‘Our Duty to Fight’: The Rise of Militant Buddhism

The New York Times
By Hannah Beech
Article
July 8, 2019

A call to arms for Sri Lankan monks. Ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. A Buddhist faith known for pacifism is taking its place in a new age of nationalism.

Thousands of Buddhists listening to Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most revered Buddhist leaders, also known by his monastic name Ashin Nyanissara, in Paleik, Myanmar, in November 2017.CreditCreditMinzayar Oo for The New York Times

GINTOTA, Sri Lanka — The Buddhist abbot was sitting cross-legged in his monastery, fulminating against the evils of Islam, when the petrol bomb exploded within earshot.

But the abbot, the Venerable Ambalangoda Sumedhananda Thero, barely registered the blast. Waving away the mosquitoes swarming the night air in the southern Sri Lankan town of Gintota, he continued his tirade: Muslims were violent, he said, Muslims were rapacious.

Militant monks / Carved up along religious lines, Southeast Asia bleeds

SOUTHEAST ASIA 
GLOBE
By: Lindsey Kennedy & Nathan Paul Southern 
April 25, 2019

A toxic mix of nationalism and religious extremism is leading to a wave of political violence across Southeast Asia

In 1998, when Thet Swe Win was in the ninth grade, he picked up a propaganda booklet at school in downtown Yangon. In it, he read that his race and religion were under threat. If Muslims were allowed to spread, the booklet claimed, it would not be long before Burmese Buddhists would vanish.