favoured by the leading voice in the field, Benjamin Schonthal. Schonthal proposes “Buddhist constitutionalism” as an analytical construct that enables dialogue with accounts of Islamic influence on constitutions. He looks at the central tendencies of actors who mobilise around Buddhism and constitutions in Sri Lanka and Thailand and concludes that at the centre of Buddhist constitutionalism are questions of “how to balance royal/political authority and ecclesiastical authority” (Schonthal, Reference Schonthal2017, p. 708). Schonthal’s work tells us a great deal, yet like any worthwhile scholarship, it misses something important. After all, from the point of view of the actors themselves—that is of the Buddhists engaged in the projects Schonthal discusses—it is puzzling to suggest that “state–sangha relations” (the Sangha is the Buddhist monastic community) is what is central to their activity. As we shall see, they do not justify their actions primarily in these terms. This is not to deny the value of Schonthal’s account but to recognise the different-yet-productive ways that perspective can be employed.

The rest of this part explains how Buddhist primacy took the particular form that it does on the island.Footnote ⁴ Buddhist primacy draws on the pre-colonial, but is Enlightenment-shaped; it is universal, but entwined with a particular people; it is transcendent, yet under threat. Its formation is linked to a struggle between two competing visions of government. On the one hand, pre-colonial forms, deeply influenced by Buddhism. On the other hand, modern forms, introduced by colonial Britain. The story of Buddhism and secular modernity is a story of attempts to displace the former, only for it to return, transformed by its encounter with the latter.

2.2. Colonial government

From 1505 to 1948, the island of Lanka had the Portuguese (1505–1656), the Dutch (1656–1796), and finally the British (1796–1948) on its shores. While all three ruled the coastal littoral, with rebellions and resistance, it was the British who captured the entire island in 1815. Colonial government in Lanka was not monolithic. At first, little changed. The Portuguese kept the coast’s native system of administration, one that had “the king at the apex and several grades of officials under him” (Wickramasinghe, Reference Wickramasinghe2014, p. 14), with officers of the king in charge of different territories. In fact, they placed themselves at the top of this pyramid and allowed “the customary hierarchy determined by caste and land ownership” to continue (Wickramasinghe, Reference Wickramasinghe2014, p. 15). The Dutch followed suit (Wickramasinghe, Reference Wickramasinghe2014, p. 16). The British did the same along the coast, though they cut down the powers of the local chiefs and abolished slavery (Mendis, Reference Mendis1956, p. xxiii). And at first, they followed the same policy in Kandy, the last independent kingdom that only fell to the British in 1815.

The native system, especially in Kandy, relied on a Buddhist-influenced vision of order, hierarchy, and authority. The anthropologist Michael Roberts expresses the nature of superior–subordinate relationships that were found here through an ideal type: the “Asokan Persona” (Roberts, Reference Roberts2021, p. 70). “Asokan,” of course, refers to Asoka, the first Buddhist emperor; his life and example are basic to Buddhist reflection on kingship and right rule (Roberts, Reference Roberts2021, p. 70). This ideal type involves

Roberts argues that in precolonial Sinhala society, the Asokan Persona captured a Buddhist king’s different roles— society’s integrating center; the fount of social order; and protector of the Dhamma or the Buddha’s teaching—and that these roles invested him with tremendous power and legitimacy. His power and legitimacy were embodied in the rituals of state, its spatial organisation, and its “devolved” administrative structures (Wijeyeratne, Reference Wijeyeratne2007, pp. 156, 159). Yet this system of religiously inflected rule did not last under the British. As I explain below, slowly at first, and then all at once, they brought in modern forms of governance (Casinader et al., Reference Casinader, Wijeyeratne and Godden2018).

The first turning point came in 1833. The British Parliament appointed a Commission of Eastern Inquiry (Mendis, Reference Mendis1956, p. xiii) whose members, W.M.G. Colebrooke and C.H. Cameron, were driven by the concerns of the British-based humanitarian reform movement. Drawing on the work of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith, they believed in a social order based on utility, private enterprise, free trade, and democracy and opposed “mercantilism, state monopolies and discriminatory administrative regulations,” especially on ethnic and cultural lines (Wickramasinghe, Reference Wickramasinghe2014, p. 31) They came to Ceylon and set up an entirely new system of governance, one that moved away from the Asokan Persona (Scott, Reference Scott1995, p. 206).

On the economic front, the Colebrooke–Cameron reforms replaced economic relations based on caste hierarchy and royal authority with principles of free labour defined by the market (Casinader et al., Reference Casinader, Wijeyeratne and Godden2018, p. 56). For example, they abolished rajakariya—a caste-based system of corvée labour that granted land in exchange for services to the King (Mendis, Reference Mendis1956, pp. 53–54). On administration, the commissioners decided against separate systems of administration in different provinces, and pushed for a unified, central one. As a result, Ceylon was divided into five provinces administered by government agents and assistant government agents, a shift away from the previous, decentralised system. In law and government, they proposed a legal system built on the utilitarian principles of punishment and reward and limited the (previously vast) powers of the Governor (Mendis, Reference Mendis1956, pp. xlvi, 53). They also took the first steps towards representative government through a new Legislative Council. Though all 16 of its members were appointed, and most were British bureaucrats, six were not British: three Europeans, one Sinhalese, one Tamil, and one Burgher. (In 1889, this number was increased to eight, with three Europeans, one Low Country Sinhalese, one Kandyan Sinhalese, one Tamil, one Muslim, and one Burgher. Other reforms included a limited franchise—four members were elected after the 1910 McCallum reforms, two Europeans, one Burgher, and one educated. Of the non-official members, six were appointed by the Governor [two Low Country Sinhalese, two Tamils, one Kandyan Sinhalese and one Muslim] and the remaining four were elected [two Europeans, one Burgher, and one educated Ceylonese].)

The next key moment came with the end of state patronage for Buddhism. In a treaty signed with the Kandyan nobles on the surrender of that kingdom in 1815, the British had promised that: “the religion of Buddhoo, professed by chiefs and inhabitants of these provinces is declared inviolable and its rites, ministers, and places of worship are to be maintained and protected (Citizens Lanka, 2016).” Yet pressure from missionary movements meant that by the late 1830s, the British colonial government had withdrawn all support given to Buddhism, and by 1847, it had formally ended its patronage (Malalgoda, Reference Malalgoda1976, pp. 116–28).

