He became a wandering monk. After years of searching, he found his answer—his awakening—and proceeded to teach others. After his death, the Buddha's teachings were written down by his followers who spread his message. These texts are called sutras. An organized religion began to take form, and with time new branches of Buddhism emerged. Three main types of Buddhism have developed over its long history, each with its own characteristics and spiritual ideals.
Theravada or foundational Buddhism, the earliest of the three, emphasizes the attainment of salvation for oneself alone and the necessity of monastic life in order to attain spiritual release. These three schools are not mutually exclusive but emphasize different practices.
For example, while Theravada teaches that only a few devotees are able to reach enlightenment and that they do it alone, Mahayana and its later offshoot, Vajrayana, teach that enlightenment is attainable by everyone with help from buddhas and beings known as bodhisattvas those who have attained enlightenment but remain on earth to assist others on their paths.
A major, long-established East Asian route of trade and influence ran from northern China through the Korean peninsula and across the Korean Straits to Japan. Traveling along this route, Mahayana Buddhism was introduced to Japan from Korea in the sixth century traditionally, in either or , as part of a diplomatic mission that included gifts such as an image of Shakyamuni Buddha and several volumes of Buddhist text.
As in Korea, the religion had a lasting effect on the native culture. By the seventh century, when the religion was firmly established, Japan had dozens of temple complexes, various orders of priests, and a body of skilled artisans to craft the icons and other accoutrements that the practice of the faith required.
Vajrayana or Esoteric Buddhist and its attendant pantheon of deities and secret, mystical rituals, was introduced to Japan in the early Heian period after by a number of Japanese priests. They studied the religion in China and returned home to found influential monasteries, two of which became the centers of the main Japanese Buddhist sects, Tendai and Shingon.
Images of wrathful deities, such as Fudo Myo-o Achala in Sanskrit , were introduced at this time as part of the Esoteric Buddhist pantheon. In the late Heian period until and following centuries, Pure Land Buddhism became very popular. Believers trusted that the diligent recitation of his name enabled the soul to be reborn in a heavenly Pure Land rather than in a Buddhist hell or other undesirable rebirth.
Intense devotion to Amida produced voluminous requests for Buddhist statuary and paintings, in addition to the many temples dedicated to him. Another salvationist deity popular at this time was Jizo, who had been introduced to Japan centuries earlier as a bodhisattva in the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon.
Jizo is a deity of compassion and benevolence whose attributed powers expanded as time passed. During the Kamakura period — , Buddhism became the faith of all people of all classes. No doubt they consulted the Chinese government census statistics. But the question of the relative size of religions today is sometimes politically motivated and always difficult to judge.
Which religions are still growing in population size today? Probably all of them, given the continued growth in the number of human beings on the planet. What about Buddhism? There are converts all over the world, including in China, now that restrictions on traditional Buddhism have been significantly eased. Does secularization in Buddhist countries like Japan and Korea mean that these numbers are in decline?
Yes, in part, but again this is a question of who counts as a Buddhist. Our answer to this and other questions will affect our statistics substantially. The politics of Buddhism across history and geography cannot be easily summarized. But a few examples may offer a general sense. Although the Buddha organized the Buddhist community, the sangha, to be wholly independent of government, both the Buddha himself and the sangha would inevitably be connected to the state.
These connections were always precarious. For the most part an unspoken agreement prevailed: so long as the Buddhist community did not meddle in government affairs criticize the government, side with groups in opposition to the government, advocate for political reform, etc. This arrangement has varied from ruler to ruler and from country to country. But a major turning point in the success of early Buddhism was the conversion to Buddhism of Emperor p.
Similar arrangements helped Buddhism to attain prevalence in other cultures. The downside of government support and involvement in religion is well known to us. State influence over and interference in religious decisions—even control over religious leaders—has frequently served to undermine the legitimacy of a religious tradition.
Governments can rarely resist the temptation to call upon religious leaders to endorse its actions. When war is declared mutual support between the two is virtually irresistible. In spite of its overtly apolitical stance, Buddhists have fallen prey to all of these dangers on numerous occasions.
Buddhist support for Japanese imperialism throughout Asia before and during the Second World War, and Buddhist legitimization of government suppression of Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are just the most recent cases in point. As Asian governments adopt new and more democratic forms, and as the belief in universal human rights becomes more widespread, Buddhists have become more likely to express political and social views, sometimes regarding them as moral implications of the dharma.
