'The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism is Shaping Modern Asia': An unquiet silence

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Sonia Faleiro’s The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism is Shaping Modern Asia follows a spectre that is haunting parts of South Asia — radical Buddhism, which many would see as a contradiction in terms. Buddhism has, in public thinking and discourse, been associated with peace and non-violence, and the Middle Path that shuns extremes. But Sonia recounts the transformation of the religion into a militant faith, mixed up with racial or national identities or both, directed against minorities and drawing its power and even legitimacy from hatred, intolerance and intimidation. It is the invention of the Other in society and politics, aided by colonial policies and spurred by wrong readings of history, that created in...

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