The Colebrooke–Cameron reforms then, are an example of modernity as

I have sketched out—and it is only a sketch—the shape of this project in Sri Lanka: the emergence of the modern, colonial, constitutional order in Sri Lanka, one that sat inside a centralised, bureaucratic state, and moved away from Buddhism.Footnote ⁵ I want to focus here on the reference to secularism. Stepping back, we can see that this project involved secularism: here I follow José Casanova in referring to the emancipation of certain spheres of life—political and legal—from religion, or in this case, Buddhist-influenced principles of social order (Casanova, Reference Casanova, Calhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013, p. 56). This is different from secularisation, the rejection of religion itself, which did not occur. That is, though the British shunted Buddhism-inflected rule to the periphery, the people of Ceylon did not give up on religion, or begin to see it as part of an immature past (Casanova, Reference Casanova, Calhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013, pp. 57, 60; Taylor, Reference Taylor2007, p. 269).

To return for a moment to the new modern order. This order, and the men who made it possible, were powered by the European Enlightenment. That Enlightenment, for all the differences among its thinkers, had at its core the idea of “refounding morality and society on universal, tradition independent rational principles” (Gray, Reference Gray2007, p. 224). This involved

We will return to this idea, and its contested afterlife in Sri Lanka, below.

2.3. A Buddhist responseFootnote ⁶

Enlightenment ideas, and the modernity they powered, had a profound influence on Buddhism. Yet this influence was not total. Buddhist actors were agents. They had their own sensitivities and concerns, whether protecting holy sites, debating ritual calendars, or building Buddhist networks across the Indian Ocean (Blackburn, Reference Blackburn2010, pp. 209–211; Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, pp. 12, 17, 151–52). They also did not simply accept or reject modernity. Rather, they both contested and absorbed it, reshaping it for their own purposes (Táíwò, Reference Táíwò2022).

We see this in the Buddhist revival prompted by Britain’s displacement of Buddhism and the spread of Christian missions. As the revival gained strength, Buddhist leaders appropriated the modern methods of Christian missionaries and used those methods against them. This decision was encouraged by the arrival, in 1880, of two members of the Theosophical Society, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a veteran of the United States’ civil war, and Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian mystic and author. Both of them helped transform the Buddhist response through a strategy described by Olcott as follows:

This call to arms, and the Buddhist Theosophical Society founded by Olcott and Blavatsky to answer it, catalysed the “organizational consolidation of the Buddhist revivalist movement, as well as its transformation into a nationalist movement” (Wijeyeratne, Reference Wijeyeratne2013, p. 215). New schools, lay associations, and printing presses were begun. Funds were raised. Olcott wrote a Buddhist catechism, designed a Buddhist flag, and organised Buddhist schools and Sunday Schools. The tools of modernity were turned against the agents of Christianity. And the revival was not led by the elite, but by monks and lay persons far away from colonial power.

These actors soon began to read Buddhism in light of the European Enlightenment. A key example is from Anagarika Dharmapala, a Buddhist reformer.Footnote ⁷ Influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of knowledge and reason, he took up arms against the local folk religion that dimmed Buddhism’s rational, scientific light, and found in the canonical Buddhist Pali texts a religion fit for the twentieth century. Again and again, he contrasted the rationality of Buddhism with the myths and superstitions of Christianity.

Dharmapala also allowed modern, European ideas of race to shape his understanding of Buddhist history. He re-read the Mahavamsa, an ancient chronicle of Buddhism’s history in Sri Lanka, through a modern racial lens. For Dharmapala, the Mahavamsa became the true history of the Sinhalese race and the Sinhalese were, to him, of Aryan origin (Guruge, Reference Guruge1965, pp. 485, 487, 494; Kemper, Reference Kemper1991, p. 200). The chronicle was also no longer read as a guide to individual ethical action in the world, but also as a directive to political action in the world (Wijeyeratne, Reference Wijeyeratne2013, pp. 209–10). This soon led to the beginnings of the idea of Buddhist primacy.

Yet we find that modernity’s entry was uneven. In his essay, “Buddhism: Past and Present,” Dharmapala said:

For all his debt to the Enlightenment Dharmapala insists, contra secular modernity and its Enlightenment ideals, on a link between religion and island: Buddhism shines forth from Lanka. But there is more: there is pride and honour that the Sinhalese have remained faithful to the Buddha’s teaching for 22 centuries despite aggressors—both religious and racial.Footnote ⁸ There is also, of course, a sense of honour and dignity associated with being a people given a blessed task, and inhabiting a blessed land.

Dharmapala’s commitment to a public role for religion is also seen in his ideas about the role of the sangha or monastic community (Seneviratne, Reference Seneviratne1999). Convinced of the glories of ancient Sinhala civilisation and dismayed by its decay under colonial influence, he called for a national revival. The key figure in this project was the monk or bhikkhu, crucial to the economic, social, and ideological transformation of the nation. (Orientalism in the study of Theravada texts was a key influence on Dharmapala’s own view of what constituted true Buddhism [see Wijeyeratne, Reference Wijeyeratne2013, p. 215]). Dharmapala criticised the sangha for not contributing to society, for living off of it and for encouraging folk Buddhism rather than the true teaching. This critique was later built on by the Ven. Walpola Rahula, Sri Lanka’s most famous scholar-monk, who set out a monastic duty to defend people, land, and religion (Seneviratne, Reference Seneviratne1999, pp. 135, 176–77).

By the time of independence then, the pre-colonial vision of governance that had been pushed aside was ready to return, transformed by its encounter with modernity. The dominant, politically relevant Buddhism of the time drew on discourses of Enlightenment rationalism, but remained enchanted. It focused on the canonical Pali texts, but allowed extra-canonical works—like the Mahavamsa—to speak. It gave the layperson a greater role, but was sustained by an energised, monastic community. It included a modern, racialised reading of Lanka’s history. And it was unapologetically public.Footnote ⁹

2.4. Independence and ethnic conflict

I want to spend more time with this vision of Buddhist primacy, how it took legal and constitutional form, and responses to these developments from those outside the Sinhala Buddhist centre. For these non-Buddhist responses soon constituted a threat that Amarasekara and others were keen to counteract.

To begin with the law. After independence, the actors behind Buddhist primacy began to make constitutional claims. This was always going to spark conflict, given Ceylon’s plural context. In 1946, two years before independence, Ceylon’s population of slightly over 6.5 million people had Sinhalese (69.41%), Ceylon Tamils (11.02%), Malayaha Tamils (11.73%) and Muslims (5.61%). (Department of Census & Statistics, Sri Lanka, 2013). Of them, 64% were Buddhist, 19% were Hindu, 9% were Christian, and 6.5% Muslim. It was also the first country in Asia to have universal suffrage, and in 1948, it gained independence.

The danger was always that Buddhist primacy would combine with the logic of democratic number to lead to majoritarian rule. Minority leaders were worried. One of them, the Tamil legislator and lawyer G.G. Ponnambalam, argued that “[i]n Ceylon where communal divisions are… wide and communal antagonisms… deep seated, it is submitted that the major community should be given a ‘relative majority’ and not an absolute majority in the Legislature” (Edrisinha et al., Reference Edrisinha, Welikala, Gomez and Thamilmaran2008, p. 195). Yet these proposals were rejected. The British introduced a Westminster-style bicameral Parliament, political parties, an independent judiciary, and a minority protection clause.Footnote ¹⁰

The first example of Buddhist primacy’s legal expression was through official language legislation. Language reform was a key issue in the 1940s and 1950s. There was an elite consensus that English had to be replaced by Sinhala and Tamil as the official languages. Yet, soon this consensus dissolved. The cries for “Sinhala only” grew louder over time, led by “activist bhikkhus and a small handful of ardent Buddhist laymen” and motivated by a fear that if Tamil and Sinhala and Tamil were given parity of status, “Sinhala and indeed the Sinhalese “race, religion and culture” would somehow “vanish” (Manor, Reference Manor1989, pp. 233–4). The language debate, then, was not just about race: it was about the trinity of people, land, and religion. This was confirmed when, a few months before the decisive general election of 1956, a prominent lay Buddhist organisation, the All-Ceylon Buddhist Congress (ACBC), released a report on Buddhism’s status on the island and proposed reforms that included making Sinhala the sole official language (The Buddhist Committee of Inquiry, 1956). To protect the Sinhala language was to protect the Sinhala people; to protect the Sinhala people was to protect Buddhism.

The unlikely leader of this movement was S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, son of an elite family, student at an elite missionary school, and graduate of Oxford University. He entered politics through the UNP, then left to form his own nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Initially, Bandaranaike supported parity for Sinhala and Tamil—both would be official languages. Yet with the general elections of 1956 coming up, and with “Sinhala-only” energising a mass base, the SLFP switched from a policy of parity of status for Sinhala and Tamil to Sinhala as the sole official language. This gave Bandaranaike leadership of the Sinhala nationalist movement, which now included different organised groups—the pancha maha balavegaya—or “the five great forces”: bhikkhus, teachers, farmers, practitioners of indigenous medicine, and the peasantry. By the time of the election, even the UNP, once firmly in favour of both Sinhala and Tamil as official languages, switched to Sinhala only. But by then, it was too late. Bandaranaike won the election and passed an act making Sinhala the sole official language.

Tamil speakers soon responded with demands for autonomy. A new political party representing Tamil speakers was formed in 1949. The Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK, known as the Federal Party) declared at a convention in 1951 that

The ITAK began with non-violent demands for internal self-determination within a federal state. Electoral success made it the main Tamil voice in politics, and led to two pacts with Sinhala prime ministers—with the SLFP’s S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1957 and the UNP’s Dudley Senanayake in 1965. Both pacts granted autonomy to Tamil-speaking regions of the island. However, pressure from opposition parties—the UNP opposing Bandaranaike in 1957 and the SLFP opposing Senanayake in 1965—led to their abrogation. Things worsened in the 1970s. A new alliance of leftist parties and the nationalist SLFP passed a series of measures: public university admissions policies that discriminated based on race, depriving many Tamils of places at university that they otherwise would have secured; a first republican constitution with a constitutional clauses that enshrined Buddhism’s foremost place (Constitution of Sri Lanka, 1972, ss. 6, 18(1)(d)) secured Sinhala’s official status to the exclusion of Tamil, and declared Sri Lanka a unitary state. On religion, language, and federalism, the ITAK had failed. “Unitary” here refers to a system of government where the central government is supreme. Even if regional governments exist, they have no exclusive spheres of competence, and the central government can override their power at will. Contrast this with a federal state, one with central and regional governments. Here, regional governments do have exclusive spheres of competence, and the central government has no unilateral override. Federal states also find ways for regional and central governments to meet and cooperate, and have mechanisms to resolve disputes—usually courts. Naturally, these are ideal types. Practice and history can mean that “unitary” is a flexible term allowing tremendous power, and federalism a restrictive, non-empowering one (Rajasingham, Reference Rajasingham2022).

In response, Tamil politics shifted gears. In 1976, an alliance representing the major Tamil-speaking parties declared its intention to seek a separate state through non-violent means. Tamil armed groups also began to form, working towards the same objective. A turning point came in 1983. Though preceded by anti-Tamil riots in 1956, 1958, 1977, and 1981, 1983 was different. Thousands of Tamil civilians were killed, with apparent state support. What followed was a surge of support for an armed struggle (Tambiah, Reference Tambiah1992, pp. 70–75). By the late 1980s, Tamil political parties fell back, the armed groups became predominant, and the conflict burst into civil war (Loganathan, Reference Loganathan1996). In a few years, one of these groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), controlled Tamil politics. The descriptor for groups such as the LTTE is a key question in Sri Lanka. I use “armed groups” because while the LTTE and others like them used terrorist tactics, deliberately attacked civilian targets, and were intolerant of dissenting voices, they were also much more, running a parallel state and formed by disaffected young Tamils in response to acts of state terror by Sri Lankan governments across time. For an important discussion of the LTTE’s tactics and Tamil support for them, see Whitaker (Reference Whitaker2007, pp. 216–17). It operated through a combination of guerrilla warfare, terrorist attacks, and conventional manoeuvres, controlled large swathes of the north-east, and ran a parallel state (Rajasingham, Reference Rajasingham2019, pp. 653, 654).

