Buddhist monks have been newsworthy of late, not as practitioners of a self-abnegating tradition but as proponents of religious nationalism. Groups like the Bodu Bala Sena in Sri Lanka and MaBaTha in Myanmar today crowd into the foreground of stories on legal and political projects to defend Buddhism against its ostensible enemies, as if each is iterative of a homogeneous, novel radicalism (see Reference Schonthal and WaltonSchonthal and Walton 2016).
In the background, more nuanced but no less fascinating stories have waited to be told. Enter Schonthal's Buddhism, Politics, and the Limits of Law, a book that turns a new page in comparative constitutional law by tracking how and explaining why the Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka has since the 1940s been embroiled in disputes over the place of religion in national affairs.
For advocates of legal arrangements to manage and protect religious interests, the nub of Schonthal's message is: be careful what you wish for. “When it comes to matters of religion,” he writes, “constitutional law has damaged, rather than promoted, harmony in Sri Lanka” (11). The damage is not due to legal failure. On the contrary, it is the outcome of what he calls “pyrrhic constitutionalism,” a condition in which functioning constitutional law “has unwittingly aggravated the very grievances and tensions it was designed to mediate” (12).
The category of religion, Schonthal argues, is particularly susceptible to pyrrhic constitutionalism because of its “distinctive combination of legal weightiness and semantic lightness” (15). The normative significance and material presence of a constitutionally protected religion, he points out, is belied by definitional ambiguity and categorical flexibility, which give legal and political actors lots of leeway in dealing with religiously imbued demands for intervention.
The book pursues this argument in two Parts. The first offers a micro-historical account of Buddhist constitutionalism in Sri Lanka. It traces how religion obtained special political salience in the late colonial period (Chapter 2), became integral to debates over constitutional reform in the 1950s and 1960s (Chapter 3), and culminated in the drafting of a chapter in the 1972 Constitution to give Buddhism its “rightful place” (Chapter 4).
Throughout Part One, Schonthal demonstrates impressive abilities to locate, interpret and synthesize the contents of diverse archival materials in English, Sinhalese, and Tamil, including published and unpublished texts on constitutional drafts and revisions, reports of government bodies, letters from lobby groups, judges' personal notes, and a host of other ephemera. Reading these, he identifies three competing paradigms for management of religion in Sri Lanka through constitutional law: one, to prevent religious sentiment from influencing legislation; a second, to protect religious rights; and a third, to promote Buddhism specifically. The “preventative paradigm” of the 1948 Constitution met with strong critiques from the outset. These critiques contributed to a mode of constitutional politics that led to the charter of 1972.
In the second Part, the book moves from the religious politics of constitutional drafting to a study of “pyrrhic constitutionalism in action” (147). Supplementing findings from archival work with material from interviews, legal documentation and news reports, it explores Buddhist constitutional practice from below, rewarding the reader with a treasure trove of narratives, engagingly told, that together speak of the unintended consequences of protecting and promoting Buddhism through law.
Here, Schonthal takes a different tack from scholars of “constitutional theocracy” (Reference HirschlHirschl 2010) who concentrate on how courts moderate religious agendas. Instead, he asks how they serve as forums to raise the status and legitimacy of religiously motivated political claims. Through case studies of monastic education, a monk who wanted to practice law, an attempt to block resettlement of Muslims displaced by war, and the commercialization of Buddha images, he identifies four distinctive idioms of “Buddhist-interest litigation”: one concerned with Buddhist autonomy from the state; the other three with protection of Buddhist orthodoxy, places and symbols (Chapter 5).
Chapter 6 turns on the case of a monk who applied for a driving license and when denied it called on the courts to resolve the matter by reference both to the fundamental rights of citizens and the religious duties of the Buddhist clergy; Chapter 7, on anxieties over conversion, and the tension between freedom of conscience and the foremost constitutional place of Buddhism. In each, Schonthal illuminates the implications of secular courts having to resolve disputes argued on both legal and religious doctrinal terms, and points to the difficulties and ironies of professional judges having to decide on essentially religious questions.
Buddhism, Politics, and the Limits of Law succeeds at a number of levels. Its contents are dense, but Schonthal organizes them well, all the while conveying a deep familiarity with—and enthusiasm for—his topic. He applies theory judiciously and engages with studies in comparative constitutional law productively. His schemas for analysis of Sri Lanka are neatly presented, and the three-paradigm model for constitutional management of religion is portable.
All in all, this is a book that stands as an exemplar of how a dedicated scholar trained in relevant languages and working across disciplines on a single country case study can produce methodologically and conceptually significant research. And it is a book that challenges socio-legal researchers seeking to contest rather than simply affirm the received wisdom on the religious politics of comparative constitutional law to take more seriously those places, like Sri Lanka, and traditions, like Buddhism, that are usually relegated to the literature's margins. With Buddhism, Politics, and the Limits of Law, at least, Sri Lanka's experiences with pyrrhic constitutionalism shall now not be left out of the conversation.