When a Vietnamese monk sitting in meditation set himself on fire to protest the suffering and killing in the Vietnam War, other monks joined the protest.
He called upon all Buddhist monks to stage nonviolent protests p. Buddhist leaders in other Asian nations and increasingly in the West have been inspired by the courageous lead of the Vietnamese monks to risk outspoken positions on a wide variety of social ills.
Whenever suffering is being needlessly caused, some Buddhists now feel the obligation to address it directly and to refuse traditional positions of nonconfrontation. Socially engaged Buddhists now promote political involvement in connection to government actions and policies but also in relation to human suffering and planetary degradation caused by corporations.
Assertions that Buddhism is at least compatible with modern science, if not itself a form of scientific inquiry, have circulated for well over a century. When Buddhism first became fashionable in Europe and America in the s, one important aspect of its popularity was a sense that, unlike Western religions, Buddhism was fully in accord with science because it encouraged rather than refused critical, rational thinking based on available evidence.
Some admirers went so far as to claim that by condemning dogmatism Buddhism had proved that it was not a religion at all. These claims of compatibility between Buddhism and science resurfaced with added strength in the second half of the twentieth century. Best-selling books such as The Tao of Physics demonstrated in considerable detail how findings in contemporary physics and elsewhere in the sciences had been anticipated by Buddhist and Daoist insights, not just by centuries but by millennia.
Then, in , a groundbreaking conference at the p. Several such conferences have been attended by or hosted by the Dalai Lama, who has taken an interest in modern science throughout his life. At one such meeting he declared that if a Buddhist idea were to be conclusively disproven by scientific investigation, Buddhists would need to reevaluate that idea, no matter how central it had been to traditional Buddhist thinking.
The Dalai Lama pointed to the early Buddhist insistence on validation by direct experience and evidence over any counterclaim grounded in scripture or monastic authority. In making this same point, other Buddhists have frequently cited scriptural authority. Only then should they be believed, rather than simply out of respect for me. Following early efforts to understand overlapping theories in quantum physics and Buddhist philosophy, a more recent point of emphasis has been the intersection between Buddhist meditation and contemporary neuroscience.
Neuroscientists have recently devised experimental methods to measure and evaluate the effects of meditation, including testing the differences in mental effect between advanced meditators and those who are newly engaged in the practice. Not all Buddhists relish these elements of compatibility with science. As with other religions, some Buddhists hold supernatural and theistic beliefs and engage in practices that correspond to them. From their point of view, the Buddhist modernism that seeks to be scientifically relevant surrenders too many aspects of traditional Buddhism that they rely on in their lives.
When scientific experiments verify traditional Buddhist meditation insight the end result could be that Buddhism is reduced to the role of confirming scientific claims from an alternative point of view.
Does Buddhism have something unique to offer the contemporary world? Or will assertions about compatibility end up undermining the possibility that Buddhism may have something of its own to contribute? Both the intersection of Buddhism and science and these recent doubts about that intersection are important matters of current debate.
If capitalism is grounded in some form of materialism, if it claims selfishness as the foundation of human nature and assumes that greed is the motivating force of economic advancement, the conflict is obvious.
In spite of this, however, capitalism has been rapidly absorbed into the lives of present and former Buddhist nations. The citizens of India, Thailand, Singapore, China, Korea, and Japan, for example, have had little difficulty taking up p.
They have done so with notable success and without coming to the conclusion that their underlying Buddhist values must be jettisoned. How might we address this? Is the tension between Buddhism and capitalism irreconcilable, or might it even be a productive tension, one that will prove useful to both sides?
Looking more closely at the ideals of Buddhism we find several paths for the reconciliation of Buddhist values and some form of capitalist economy. Although we assume that renunciation entails rejecting what one wants, a demand to give up something that really does have significant value, at a more mature level Buddhist renunciation evolves out of a comprehensive insight. It entails seeing things as they really are as opposed to seeing things as we might prefer them to be.
The Buddhist goal is to renounce not everything but what one can now see to be inessential or even destructive. The point of the Buddhist renunciation of desires is to avoid being controlled by them, to be capable of choosing among desires. Are they conducive to health? Do they accord with the values of wisdom and compassion? The Buddhist goal, then, is not to transcend the world through ascetic renunciation but to see the world as it really is and to live skillfully within it.
The truth, they realized, will set you free. One traditional model for this kind of renunciation within the world is the lay Buddhist businessman Vimalakirti, whose worldly renunciation is described in an early Mahayana sutra.
He was honored as the landlord among landlords because he renounced the aggressiveness of ownership. It is possible to possess worldly things without being possessed by them. One of the basic premises of Buddhist practice is that, through meditative exercises, greed could be transformed into generosity, hatred into compassion, and delusion into wisdom, and that this transformation takes place within the world rather than beyond it.
Aligned with this belief, greed is regarded as a common human condition but not the bedrock of human nature, since it can be overcome. At the same time, considerable skepticism about the dangers of capitalist values can be found throughout the history of Buddhist thought and practice. To the extent that capitalism tends to promote the commodification of all aspects of human life and reduce human beings to consumers, Buddhist criticisms have been and will be harsh.
The point of life is not consumption, nor is that the path to happiness. In fact, the earliest truths of Buddhism announce clearly that although we inevitably assume otherwise, the fulfillment of desires is not the path to happiness. Happiness is found instead in freedom from enslavement to desires and the freedom to choose among motivations in such a way that healthy living is enhanced. Out-of-control desires give rise to out-of-control suffering.
On these grounds there is no getting around the basic Buddhist conviction that greed is the first of three life-threatening poisons. Greed kills. In this tongue-in-cheek comment, Buddhism turns out to be fully compatible with capitalism even to the point of being essential to its p. And so goes the debate. Although the economic implications of Buddhism were rarely spelled out in the tradition, these topics are now at the forefront of contemporary Buddhist conversation. The modern discipline of psychology was born in the nineteenth century at roughly the same time that Buddhism was coming to be known in the West.
From that time forward both psychologists and Buddhists have recognized significant common ground. At the beginning of the twentieth century, having listened intently to a Harvard lecture by a Sri Lankan Buddhist, the psychologist and philosopher William James made the offhand prediction that within a quarter-century many people in the West would be studying Buddhist psychology. To take just one example, Buddhist-style mindfulness practices are now integrated into virtually every form of psychological therapy and are now used to treat stress, anxiety, pain, depression, insomnia, and many other conditions.
It is also true that the way contemporary Buddhism has come to be seen in the West borrows heavily on the vocabulary and overall orientation of modern psychology. Buddhists have learned and incorporated a great deal from the discipline of psychology. Although Buddhist psychology is a modern phrase with no traditional counterpart, a focus on and therapeutic treatment of the human psyche goes all the way back to the origins of Buddhism and is heavily emphasized throughout the tradition.
Buddhist meditation practice begins with the cultivation p. Buddhist meditators learn to observe their own thought processes, emotional states, and patterns of motivation, all of which ordinarily proceeds without conscious recognition.
The point of these psychological exercises is to recognize who we are, to tame destructive emotions, and to redirect motivations from the cravings of greed and hatred. Recall that the early Buddhist understanding of the self is that human beings are highly malleable and open to change. Understanding a person as the ongoing conjunction of five mental and physical components encouraged Buddhists to observe in meditation how each component interacts with the others—how physical perceptions, feelings, thoughts, will, and self-consciousness are always open to influence and change, and how this process can in certain ways be intentionally directed toward enlightened forms of life.
This malleability of character allowed Buddhists to observe and study healthy ways of living and to begin to appropriate those into their own lives. The fact that Buddhist psychology has been embedded in a larger philosophical and religious framework oriented to enlightenment and the cultivation of ethical character has helped make it attractive as a model for the further development of modern Western psychology.
Since its beginnings modern psychology has typically been located in the sphere of medicine as the study of psychological illnesses—the range of what can go wrong with human minds. A more persistent focus in Buddhism has been on the positive side of mental life. Its primary questions concern how it might be possible to enhance, expand, and deepen the best states of human character: generosity, openness, creativity, wisdom. Buddhists sought ways to awaken from mental delusions and enslavement to self-imposed suffering in order to focus on the cultivation of greater mental capacity and highly refined states of consciousness.
