ABSTRACT
This chapter narrates the career of an innovative monk of Sri Lanka whose religio-nationalist and moral fervour captured the imagination of urban and suburban audiences, and whose untimely death led to a surge in Sinhala Buddhist xenophobia that shortly afterwards solidified into a political party of Buddhist monks. This party and its ideology constitute the background for the burgeoning of a new militancy in Sinhala Buddhism, that has since been pushing the major political parties towards increasing majority hegemony. The chapter concludes with a hopeful note enabled by what looks like a modest beginning, within the Buddhist monastic order itself, of an attempt to bring about inter-ethnic and religious harmony, and to safeguard the island’s early post-colonial image as a secular democracy.
