We like to imagine Buddhism as a lantern in the storm, serene and immune to the heat of politics. That image is comforting from a distance and, at the level of personal practice, not without merit. But civilisations are not built at a distance. They’re built from the granular recursion of story into structure and back again—worldviews solidifying into world‑systems through malleable mindsets, then dissolving and reforming as new conditions arise. When that recursive loop is grasped, the spectacle of Buddhist symbols, chronicles and monastic authority being mobilised to legitimise majoritarian nationalism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka stops being an anomaly and unfortunately becomes a predictable pattern. Not because Buddhism is inherently violent, but because no sacred narrative is inert once it is fused to identity, territory and the machinery of the state. Contemporary America illustrates this principle most clearly: fuse faith and flag under a state sure of its virtue, and myth ossifies into law.
I begin with patterns because, frankly, forecasting is sterile without them. A community’s answer to the perennial questions—who are we, what matters, how should we live—coheres into national institutions, laws and rituals. Those artefacts then choreograph everyday habits of thought and feeling. In both Myanmar and Sri Lanka, the sanctity of the Buddhist dispensation is entwined with the majority’s sense of self, the legitimacy of rulers and the meanings attached to territory. From chronicles that narrate righteous kingship and heroic defence of the island or the realm, to constitutions granting Buddhism a privileged place, to schoolbooks and sermons that knot faith with language and blood, the narrative infrastructure has long been in place. Add a modern state security apparatus and a volatile media ecology and you have all the conditions required for a sacral politics that casts the protection of “race and religion” as a moral emergency.
If that sounds like diagnosis, it is deliberately so. Ideas often behave like pathogens. They have vectors, incubation periods and reproductive numbers. In Myanmar, the sudden ubiquity of Facebook, weak moderation in local languages and coordinated campaigns by political and clerical entrepreneurs produced a memetic environment in which inflammatory myths about Muslims—especially the Rohingya—spread more rapidly than corrective speech. UN investigators later suggested that this amplification contributed to atrocity crimes.
In Sri Lanka, the end of the civil war created a vacuum in which a different adversary could be imagined. Street‑wise monks and their lay allies reframed halal certification, dress codes and intermarriage as fronts in a civilisational struggle. When a jihadist cell committed the Easter bombings in 2019, the cognitive trails had already been laid; reprisals and securitised policies, including the temporary insistence on cremations during the pandemic that ran roughshod over minority religious duties, were justified as necessary hygiene for the body politic. If we know that fear can become epidemic, why would we not build civic immune systems—prebunking rather than chasing lies after they have lodged, locally grounded early‑warning networks, and rituals of checking before acting that are as normal as washing hands?
Psychology deepens the picture without in any way reducing it. Sacred values are defended with heightened vigilance, particularly when leaders insist those values are under siege. When monks declare that the faith and the nation are inseparable, that the wombs of Buddhist women must be defended, or that minority‑owned businesses are disguised instruments of cultural conquest, they activate moral foundations of loyalty and purity while dialling down the weight given to care and fairness. Threat sensitivity rises. Identity fusion takes hold—the sensation that the group is the self—making coercion seem necessary and violence defensive. Under such conditions, legal arguments about rights bounce off the shield of sanctity. Persuasion must then touch the same affective circuits being activated by demagogues. Could “protection” be reframed as the protection of every child from humiliation and hunger? Could “purity” be redirected from anxieties about bodies and borders towards the probity of those who hold power and the integrity of public speech?
None of this should be interpreted as spontaneous combustion. On the contrary, these are learned performances. Rituals of merit‑making, flag salutes, marches led by monks, sanctification of public spaces with relics, curated anniversaries of victory and sacrifice—these are the theatres where a sacred nation is rehearsed into being. The Mahavamsa’s tales of battles and blessings on the island, or Burmese chronicles celebrating righteous rulers, are not simply histories; they are pattern libraries from which repertoires of action are selected in the present. In Sri Lanka, the island as dhammadīpa, entrusted with the dhamma, continues to be imagined in ways that render pluralism precarious. In Myanmar, a vocabulary of “race, language and religion” has for decades been used by the military to script loyalty and stigmatise dissent. Yet the same cultural grammars also house threads of generosity, humility and non‑attachment that can be rehearsed differently. Might we redesign civic rituals so that their default effect is to widen the circle of belonging rather than narrow it?
