Buddhist Brotherhood: The Sinhala Ethic and the Development of Anti-Muslim Capitalism

In the years preceding the recent violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka, militant Sinhala Buddhist groups advocated for urgent improvements to the country’s deteriorating political-economic conditions, asserting that such improvements must be grounded in Buddhist values. Central to their framing of this deterioration has been the portrayal of Muslims—their businesses, population growth, and perceived economic dominance—as primary contributors to the discontent, a phenomenon they termed “Muslim encroachment.” In response, these groups proposed an economic agenda centered on an ideal society, anchored in what they called a “Buddhist Brotherhood,” as a solution to their grievances. In this talk, Dharmasinghe argues that this proposal is modelled on an imaginary conception of ‘brotherhood’ among Muslims. On the contrary to envisioning business success solely through Buddhist ethics, however, the proponents of the proposal rearticulated their economic and national concerns emulating Muslim business practices that are imagined as conducive to business success and personal growth in the interest of creating a more disciplined, less corrupt employer and employee—a process she calls ‘pecuniary emulation cannon’ of militant Buddhist tradition.

About the speaker

Geethika Dharmasinghe is a postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2022, Geethika Dharmasinghe earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University in Asian Literature, Religion and Culture with specializations in the relationship of Buddhists to violence in contemporary times. Her dissertation research, Terror-Making in Buddhist World was funded by the Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork grant. From Fall 2022 to Fall 2023, she held the post of Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University. An anthropologist of religion, her teaching and research converge around literatures on New Social Movements, Buddhist modernity, nationalism and the political economy of South and Southeast Asia.

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