2.5. The shape of Buddhist primacy

It is this intellectual and political space that explains Buddhist primacy as promoted by Gunadasa Amarasekara. Colonial-era Buddhist reform produced a Buddhism that was rational, Enlightened, and scientific—yet also enchanted, extra-canonical, and monk- and lay-powered. It adopted a racialised reading of the past, and a narrative about the unity of land, religion, and people—Lanka, Buddhism, and the Sinhalese. And as it stretched out across the island after independence, accompanied by legal and physical force, it soon faced fierce resistance. Resistance from Tamil speakers, which began as a non-violent struggle for autonomy, soon became a violent civil war for a separate state.

3.1. The Birth of Jathika Chinthanaya

As a result, by the 1980s, the Sinhala polity was in crisis. On the one hand, Tamil nationalism had morphed into a force that was determined to split the island. On the other hand, the key political vehicles of Buddhist primacy had failed. A year after the leftist parties and the SLFP formed a coalition government in 1970, educated Sinhala youth led a Marxist insurrection, fuelled by rural disaffection (Dewasiri, Reference Dewasiri2018, p. 44). By 1977, the government and its socialist programme were deeply unpopular. The UNP decimated the SLFP and the left at the 1977 general elections, won 80% of seats in Parliament, and introduced free market reforms alongside a new constitution with an executive presidency.

It is in this context that Gunadasa Amarasekara, the author of Sabhyatva Rajya Kara, comes onto the scene. Born in Sri Lanka’s deep South in 1929, and educated at Mahinda College, Galle, and Nalanda College, Colombo—both key Buddhist educational institutions—Amarasekara trained as a dental surgeon at the University of Peradeniya. It was here that he was influenced by Ediriweera Sarachchandra and Martin Wickramasinghe—leading Sinhala intellectuals and literary figures—and became a member of the “Peradeniya School,” “a literary movement that took as its inspiration the aesthetic ideology of Ediriweera Sarachchandra, who advocated a modernist approach to literature and encouraged Sinhala writers to experiment with form and content” (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 104).

Yet by the early 1960s, Amarasekera’s work had moved away from modernism towards nationalism. This shift was influenced by themes in the writing of Martin Wickramasinghe, “who was central to the cultural articulation of an authentic imaginary in Sinhala literature from the 1940s to the early 1970s” (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 105). In particular, we find the ideas of rural simplicity, organicity, and authenticity and “the symbolic triad of the Sinhala cultural imagination of the weva (tank or lake), dagoba (Buddhist stupa) and yaya (paddy field)—three symbols that hark back to glorious Sinhala kingdoms of the past” (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 106). Under this influence, Amarasekara began to fashion himself as a teacher, helping a wayward Sinhala people on their journey back to their authentic roots. In a series of novels beginning with Gamanaka Mula (The Beginning of a Journey) (Amarasekara, Reference Amarasekera1984), he told the story of a Sinhala middle class that loses contact with its authentic, rural roots only to rediscover them at a later time.

This idea—an authentic core that the Sinhalese have forgotten and must return to—was mirrored in his political writings. The late Harshana Rambukwella distils Amarasekara’s central argument as follows:

The clearest expression of this is his Anagarika Dharmapala Maaksvadeeda? (Is Anagarika Dharmapala Marxist?) (Amarasekara, Reference Amarasekera1980) where Amarasekara argues that an ancient Buddhist system of governance remains relevant for today, and that “consciousness of an indigenous form of governance remains in the collective memory of the Sinhala people and that they recognise it as part of their heritage” (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 115). Yet, this was still a time where Amarasekara’s aim was to “create an egalitarian society by combining Marxism’s revolutionary potential and Buddhism’s ethical social vision” (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 110).

It is from within this intellectual space that Amarasekara helped found a new nationalist movement called Jathika Chinthanaya, or “way of thinking of a nation” (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 42). The other key figure was Nalin de Silva, a mathematician and ultra-left intellectual who eventually moved, through epistemology and science, to a relentless Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Jathika Chinthanaya began with Sinhala intellectuals who questioned “the validity of Marxism as an emancipatory political ideology” (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 43). At first, Jathika Chinthanaya argued for an alternative, nationalist path to Marxist, egalitarian ends. There was even support for Tamil self-determination, rooted in both de Silva and Amarasekara’s leftist sympathies (Dewasiri, Reference Dewasiri2018, pp. 48–49).

Yet by the late 1980s, things had changed, with Indian involvement proving to be a key flashpoint. India had already covertly trained and armed Tamil militant groups in the 1970s and early 1980s. After the ethnic pogrom of 1983, India became a mediator in negotiations between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil political parties. A series of events led, in 1987, to Indian pressure on the UNP President, J.R. Jayawardene, to pass a constitutional amendment to devolve power. In a quid pro quo, Indian troops would supervise the disarmament of Tamil groups.

Devolution under what was the 13th Amendment to the 1978 Constitution was hopelessly flawed (Rajasingham, Reference Rajasingham2019), but it still met with a furious Sinhala nationalist response. Sinhala Buddhist nationalists argued that devolution would lead to a division of the country and that “a “division” of the country and the weakening of its sovereignty would also diminish, even doom, Buddhism and the Sinhala culture that it supports” (Tambiah, Reference Tambiah1992, p. 85), In this context, Amarasekara and de Silva’s Jathika Chinthanaya movement began to place “more emphasis on nationalism” because of a “need to challenge the “separatist threat” perceived to have come from Tamil nationalism and its local and international allies” (Dewasiri, Reference Dewasiri2018, p. 49). It evolved into a thorough-going philosophical project, an attempt to rethink all aspects of human existence through the culture and philosophy of a Sinhala nationalism-inflected Theravada Buddhism (Dewasiri, Reference Dewasiri2018, p. 47).

3.2. Sabhyatva Rajya Kara—Towards a Civilisation-State

Sabhyatva Rajya Kara or Towards a Civilisation-State is the latest stage of that project. Amarasekara no longer sees dialogue between Marxism and Buddhism as necessary; indigenous Buddhist thought and experience are all that Sri Lanka needs. Moreover, he injects the idea of “civilization” into his argument, giving the authentic Sinhala Buddhist consciousness an ancient pedigree. Drawing these ideas together, Amarasekara uses the book to set out why Sri Lanka needs a Theravada Buddhist civilisation-state, what it might look like, and how nationalists might get there.