The practical mechanics of weaponisation are not obscure. In Myanmar, the 1982 citizenship law narrowed belonging so drastically that the Rohingya were effectively cast outside the polity, a legal prelude to the clearance operations of 2017 that forced more than 700,000 people across the border and now form part of proceedings at the International Court of Justice. Monastic movements such as 969 and MaBaTha, subsequently rebranded, championed “protection” laws in 2015 policing interfaith marriage, conversion, monogamy and reproduction—statecraft in the register of sanctity. In Sri Lanka, constitutional language granting Buddhism the “foremost place” has been interpreted by some as permission to privilege Sinhala‑Buddhist culture. Parties courted clerical endorsements, and monks entered electoral politics, normalising a traffic between pulpit and parliament. Street violence in Aluthgama and Kandy didn’t emerge from nowhere; it fed on cues that vigilante enforcement of majoritarian norms would be tolerated. After the 2021 coup in Myanmar, the new junta again sought monastic legitimisation even as sections of the sangha supported resistance. If these are facts, what becomes of the claim that religions are a private affair beyond policy?
Mysticism seems, at first glance, to pull in a different direction. If practice aims at a lucid release from self‑clinging, what are we to make of the obsession with an unblemished collective identity? If compassion is meant to be boundless, how can we sanction cruelty to neighbours on the grounds that they are not “really” of us? For some, the duty to guard the dispensation is the higher calling. For others, that very insistence is a snare that multiplies suffering. Instead of arguing from doctrine, might we experiment with civic practices that translate non‑attachment and loving‑kindness into institutional habits—officials trained to pause, to inquire into causes and conditions before acting; public hearings that begin with a shared intention to reduce harm; education in disciplined attention to the effects of our words as they move through networks?
Ends and means must be held together. The ultimate aim of a state is often presented as order, security and growth. The telos of a contemplative path is liberation from suffering and delusion. When these are fused clumsily, the state pretends to save souls and the sangha grabs worldly authority, producing salvation politics that treat citizens as raw material for a project to which they did not consent. What if we inverted the test? Judge a government by the suffering it actually reduces. Not the enemies it claims to defeat. Not the monuments it builds. The practical consequences become startlingly concrete: overhaul laws that encode hierarchy of belonging; guarantee that police protect assemblies equally; ensure that those who orchestrate incitement face consequences; require platforms to invest seriously in civic integrity in the languages people speak. These are the bare minimum. They don’t get us to the transformation I care about.
I have argued for years that we’re stuck in first‑order problem‑solving, treating symptoms within the logic that produces them. Anticipatory governance asks us to cultivate different literacies: deep pattern recognition, the capacity for multiple ontologies to coexist without collapse into relativism, an ethic of care that scales, a knack for redesigning systems so that better behaviours become the path of least resistance. Applied here, that means moving beyond the spurious notion that a better law or an election will suffice, although both matter. It means designing for proximity so that daily life is shared, not segregated. It means training monks, priests and imams in network stewardship so that moral authority is exercised as care, not manipulation. It means establishing civic epidemiology units that monitor memetic outbreaks the way we monitor dengue fever or cholera, with dashboards in vernacular languages and neighbourhood response teams trusted enough to knock on doors before rumours ignite. It means embedding ethical speech audits into political campaigns and televised debates, with standards as stringent as those in aviation or medicine, not to police thought but to reduce harm. It means convening citizen assemblies that include women from monastic orders, religious minorities, youth and the poor, and giving those assemblies teeth, not just cameras.