Psychologists now emphasize how character traits such as mindfulness and compassion enhance overall well-being and how these traits can be cultivated through the adoption of meditative practice.
While psychologists have used Buddhism and meditation to reenvision their discipline, Buddhists have similarly been able to employ many facets of modern psychology as a means of reengaging with their own earlier traditions. Many Buddhists now recognize how the early Buddhist way of analysis, which focused on understanding inner mental life, had slipped into the background of Buddhist practice and how its resurgence can help make Buddhist ideas relevant to the contemporary cultural world.
The recent emergence of what in psychology is called cognitive behavioral therapy, which shares many insights and strategies with Buddhist meditation therapy, has been particularly influential in Buddhist psychology.
The discipline of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy shows the extent to which mindfulness meditation from Buddhism has melded with contemporary cognitive therapy. The language of experience-dependent neuroplasticity is a scientific articulation of what traditional Buddhists had taken as the foundations of meditative practice. That the neurological structure of the brain is plastic, in the sense of malleable, and that it reshapes itself based on habits of experience is precisely what Buddhists had assumed as the basis of its practice.
Buddhists have found the analytical terminology of modern psychology to be very useful in their own practices. Modern psychological terms appear frequently in contemporary Buddhist discussions and help lend both precision p. Some Buddhists have begun to recognize how the language and insights of psychology have helped provide them with new ways of looking at their own traditional meditation practices. Psychology and neuroscience are influencing the Buddhist sense of what meditation is and could be.
The use of advanced technology for neuroimaging in hospitals and laboratories is another recent area of importance in Buddhism. EEG brain-wave measurement and functional MRI videos of brain processes are now being used to test and measure the effects of meditation. Neuroimaging for both beginning meditators and advanced practitioners helps researchers understand what it is that meditation can contribute to mental health. Although these tests will likely become more sophisticated over time, results so far show that the benefits of meditation are extensive.
They maintain that traditional Buddhism is built on a different set of values and goals and that conflating them will ultimately be detrimental to Buddhism. Some psychologists avoid making any connection to Buddhism on the grounds that connection to a religion could have the effect of throwing the scientific, medical, and secular status of the discipline into question.
Nevertheless this connection continues to strengthen today, and the likelihood of greater cooperation is strong. Secular Buddhism names a newly emerging orientation within Western Buddhism that may become attractive to Asians as p.
This version of Buddhism is being articulated by converts seeking to avoid what they see as the perils of Western religions. Although there is no consensus on what secular Buddhism is, participants tend to maintain a scientifically attuned worldview that is nontheistic, naturalistic, humanistic, pragmatic, and agnostic on traditional religious claims about life after death in other worlds. Secular Buddhists focus on meditation and the elements of Buddhist thought that provide instruction on living healthy lives in this world.
They de-emphasize or criticize supernatural beliefs, otherworldly concerns, traditional rituals, and the necessity of monastic guidance wherever those appear in the Buddhist tradition. There are cultural motives for the emergence of secular Buddhism that can be seen in the history of Western Buddhism.
In the early decades of Western Buddhist practice, converts would typically join an organization led by a teacher from Asia. Without knowing much about the differences between forms of Buddhism, Westerners began receiving teachings that were either Tibetan, Japanese, Thai, or some other tradition. Converts were often given an Asian Buddhist name and proceeded to learn Buddhism as it had developed in the background culture of that particular teacher.
Over time some practitioners found themselves frustrated with several aspects of this way of being a Buddhist. One frustration had to do with the extent to which Buddhist teachings were inevitably conjoined with a particular Asian culture such that converts felt they were expected to convert not just to Buddhist teachings and practices but to Tibetan or Japanese culture.
They wanted to be Buddhist but in a French way or an English way. For some Western Buddhists cultural difference was part of the attraction, while for others this cultural shift seemed neither desirable nor possible. Another problem for some Western Buddhist converts was that their own grounding in secular, scientific, democratic culture was deeply entrenched and thus nonnegotiable. So whenever Buddhist ideas or practices from Asia appeared to be in p. Traditional Buddhist beliefs concerning rebirth, other worlds, or supernatural beings to whom one might pray were frequently discarded on grounds of insufficient evidence.