The book was published in 2016 in the context of a perceived threat to Buddhist primacy. The Tamil separatist struggle was brutally neutralised in 2009 by the nationalist Mahinda Rajapaksa, with terrible atrocities by the armed forces and the LTTE. Yet Rajapaksa’s corruption and authoritarianism led to his own defeat at the 2015 presidential election. A new, reformist government was now in power and had promised more devolution of power and accountability for war crimes. For Amarasekara and those like him, this prompted fears that the ideology of Buddhist primacy, saved from the LTTE, was at risk once more. Yet, by 2016, the new government had fallen into corruption and infighting, and was losing support.

Amarasekara begins his book with this growing discontent against the reformist government. For him, the root of the problem was not simply the reformers’ failings. The problem was a basic lack of fit between who the Sinhalese are and the system of rule imposed upon them. Sri Lanka was the site of an ancient civilisation, with an unbroken, 2000-year-long tradition of government. The failures of Sri Lanka’s post-colonial state lay in the British imposition of a foreign form of government, part of a particular place and history, onto a people—the Sinhala Buddhists—who had their own civilisational consciousness and tradition of government.Footnote ¹¹

The British were forgetful of Ceylon’s past. They and their local collaborators thought that the Sinhala mind was an “arid land,” a “barren field,” ready to accept whatever new system that might be handed to it (Dewasiri, Reference Dewasiri2018, p. 12). British-produced local elites, says Amarasekara,

Something of the bitterness and anger of a humiliated people, told they had nothing to offer the world, emerges in Amarasekara’s writings here. Yet, he points out that none of these actions did away with Sri Lanka’s civilisational consciousness. It simply resulted in a form of government wholly unsuited to the people on whom it was imposed. This is why, Amarasekara argues, the Sinhalese had an abiding dissatisfaction with government (Dewasiri, Reference Dewasiri2018, p. 40). The British legacy: a secular, modern, parliamentary democracy with a combative party system—was inauthentic. These institutions did not fit with who the Sinhalese are. This is why the entire system needed to be infused with Theravada Buddhism: this must be the cornerstone, the logic that holds everything together. Sinhala intellectuals, the Buddhist sangha, and political leaders had a duty to bring this tradition back to the centre of the Sri Lankan state.

Amarasekara then goes on to suggest what a reformed state might look like. He draws inspiration from history to argue that the ancient Theravada Buddhist civilisation-state was based on three historical institutions: the king, the sangha, and the people. None of these branches had unlimited power; instead, each acted as a check on the other (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, pp. 35–36). The critical tasks of the rulers and the people were “the preservation and maintenance of the unitary character of the State, the protection of Buddhism, as well as the Sinhala language and culture (of the majority community)” (Senaratne, Reference Senaratne and Welikala2015, p. 10). The model was consensus-based rather than majoritarian (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, p. 64), and unlike individualism-oriented Western liberal democracy, this system was oriented towards communitarianism (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, p. 40). Of course, Amarasekara does not suggest that Sri Lanka should return to this ancient system. Rather, he argues that it should form the foundation for all thought and practice about governance in Sri Lanka (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, p. 48). He even suggests, with some pride, that the principles underlying this state could serve as a model for the rest of the world (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, pp. 60–61). Clearly, contra the assumptions of the British and their local agents, the Sinhalese have something precious to offer the world.

But what about non-Buddhists? Here is where the hegemonic core of Amarasekara’s project emerges. Inside his system, Sinhala Buddhists are dominant but not assimilationist. That is, minorities may remain distinct and celebrate their language and religion, but the state is hierarchical: Sinhala Buddhists are at the apex. This, of course, leaves no room for self-determination, federalism, or arguments about the equal dignity and worth of communities. For Amarasekara, this is simply how things have always been done. In the past, he argues, so long as non-Buddhists were willing to protect Sinhala Buddhist civilisation, the Sinhala Buddhists were willing to accept them—even to crown them their rulers:

Anything short of this acceptance of Sinhala Buddhist dominance will lead, in the long run, to the separation of the state, and a split in the trinity of land, people, and religion:

If for 2000 years all races accepted the Sinhala Buddhist civilisation as the civilisation of this state, and stayed within that civilisation while recognising their own cultural identity, why can’t they do the same now? (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, p. 58).

Any move to weaken the power of the central government—a government necessarily formed by a majority of Sinhala Buddhists—will lead to the division of the country. If all races—minorities and majority—would only become stakeholders in an overarching Theravada Buddhist civilisation, this could be prevented. But to get there, we need to accept that there is only one culture in Sri Lanka—a Sinhala Buddhist one—with all other races and religions taking their place within it.

This is Amarasekara’s vision. To give Buddhism its proper place in the constitution is to set up a Buddhist civilisation-state, one adapted to modernity but critical of it, one where minorities are welcome as long as they bow to Sinhala Buddhist dominance.

3.3. Buddhist primacy, dominance, and ethnocracy

With the broad strokes of Amarasekara’s vision before us, I turn back to the question we started with: what gives Buddhist primacy its attractive force? One answer is that Buddhist primacy serves the interests of the Sinhala Buddhists, interests towards power, survival, or wealth. Consider two examples of this kind of analysis.

First, the work of Bruce Kapferer and Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne. Both offer interpretive accounts of Buddhist primacy by bringing together Sinhala Buddhist cosmology, violence, ritual, and state structure (Kapferer, Reference Kapferer1988; Wijeyeratne, Reference Wijeyeratne2013). Their central argument is that the logic of Sinhala Buddhist cosmology structures ritual, state form, political performance, and political violence in Sri Lanka today, and that this cosmology centres on hierarchy, power, and subordination. It involves a sacred order of gods, demons, and deities, with the Buddha at the apex and demonic forces at the base (Kapferer, Reference Kapferer1988; Wijeyeratne, Reference Wijeyeratne2013, pp. 164–6). The Buddha acts as a unifying force at the top of this cosmological order, while demonic forces, with their powers of fragmentation and disintegration, sit at the base. The Buddha overcomes the demonic not by expelling it but by encompassing and subordinating it.