None of this belongs to the left or the right, and none of it is alien to Asia or native to the West. Ubuntu insists that “I am because we are”. Buddhist interbeing points to the same entanglement. Confucian role ethics can be read as permission for conformity or as a scaffold for mutual responsibility. Liberal commitments to individual dignity are often caricatured as foreign impositions, yet do they not rhyme with local philosophies of compassion and restraint when those are at their best? Indigenous understandings of kinship with land interrupt extractive politics, and that interruption is urgently needed where development has come to mean the monetisation of everything. The point is not to synthesise these traditions into a bland universal, but to let them interrogate and enrich one another so that the most life‑affirming strands can be amplified and the most exclusionary tendencies transformed.
Some will bristle at the very suggestion that Buddhism can be implicated in harm; that it’s more philosophy than religion. They might ask whether highlighting extremist appropriations plays into hostile narratives. That’s a fair concern. The record matters. In both Myanmar and Sri Lanka there are monks and lay Buddhists who have stood against violence and chauvinism, who marched for democracy in 2007 and again in 2021, who put their bodies between mobs and mosques, who insist that the protection of the dhamma is meaningless if it does not issue in the protection of vulnerable neighbours. The sangha is not a monolith. The body politic is not a monolith. Recognising their diversity is not a prelude to both‑sides relativism; it’s the ground from which sensible action grows.
If I sound impatient, it’s because the stakes are not theoretical. When Rohingya families are stripped of citizenship and driven from their homes; when Muslim traders in Kandy or Aluthgama watch shops destroyed while police look away; when communal fear is stoked to win elections or consolidate a coup; the wound is not purely local. It is civilisational. Every time a people’s deepest sources of meaning are conscripted into the service of exclusion, trust erodes, and with it the capacity for us to imagine viable futures together. That erosion is global. We witness it in different guises from Delhi to Warsaw, from Lagos to Washington. The lesson travels: worldviews become world‑systems through mindsets rehearsed in ordinary life, and these can be redesigned.
So what might we do, not as a checklist but as a new habit of mind and a practice of governance?
· Imagine rewriting constitutions as compacts of mutual care, where any clause granting primacy to a tradition is inseparable from robust guarantees to minorities and enforceable duties on the state to foster belonging.
· Imagine allocating public funds to interfaith commons—shared libraries, clinics, kitchens and festival spaces—co‑designed by clergy and lay communities to institutionalise proximity.
· Imagine school curricula that teach the epidemiology of ideas alongside history, so that children learn how rumours spread and how to interrupt them without humiliation.
· Imagine civil servants trained in contemplative disciplines that sharpen attention and reduce reactivity, not to spiritualise the state but to improve its judgement.
· Imagine platform companies required to publish transparent, independent audits of how their design choices affect civic harm in every language where they operate.
Each of these is possible. The constraint is not knowledge but willpower. I offer them not as distant ideals but as pragmatic steps grounded in a single proposition: public life should be organised around reducing suffering. If that principle feels too soft for the rough‑and‑tumble of politics, ask yourself what alternative telos we have been living under and whether it has delivered what it promised.
I can’t claim certainty about how each element will play out in every place; context is everything. But I refuse the counsel of cynicism that says nothing can change. The very plasticity of the forces we’re discussing—narrative, ritual, identity, law—means they can be redirected. If fear can be engineered, then so can courage. If hatred can be taught, so can care. If networks can amplify lies, they can also weave solidarity.
In the final analysis, the spectacle of Buddhism weaponised for nationalist ends in Myanmar and Sri Lanka is a mirror held up to our species. It shows how quickly the sacred can be recruited to soothe our anxieties about change, how easily majorities can be convinced that their survival requires the humiliation of minorities, how readily worldviews harden into world‑systems pathologised by habits of mind we barely notice.
It also shows that resistance is always present, that reinterpretation is always possible, and that design is our ally when imagination is matched by rigour. The question I return to, in every context, is deceptively simple: what would it take to make the reduction of suffering the default metric of success in politics, law, education and commerce? If we hold ourselves to that question, and if those with moral authority and technical capacity answer it together, we may yet redeem the best within our traditions from their worst uses—and, in doing so, craft a civilisation fit for all our children, wherever they happen to be born.