Traditional monastic hierarchical structures, assumptions about patriarchy, and other political differences were open grounds for criticism. The available responses to these points of tension were basically three: abandon Buddhism, work for reform within the lineage of an inherited Asian tradition, or found new Buddhist organizations that are at the outset fully Western and contemporary in outlook.
Those who have chosen this last option are at the forefront of the creation of secular Buddhism. This naturalized form of spirituality emphasizes personal development, inner peace, and stability in tune with contemporary science and culture, rejecting otherworldly concerns about life after death and the assumption of divine beings overseeing the world. Secular Buddhism shares these concerns, including the insistence that the human search for personal and collective meaning is essential.
That it risks losing the depth of Buddhism as it conforms to science and secularity, becoming diluted or banal. That it is based on a misunderstanding of religion by identifying religion with the forms that it has taken in the West, thus shortcutting the potential of contemporary p. In recognition of this possibility, Stephen Batchelor, the most prominent advocate of secular Buddhism, has repeatedly claimed that there is an important religious dimension to secular Buddhism.
That the critique of religious institutions often naively assumes that a spiritual dimension to culture can flourish without institutional support, or that it fails to recognize that whatever new institutions are eventually adopted will very likely be vulnerable over time to the same forms of corruption.
As secular Buddhists address these skeptical responses, the Buddhism they advocate will grow in refinement. Because so many people around the world now encounter Buddhist teachings and practices in secular circumstances—particularly as mindfulness meditation exercises in schools, hospitals, businesses, and even the military—the ease with which they can be utilized outside of religious institutions bodes well for the future of secular Buddhism.
Dalai Lama is a title given to the religious leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Although a member of one particular sect of Tibetan Buddhism the Gelug, or Yellow Hat, lineage , the Dalai Lama represents the unity of all Tibetan sects and the cohesion of the Tibetan people. All those who have held the title of Dalai Lama are considered to be reincarnations of the Mahayana bodhisattva of compassion Avalokitesvara. Tenzin Gyatso was born into a humble farming family in rural Tibet. Selected by Tibetan Buddhist leaders at a very young age and given the highest form of Buddhist education, the Dalai Lama was pressed into office while still a teenager p.
In the Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet along with other Buddhist leaders to take up residence in Dharamsala in northwestern India. As the symbolic leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama has faced enormous political pressure. For many years he sought the liberation of Tibet from Chinese dominance. As that goal became increasingly unlikely, by the s the Dalai Lama conceded overall sovereignty to China while seeking enough autonomy for Tibetan culture to thrive on its own terms.
At the time of this writing it has been sixty years since the Dalai Lama last set foot in Tibet. Exiled from Tibet and the position of direct leadership there, the Dalai Lama has traveled the world as the foremost representative of Tibet and, in some sense, of Buddhism.
He has authored many books, has given public talks all over the world, and has become an influential teacher of meditation and Buddhist philosophy. He is known for his lifelong interest in science, his sense of humor, and his ability to make almost immediate connections with a wide range of people; no public speaker has attracted the enormous audiences that the Dalai Lama has over the past half-century.
The story of his life was depicted in a major motion picture in under the direction of Martin Scorsese, and his books have sold many millions of copies. For most non-Buddhists, the Dalai Lama is the face of Buddhism. As he enters the final segment of his life, much controversy surrounds the future of the institution of the Dalai Lama. Long opposed to positions taken by the fourteenth Dalai Lama and irritated by his global prominence, the Chinese government insists on some degree of control over who will be chosen as the next Dalai Lama, an insistence resisted by Tibetan Buddhist leaders both inside and outside Tibet.
The Dalai Lama himself has equivocated, claiming on occasion that he just might be the last in the lineage and that the institution of the Dalai Lama might have outlived its usefulness. On another occasion the p. Meanwhile, toward the end of his life it is clear that the fourteenth Dalai Lama has become an international figure of great importance, indeed among the most highly respected and beloved people in the world.
He has become a symbol of peaceful, nonviolent negotiation between peoples and, although officially representing only a tiny fraction of Buddhists, is now widely accepted as a leading figure of the Buddhist tradition even by Buddhists of other nationalities.