Kapferer and de Silva Wijeyeratne argue that this dynamic of hierarchy and encompassment continues to shape the discourse and performance of rule in Sri Lanka. To gain legitimacy, rulers must unify the polity by defeating enemies who work to fragment the state, the people and Buddhism. There is almost a mimetic effect at work here—rulers re-enact the Buddha’s cosmological unifying force by working to unify the country and protect Buddhism from external threats. Yet, in an echo of Jathika Chinthanaya, these threats are not ultimately expelled. The Buddhist ruler defends the state against minority ethnic and religious groups through a process of subordination and incorporation. Buddhist primacy subordinates the “Other.” On this analysis, Buddhist primacy is mainly about domination.

A second example links Buddhist primacy to “ethnocracy.” This is the position taken by the Sri Lankan political scientist Jayadeva Uyangoda and the legal scholar Asanga Welikala (Uyangoda, Reference Uyangoda, Stokke and Uyangoda2011; Welikala, Reference Welikala2015; Yiftachel, Reference Yiftachel2006). Ethnocracy arises in

On an ethnocratic account, Buddhist primacy is about the dominant group appropriating the state and using its resources. It is attractive because it satisfies the economic and political interests of the majority.

Seeing Amarasekara’s civilisation-state as either an enactment of Sinhala Buddhist cosmology or an attempt at ethnocracy is productive because it fits. First, with the structure and shape of Amarasekara’s proposal, which assimilates minorities but requires that they bow down to the majority but also with the fact that interests are a powerful motivator of human action (Coomaraswamy, Reference Coomaraswamy1996, pp. 1–23). Now, to be fair, by Kapferer, de Silva Wijeyeratne, Uyangoda, and Welikala, none of them explicitly discusses the reasons why Buddhist primacy is attractive to its followers. They focus more on the actors that mobilise this discourse. Yet given their focus on power and economic interests, I assume that this is what they see as having the primary, attractive force for the ideology of Buddhist primacy.

Yet I want to argue that there is more–though not less–to Amarasekara’s proposal than dominance. And this more helps us better see why it is so powerful. So while I agree that interests towards political and economic power are part of the explanation of Buddhist primacy’s attractive force, I don’t think they exhaustively explain it. Its force comes from something more and what that something more might be is illuminated by reading Amarasekara in the company of post-secular thinkers.

4.1. Amarasekara in the company of post-secular thought

I have said that I want to read Amarasekara in the company of post-secular thinkers. What do I mean?

To explain, it might help to say something about the similarities and differences between these two sets of writers. Amarasekara and post-secular thinkers like Asad, Taylor, and Habermas start, and end, in different places. The latter address “the West,” where Christianity was dominant but no longer is, where religion was expected to vanish but has returned, where the question is “what place should a resurgent religion have in the public sphere?” And whatever the differences in their answers, thinkers like Wolterstorff, Habermas, and Taylor all endorse some kind of liberal democratic state. Yet these post-secular thinkers are united in how they think of religion. Casanova puts it like this, with reference to Habermas:

In essence, post-secular thinkers reject the idea of religion as a relic of the past and secularism, by contrast, as grounded in universal, neutral, rational principles. Their claims are not about the “re-enchantment” of the world, or even an increase in religiosity. Rather, they are about putting the “religious” and the “secular” on the same epistemic plane.

Amarasekara is different from these writers in many ways, but he shares this basic intuition about religion. His work is not “post-secular” because Sri Lanka never secularised, i.e. never saw its people give up on religion, and his aim is not a liberal democratic state, but a Theravada Buddhist one. Yet he shares post-secular thinkers’ scepticism about secularism’s claim to be rooted in universal principles acceptable to all reasonable, rational persons.

This is where reading these thinkers in each other’s company comes in. This is not a rigid or structured formula. It is a matter of putting two unlikely things together and seeing what “comes up,” a move along the lines of the free play of conversation, or an intuitive looking from one to another, a noticing of similarities and contrasts that leads to greater insight. This insight is made possible precisely by the mix of similarity and difference between these thinkers.

Why do I say this? First, at a basic level, a common project of scepticism might be a reason for bringing critiques and insights from one arena to another—they are addressing the same problem.Footnote ¹³ But their difference is also helpful. They are different enough for us to learn something about the directions scepticism about the secular might take. There is also enough similarity between them, enough common ground, for us to be surprised by difference, to stop and ask “why” when it turns up. This surprise pushes us to look more closely at each of them.

This movement from one to the other helps us, I suggest, understand Buddhist primacy better precisely because that ideology is deeply intertwined with the fundamental questions these post-secular thinkers address: religion, state, power, attraction, and affect. More specifically, a reading in company does three things that help us understand the power of the civilisation-state better. First, it puts the religious and the secular “on the same plane,” opening us up to the possibility that politics or economics is not all that is at work in Buddhist primacy. Second, it keeps us alert to the reality that power can be part of what drives these claims. Third, it gives us the conceptual tools and vocabulary to understand the affective, energising, motivating features of Buddhist primacy better. Let me look at each of these in turn.

4.2. A sectarian civilisation-state?

First, we find that Amarasekara and the post-secular put the secular and the religious on the same plane.

To show how, let me start with an obvious criticism of Amarasekara’s project: its sectarianism. This objection would say that Amarasekara proposes a system for the rule of all based on principles that are only acceptable to some. This is a kind of tyranny; shouldn’t the rule of all be ruled by neutral principles that all rational persons can accept? While this objection seems to make sense, turning to the post-secular undermines it.

Start with Amarasekara’s critique of the Sri Lankan constitutional order. His claim, from the very first page of Sabhyatva Rajya Kara, is that it does not fit. The Enlightenment ideals of the British Colebrooke–Cameron Commissioners and their successors are forgetful of the past: of the Enlightenment’s own past as local, situated, and particular and of Sri Lanka’s past, and its indigenous tradition of government.

There is a vast literature on the situatedness of the Enlightenment and modernity (MacIntyre, Reference MacIntyre1988; Gray, Reference Gray2007). In essence, it argues that the Enlightenment is not traditionless, universal, or the simple revelation of reality through the stripping away of myth and superstition. Rather, the Enlightenment is itself traditioned, particular, and constructed. And this critique extends to systems of rule built on Enlightenment ideals—a critique that Amarasekara makes in Sabyathva Rajya, as noted in the sections above. He points out that the “Westminster-style Parliament, the party system, and democracy” (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, p. 8) that the British left behind was built in England, at great sacrifice, and “reached its current state after many hundreds of years of evolution” (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, p. 11). Its claims to universality are misguided at best; a power-play at worst (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016, pp. 40, 64). The British legacy—a secular, modern, parliamentary democracy with a combative party system—is inauthentic. It does not fit with who the Sinhalese are. The entire system needs to be overhauled, with Theravada Buddhism as the cornerstone, the logic that holds everything together.

