Sri Lanka

Located south of India along the maritime routes in the Indian Ocean, the island nation of Sri Lanka has had a long involvement with global movements of religious and cultural forms. Sri Lanka is a multireligious country with a population that is slightly more than two thirds Buddhist, with the remaining third divided roughly equally between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. The country has been influential in the historical development of Theravada Buddhism and has maintained ties with Buddhists in other countries, particularly in peninsular Southeast Asia. Sri Lanka has also had a long history of contact with Europeans, most notably the successive colonial rules of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British between 1506 and 1948. As a result of these encounters, various Christian missions were sent to the island. At the same time, European scholars studied Sri Lankan Buddhism with the indispensable assistance of local monks, and the country's Theravada texts and practices came to exert considerable influence over how people understood the history and purported “essence” of Buddhism worldwide.

Exchanges between Sri Lankans and Westerners, both positive and negative, helped spur the rise of what has been called “Protestant Buddhism,” which signifies a rational reinterpretation of the tradition in response to modern values and institutions. The lengthy colonial history also gave rise to a nationalist response that has used Buddhism as the ideological basis for mobilizing resistance to Western rule and influence. In recent decades, an [Page 1220]armed conflict and civil war between the military—which mainly comprises members of the majority Sinhala ethnic community—and a Tamil separatist group called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has cost tens of thousands of lives and sent hundreds of thousands into diaspora around the world as political and economic refugees. As a result, Sri Lankan Buddhist and Hindu religious communities are now found in many countries, contributing to the globalization of religious ideas, cultural forms, and political advocacy. This entry discusses religious exchanges in the premodern world, colonial religious history, Protestant Buddhism, Buddhist nationalism, and diaspora and virtual communities.