This kind of cross-cultural status is unique in the history of Buddhism. There are many significant Buddhist leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Here are four who have been especially prominent in very different ways and styles:. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, meditation teacher, and peace activist who has attracted millions of followers all over the world. His teachings are drawn from many segments of the Buddhist tradition: early Pali sutras, Mahayana philosophy, Zen, and even Western psychology and environmentalism. Nhat Hanh first came to international attention for his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Coining the now well-known term engaged Buddhism , he has made the case that committed Buddhists should be active participants in the political debates of their time. Denied access to his p. In Martin Luther King Jr. It would become his long-term home and the center for his many activities and institutions.
Members of the order manage meditation and retreat centers in Europe, the US, and Vietnam. Although Nhat Hanh continued to be denied access to Vietnam after the war, in he finally returned to his native country to visit monasteries and temples and to teach. He is the author of dozens of widely read books on Buddhism, mindfulness meditation, and numerous other topics, which are published by his own publication house, Parallax Press. In Nhat Hanh was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage and has been unable to speak since then.
In he returned to Vietnam to live out the remainder of his life. Goenka — was a highly influential Burmese meditation teacher in the Vipassana tradition. After spending much of his career as a businessman in Myanmar, in he moved to India, from where his reputation for Buddhist teachings spread worldwide.
A Buddhist modernist, Goenka emphasized the rational, scientific, and nonsectarian, universal character of the Buddhist path. He encouraged the rejection of traditional ritual and advocated against the imposition of any required beliefs for Buddhists.
During his lengthy career, Goenka opened Vipassana meditation centers all over the world, leading meditation retreats that influenced thousands of Buddhists from both Asian and Western backgrounds.
Among his many notable Western students are Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and Daniel Goleman, all of whom have been instrumental in the widespread dissemination of Buddhist meditation p. Goenka founded the Vipassana Research Institute, which pursued the careful study of Vipassana and became the home base for the translation of early Buddhist sutras from the Pali.
Goenka was also influential in introducing meditation practices into prisons and setting up networks of instruction for mental training specifically tailored to the difficulties of prison life. Shunryu Suzuki — was a monk and teacher in the Soto Zen tradition whose influence on the global growth of Zen practice was extraordinary.
Born into the Soto Zen tradition, Suzuki began training in Japan at the age of twelve. He graduated from Komazawa University, the Soto Zen headquarters near Tokyo, and underwent rigorous training at the two primary Soto Zen monasteries, Eihei-ji and Soji-ji. In , at the age of fifty-five, Suzuki was sent to San Francisco to serve immigrant Japanese there as a priest at the Soto Zen temple.
A key Buddhist revivalist figure of the early 20th Century, Anagarika Dharmapala, was less than complimentary about non-Sinhalese people. He held that the "Aryan Sinhalese" had made the island into Paradise which was then destroyed by Christianity and polytheism. He targeted Muslims saying they had "by Shylockian methods" thrived at the expense of the "sons of the soil".
And later, in Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike was assassinated by a Buddhist monk - the circumstances were murky but one contentious issue was the government's failure to do enough to ensure the rights of the Sinhala people. The long war against the Tamil Tigers - a violent rebel group purporting to speak for the Tamil minority - brought the hard-line Buddhists into their own once more. Portraying the war as a mission to protect the Sinhalese and Buddhism, in nine monks were elected to parliament on a nationalist platform.
And it was from the monks' main party that Gnanasara Thero later broke away, in time forming the BBS. It is now the most prominent of several organisations sharing a similar ideology. Since , the BBS has embraced direct action, following the example of other like-minded groups.
It raided Muslim-owned slaughter-houses claiming, incorrectly, that they were breaking the law. Members demonstrated outside a law college alleging, again incorrectly, that exam results were being distorted in favour of Muslims. Now that a Tamil adversary has been defeated, Muslims seem to be these nationalists' main target, along with evangelical Christians whom they accuse of deceitfully and cunningly converting people away from Buddhism.
But can the BBS be called violent? Time and again he and his colleague bracket the word "Muslim" together with the word "extremist". They are not the only Sinhalese who express discomfort at a visible rise in Muslim social conservatism in Sri Lanka.
More women are covering up than before and in parts of the country Saudi-influenced Wahabi Muslims are jostling with more liberal ones. Yet there is no evidence of violent extremism among Sri Lankan Muslims. Rather, they have been at the receiving end of attacks from other parts of society.
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