‘The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism is Shaping Modern Asia’ by Sonia Faleiro is a lost opportunity

Billed as ‘narrative non-fiction’, this Columbia Global Report turned into a small book promises to unravel how Buddhist extremism is shaping modern Asia and how ‘the robe is being turned into a weapon, as radical monks and nationalist movements unleash hatred and war’ in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand.

For a serious issue, insofar as the violence against Rohingyas and other instances like it in some Buddhist-majority countries ought to be and are acknowledged as a severe blot on Buddhism’s universal claim to ahimsa and karuna, it is a shallow account, lacking depth and knowledge.

The author’s understanding of Buddhism appears to be selective readings and misinterpretations of ‘The Jataka Tales’, used as bookends — with a seasoning of the four noble truths and dukkha, themes beloved of the non-specialist. The Buddha giving his body to a starving tigress to save her from eating her cubs (p. 27) is read as self-inflicted violence being justified and prescribed for the greater good, with the tragic Tibetan case of self-immolation as resistance used as an ill-fitting example. Nor is token mention made of the fact that even in their acts of quiet desperation, Tibetan self-immolators have never actually tried to inflict harm on others, which is always a marked possibility when so-called extremists are willing to die for their religion.

The bodhisattva monkey king sacrificing his body so others could live (p. 138) is taken as an illustration of the fact that although faith and power do collude — which ought to come as a surprise to no one save the author — the study actually found many monastics who resisted religion being used as a weapon, upholding Buddhism’s original values at great personal cost and sacrifice in all three sites of Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand.

Indeed, a learning for me from this book is how brutal state violence is inflicted on the monastic communities in these countries at various junctures, yet courageous individual monks still chose to stand up for the values of Buddhism, emerging as the unintended heroes of this account.

According to latest Pew Research Center Censuses (2025), countries with the highest number of Buddhists, all falling in Asia, are: China (254m); Thailand (66m); Japan (41m); Myanmar (41m); Sri Lanka (15m); Vietnam (15m); Cambodia (15m); and South Korea (11m). In a work that is supposedly tackling how extremist Buddhism is shaping the whole of modern Asia, the big elephant in the room that goes unmentioned is China and its coercive religious policy, including the politicisation, Sinicisation and attempted decimation altogether of Tibetan Buddhism.

To illustrate, Tenzin Kunsel, the Tibetan nun, is cited as having left Tibet because in a patriarchal act, nuns in Lhasa are not given an education (p. 26), and not because the 1950s transpired, and the CCP is actually seeking to erase them altogether, for example, at Larung Gar, Serthar County, Sichuan Province. Nor is China’s shaping of the whole of Asia and world today through its sheer economic and military might — including the study site countries — even acknowledged.

This is especially curious as the book unnecessarily opens with Tibetan Buddhism, planting its epicentre as Dharamsala, with nary a mention of the seismic events of 1959 or of their decades long iconic non-violent resistance to a colonising great power, where the principles of Buddhism are what has compelled the Dalai Lama to hold his people to the foundational principle of non-harm. Instead, trite topics are dealt with in a hackneyed manner, such as the Kung Fu Nuns of Nepal.

Relatively good journalistic prose in the primary interview material covering Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand are a relief, as are the travel accounts to meet with some interviewees. But the big-fish interviews — such as with Aung San Suu Kyi, which is an original and eye-opening part that ought to have got more coverage — are merely citations of others’ work, which is a pity.

Other oversights are glaring. Take the cover illustration of Acala wielding the sword of wisdom to cut the root of ignorance — it is a Tibetan deity, not practised in the Pali tradition countries that are the remit of this book, yet used to misguide readers on what the sword stands for. The repeated synonyms used as adjectives for overweight monastics, used to demonstrate their non-renunciate and violent nature one may deduce, is simply a giveaway of poor inference and ethics.

In conclusion, this sweeping, leap-frogging and ignorant account of 2,500 years of a religion, as well as vast swathes of geography and geopolitical territory, appears in size, title, and reach to want to emulate EH Gombrich’s ‘A Little History of the World’, but falls far short. It is a real lost opportunity for a serious book on a very important topic, and that is the collusion of state power and Buddhist faith in some countries at some points in contemporary Asia.

— The reviewer is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Excellence in Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence