It has been more than a century since Dominican author Manuel de Jesús Galván, in his only historical novel Enriquillo, presented, although sympathetically, the two aspects of Spanish colonisation of the Americas — the cross and the sword. The sword represented the brutal conquest of pillage and murder, and the cross, the salvation that was supposedly brought about by the Christian faith.
In 2025, journalist and author Sonia Faleiro, in her minutely researched narrative non-fiction book, The Robe and the Sword, returns to this old pairing. However, contrary to the colonial encounter in which the cross and the sword had different carriers, in her account of contemporary militant Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, the robe and the sword are not opposing forces. They are worn and wielded by the same people.
Faleiro aims to make a straightforward point. Buddhism is not an exception among religions. Like any faith, it could be used to justify violence or peace-making, exclusion or inclusion. Its adherents are no less susceptible to political manipulations and the often-irrational passions of nationalism.
What makes this story particularly hard to tell is the simplistic image of Buddhism it unsettles, especially in the West, where Buddhism has long been reduced to a sanitised aesthetic of robes, chants and meditations. It is this caricature that makes it difficult to accept the inconvenient reality that Buddhist monks have played a role in legitimising, organising and at times, even perpetrating large-scale violence. Her book traverses Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, tracing how monks, often shielded by religious authority, have helped transform the faith of peace into a political weapon.
Faleiro starts her narration with Sri Lanka, where militant Buddhism has been intertwined with post-colonial state formation and nation-building. Groups like the Bodu Bala Sena, literally the Buddhist Power Army, are not aberrations but the latest manifestations of a longer tradition in which Buddhism has been mobilised to consolidate Sinhala majoritarianism. During the Sri Lankan civil war that ran from 1983 to 2009, monks lent legitimacy to state violence against Tamils. After the end of the war, the hostility was redirected towards the country’s Muslims.
The monks’ proximity to power, reinforced by Buddhism’s constitutionally privileged status, has often placed them beyond accountability. ‘The yellow robes,’ as one Muslim politician of Sri Lanka put it, ‘are untouchable’ (p. 35). Monks who agitated for stringent measures during the civil war earned themselves monikers like ‘war monks.’
After the war, when Bodu Bala Sena and similar groups led violent anti-Muslim campaigns, burning houses and terrorising villages, as they did in Aluthgama in 2014, they justified the violence as a necessary defence of Buddhism itself. ‘Attaining nirvana,’ they insisted, ‘can wait’ (p. 35).
Written in lucid lyrical prose, The Robe and the Sword is immersive without being indulgent
The author then moves to Myanmar, which offers an even starker illustration. There, Buddhist monks were central to the rise of explicitly anti-Muslim movements like the 969 campaign that was led by the Ma Ba Tha organisation, especially by their firebrand founder, Ashin Wirathu. Muslims, derogatorily labelled Kalar, referring to the relative darkness of their skin tone, were economically boycotted, politically disenfranchised and eventually ethnically cleansed. The monks were crucial to all three of these stages of the Rohingya genocide.
Faleiro captures the bitter irony of this history at the Mae Sot border between Myanmar and Thailand. Many monks who once incited hatred against the Rohingyas find themselves displaced by the military coup of 2021 and the civil war that followed. They shelter uneasily in exile, very much like the Rohingya whom they had helped expel and who remain dispersed across Bangladesh and India.
Militant Buddhism, Faleiro shows, does not exist in isolation. Its leaders borrow strategies and rhetoric from religious nationalists elsewhere. Sri Lanka’s Bodu Bala Sena sought collaboration with India’s RSS soon after the BJP came to power in 2014. In the same year, Wirathu travelled from Myanmar and was received as a special guest in Sri Lanka by Bodu Bala Sena’s leader, Galagoda Gnanasara.
Anti-Muslim narratives circulating in India and the West after 9/11 were repurposed in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, casting Muslims as demographic threats, sexual predators, and civilisational outsiders. The fear of extinction of a race, a culture, a faith, becomes the engine that draws communities towards violence.
The historical weight of colonialism looms large throughout the book, shaping modern nationalism and the categories of belonging and exclusion they rely on. The methods are strikingly similar across contexts: demonising minorities, weaponising women’s bodies, and projecting political anxieties onto religious identities. What changes is not the logic but only the colour of the robe.
After painting the rather frightening picture of the actions of saffron-clad Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, the author, in a positively desperate bid to seek a hopeful end to her book, reaches Thailand. There, she encounters dissident Burmese monks resisting the junta, women monks challenging the patriarchy of the Theravada Sangha, and critics of what they believe is the crass commercialisation of Buddhist holy sites and practices in Thailand. These figures offer no easy redemption, but they remind the reader that religious traditions are never monolithic.
Written in lucid lyrical prose, The Robe and the Sword is immersive without being indulgent. Characters walk in and out of the book with effortless ease. Each event of violence reported, each of the author’s encounters with her interviewees and each of her visits to important sites are described in vivid detail, making the readers see what she saw and almost making them feel what she felt.
The book’s real provocation lies not in placing “Buddhist” and “violence” in the same sentence, but in asking a deeper question: what happens to a philosophy of peace when it enters the pursuit of power? It is a question that extends well beyond Buddhism and far beyond South and Southeast Asia.