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Buddhism, Politics, and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka. By Benjamin Schonthal. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016.
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 Schonthal 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,...