Now, Amarasekara’s proposal might be sectarian, in that only some Sinhala Buddhists can access the premises Amarasekara relies on. But the post-secular critique of the secular shows us that sectarianism, or a lack of neutrality, is a problem for everyone—not just for Amarasekara.

To see why, let us turn to a key post-secular debate: one on the place of religious reasons in public deliberation on government policy. This debate applies mutatis mutandis to the question of the principles on which a state should be built. The objection from sectarianism against Amarasekara was best voiced by John Rawls. Rawls argues that decisions about “constitutional essentials” should be based on reasons that all reasonable citizens find intelligible and accessible. This is what makes them “public” and legitimate—they are, in principle, accessible to all:

A “public basis of justification” requires that we use “plain truths now widely accepted, or available, to citizens generally.” Why is this important? For reasons of legitimacy and equal dignity and worth. To decide, for instance, that Sri Lanka should adopt a unitary state because the land is essential to the survival of Buddhism is to determine the structure of state power based on reasons that many citizens—most non-Buddhists and some Buddhists—do not accept. To allow these reasons in is to exclude those many citizens from engaging in public conversation about basic questions. It is to push them aside, to refuse to treat them with equal respect. As Habermas puts it “[t]he exercise of power that cannot be justified in an impartial manner is illegitimate because it reflects the fact that one party is forcing its will on another” (Habermas, Reference Habermas2008, p. 122). Or as Chaplin says, “[t]o offer them a reason we know they can never make sense of or assess for themselves is in effect to say to them, ‘Don’t think—trust me’” (Chaplin, Reference Chaplin2021, p. 86).

But this assumes that there might actually be reasons that are neutral. Are there? This is where post-secular thought sharpens Amarasekara’s point. The idea of neutral reason, neutral because independent of religion or any other sectarian doctrine, is difficult to support (Asad, Reference Asad2003; Audi and Wolterstorff, Reference Audi and Wolterstorff1997). The problem is that any principles from which reasons for a particular form of government emerge are always grounded in “faith-like” commitments that some might find inaccessible or unintelligible. For example, secular liberalism has at its foundation a commitment to the supreme value of individual autonomy. Rational individuals may accept that individual autonomy is important; they may struggle, however, to understand why it is supremely important. The same is true of Marxist theories of society, or Kantian moral philosophy, or Buddhist ideas of no-self, karma, or Nirvana. That is, “sectarian” faith-commitments, whether religious or secular, are inescapable in any normative framework that governs society. For these always have a commitment to things such as “the nature of truth, the purpose of human life, the source of morality … or, perhaps, the inscrutability or absence of all such things” (Chaplin, Reference Chaplin2021, p. 63). And this is precisely what we should expect, notes Wolterstorff, for

If all the reasons we might offer to justify constitutional order are based on principles grounded in faith commitments, then all reasons are “sectarian.” That is, they will always be inaccessible to some, even many, rational citizens. Secular reasons share this problem because secularism has its own assumptions and genealogies and cannot claim a privileged place as a public, universal, rational system—as opposed to an irrational, private, and sectarian religion (Asad, Reference Asad2003; Connolly, Reference Connolly2005).

If this critique meets its mark—and I think it does—then it undermines the objection from sectarianism. We can no longer easily dismiss Buddhist primacy as reducible to politics to economics. That kind of reductionism is plausible only if we think of religion as fundamentally irrational and faith-grounded, rather than rational. It is a view that leads, fairly quickly, to the conclusion that “true believers” are either ignorant, or disingenuous, using religion to hide their true motives—which are a desire for power or wealth or both. Reading Amarasekara in the company of the post-secular forces us to rethink this assumption. For this reading demonstrates that all norms about state power—whether religious or secular—are based ultimately on faith commitments, on reasons that admit of no further justification. And many of those who would reduce religion to politics or economics are also reluctant to reduce their own, often secular, commitments to these things. Clearly, we are not always and everywhere motivated by power and wealth—whether we are religious or secular. We are left to consider the possibility that, since secular reasons are faith-based but cannot always be reduced to politics or economics, perhaps the same applies to religious ones.

4.3. Hegemony: Secular and religious

Yet all this is not to close our eyes to the obvious. Amarasekara’s state places the Sinhala Buddhists at the apex, and requires everyone else to submit—something this “reading in company” also calls to our attention. That is, power can be a motivating factor behind religious and secular beliefs, and this is another way in which both are on the same plane.

Consider, for instance, the curious structural similarity between Amarasekara’s project and the project of a secularism that insists on a public square free of religion. Both demand total control of the public sphere. No worldview that offers a genuine challenge to the reigning paradigm is allowed. For Amarasekara, other groups’ cultures are welcome, so long as they kneel before Sinhala Buddhist hegemony; for the strong secularist, religion is fine, so long as it sheds anything about itself that might contest the tenets of secular liberalism.

So, dominance is a part of Buddhist primacy and secularist thought. A side point, but still of interest, are parallels between how post-secular theorists and scholars of Buddhism and law have attacked these hegemonic impulses. Secularist hegemony, as we saw above, claims to be neutral and therefore to possess the only set of justifying reasons that should be allowed into debates about the structure of the state. The post-secular attacks this neutrality, first through a critical genealogy that points to secularism’s particular, situated origins (Taylor, Reference Taylor2007, pp. 1–211; Bilgrami, A. Reference Bilgrami2011, pp. 16–17; Asad, Reference Asad2003) and second by countering the logic of neutrality. These moves have their parallels in responses to Buddhist primacy.

