Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka

Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka offers a new perspective on contemporary debates about Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. In this book de Silva Wijeyeratne argues forcefully that ¿Sinhalese Buddhism¿ in the period prior to its engagement with the British colonial State signified a relatively unbounded (although at times boundary forming) set of practices that facilitated both the inclusion and exclusion of non-¿Buddhist¿ concepts and people within a particular cosmological frame. Juxtaposing the premodern against the backdrop of colonial modernity, de Silva Wijeyeratne tells us that in contrast modern ''Sinhalese Buddhism/nationalism'' is a much more reified and bounded concept, one imagined through a 19^th century epistemology whose purpose was not so much inclusion, but a much more radical exclusion of non-¿Buddhist¿ ideas and people.

In this insightful analysis modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, then, emerges through the conjunct