Anthropologists like Tambiah and de Silva Wijeyeratne and historians like Pathmanathan (Pathmanathan, Reference Pathmanathan2019) have questioned the idea of a unified, centralised state structure in Lanka’s history. Tambiah points out that though the king claimed total authority in pre-colonial Buddhist polities, there was much more autonomy allowed to those on the periphery, with the authority of the king weakening as the “provinces stretched farther away from the capital” (Tambiah, Reference Tambiah1992, p. 174). Others have questioned the logic of authenticity. Harshana Rambukwella’s work is instructive here, highlighting how authenticity is sustained and produced, but also how Amarasekara’s vision of authenticity is in decline (Tambiah, Reference Tambiah1992, p. 148). He points out that other discourses of authenticity have begun to take shape, including one that emphasises a Sinhala link to Ravana, the mythical opponent of Rama in the Hindu epic poem, the Ramayana (Rambukwella, Reference Rambukwella2018, p. 149; Dharmasiri, Reference Dharmasiri, Patra and Bhattacharya2024; Henry, Reference Henry2022). What is most striking, however, is the complete absence of Amarasekara’s notion of authenticity in Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya protests. The unprecedented public outpouring of dissatisfaction with government at these protests did not lead to demands for a civilisation-state alternative. Citizens demanded change, but their proposals were a mix of liberal, republican, and feminist themes. Buddhist primacy faded into the background (Uyangoda, Reference Uyangoda2022; Hemachandra, Reference Hemachandra2023). Amarasekara’s view was that the protests were “inauthentic” and part of a Western conspiracy (Amarasekera, Reference Amarasekera2023), and he would no doubt say that this is just one more instance where Sinhala civilisational consciousness was submerged.

4.4. Narrative and stance

These two strategies—attacks on authenticity and neutrality—seem to have failed. Despite a decline in its popularity, Buddhist primacy remains resilient. Rajesh Venugopal makes the point:

Perhaps part of the problem is that both strategies to deal with the hegemony of Buddhist primacy—whether the attack on neutrality or on authenticity—begin from an assumption that what we have here is nothing but a claim to power. This might be why they miss the mark: they are aiming at only one aspect of a many-headed phenomenon. But what if there is more at work?

Charles Taylor’s A secular age helps us uncover what this “something more” might be. In a discussion on the role of scientific materialism in making belief in God simply one option among others, he argues that scientific materialism gained traction despite weaknesses in the arguments supporting it because it sat inside a certain narrative and constituted a stance. For Taylor, the “materialist package”—one which sees the world as consisting of nothing but matter and believes that science has refuted God—is not convincing merely on the grounds of what science has shown. Rather, there is a posture, a certain ethically loaded account of agency, and a narrative, that give it its power. As he says:

Accepting scientific materialism allows us to see ourselves as mature, courageous adults, ready to give up childish illusions of faith, and face up to “unvarnished reality” (Taylor, Reference Taylor2007, p. 365). We can see ourselves as living up to the “ideal of the courageous acknowledger of unpalatable truths, ready to eschew all easy comfort and consolation” (Taylor, Reference Taylor2007, p. 562). This is “seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality” (Taylor, Reference Taylor2007, p. 365). This self-narrative, and this stance, he says, is part of what gives the materialist package its power. Could a similar narrative be at work with Buddhist primacy?

A return to Hauerwas might also be helpful here:

Now, one does not need to agree with Taylor or Hauerwas’s specific claims to think with them for Sri Lanka. Could participation in an adventure, an ethically charged stance, explain the “something more” of the attractive force of Buddhist primacy? I think it does.

The “something more” begins with an adventure: the Sinhala people have been given a sacred task by the Buddha himself, to protect his teachings for the sake of the world. This is the narrative that Anagarika Dharmapala appealed to as he fashioned a modern, enchanted, Sinhala Buddhism. Now this narrative, this invitation, is significant. Its narrative confers dignity, honour, and equality. Dignity and honour because a righteous superior—the righteous superior, the Buddha—has related to this land and these people in a unique way. That he did so says something about the land and the people—the Sinhalese are considered worthy of being entrusted with something precious by the Buddha himself. And this dignity and honour are shared equally, for no matter what lines of hierarchy exist in Sinhala society, everyone is equally entrusted with this task, everyone has been related to in this special way by the Buddha (Venugopal, Reference Venugopal2018, p. 38). This sense of being an equal participant in an adventure—an adventure for the sake of the world—is powerful. It can drive a secular atheist human rights activist and Marxist, no less a Sinhala Buddhist; and the drive here is a motivation beyond a desire for political or economic power. We see traces of this emotive, affective element, this sense of adventure, in the writings of Dharmapala, Amarasekara, and even in Ven. Rahula discussed before.

Yet there is more. The Sinhalese people have a responsibility, a duty to carry out an all-important task. There is shame, disgrace, if they fail, the loss of something precious, if Buddhism disappears.Footnote ¹⁴ And yet, despite obstacles and threats both foreign and local, despite ridicule and rejection, they have held firm. Thus, as Amarasekara notes, despite all odds, the Sinhalese civilisational consciousness, grounded in a civilisational task, remains intact. Though the Sinhalese are a regional and global ethnic minority (largely because of the presence of over 60 million Tamils in South India) and Buddhists are a regional and global minority (as opposed to Christianity and Islam, for instance, see Nanayakkara (Reference Nanayakkara2016)), they remain determined to fulfil the Buddha’s charge.

Here we have something of Taylor’s ethically charged stance, a picture of ourselves thrown up by a worldview which makes that worldview convincing. The Sinhala civilisational consciousness has survived 400 years of colonial rule, and the Sinhala people have remained true to their calling against remarkable odds. The narrative is of the heroic underdog. a minority in the world, under threat at home, but still carrying out a world-historical task. It is of a people, humiliated and dismissed in their own home—a people whose intellectual heritage was dismissed as a “barren land” or an “arid field”—breaking free and finding, after years of being told, even accepting, that they have nothing to offer the world, that they are the trustees of something precious for the world (Amarasēkara, Reference Amarasekera2016).

Even if we are outside the chosen community, we can still see why a people might find something noble or admirable in this vision of themselves: an embattled minority struggling to protect something of value, living with commitment and sacrifice towards this purpose. At the same time, we can affirm that precisely this story has led to terrific violence and oppression. Those outside the chosen community have had, and continue to have, first-hand experience of both. Yet, that reality need not deter us from looking closely at the multiple sources of that story’s persuasiveness. In fact, this account of the power of Buddhist primacy augments the politics and economics-centric accounts that we saw before. It tracks the structure of Buddhist primacy. And it is also open to a richer human anthropology, an account of ourselves as motivated by power and wealth but also by narrative, purpose, stance.

This then is the value of reading Amarasekara with the post-secular. It helps us see the ideology of Buddhist primacy in new ways, and questions approaches to religion and constitutions that reduce religion to politics and economics.