154 CHAPTER SEVENhas spawned centers abroad as well. The military junta that replaced U Nu
originally espoused a purely secular ideology, but in more recent years it has
turned to advertising its support for the Sangha as a way of shoring up its
crumbling popularity.
As for Sri Lanka, the government established a World Buddhist Fellowship
in 1950 and began sponsoring an Encyclopedia of Buddhism, an ongoing pro-
ject that has won international respect for its high level of scholarship. Monks
were sent to study meditation at the Mahasi center in Burma in order to re-
vive the almost moribund state of meditation on the island. The most active
role in the postcolonial Buddhist revival on the island, however, has been
played by nongovernmental lay organizations. These include the Sarvodaya
Shramadana (Donation of Labor for the Uplift of the Masses) movement,
founded in 1958, which has been attempting to bring Buddhist ideals to bear
on the material, social, and spiritual development of the Sri Lankan poor; the
numerous lay meditation centers scattered throughout the island; and the Bud-
dhist Publication Society, founded in 19 58 for the dissemination of Buddhist
literature in English and Sinhala, which has since established a membership
throughout the world. Unfortunately, the attempts to build a national Sri
Lankan identity around Buddhism have exacerbated relations between the
Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu/Islamic minority, resulting in
civil war.
The most important factors determining the postwar fortunes ofBuddhism
in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, however, were forces beyond the control of
any one government or organization: overpopulation, industrialization, and
urbanization. These had the effect of rendering popular Buddhism, with its
strong ties to the needs of the -rural agrarian class, increasingly irrelevant to an
increasing proportion of the pbpulace. Even more radical social changes came
with the cold war. Communist takeovers in Laos and Cambodia destroyed or-
ganized religion in those countries, but in a strange spin-off of geopolitics, the
cold war resulted in a windfall of knowledge concerning Buddhist syncretism
in this area, especially with regard to Buddhism in rural Thailand.
American military and political advisers were concerned with stabilizing
Thai society in an effort to keep the country from falling to the communists,
and the realization came that the most unstable societies in Asia were those
where Christian missionaries had been most successful in winning converts.
As a result, anthropologists received government grants to study the role of
Buddhism in Thai society in hopes that knowledge of Thai peasant beliefs and
of the monks' role would assist in using the monks to mold public opinion. It
is difficult to gauge what impact these studies played in the conduct of the
cold war. Still, the anthropologists were working in the interests of science
and their professional reputations, and their studies have left us with a remark-
ably detailed picture of Theravadin Buddhist syncretism and its social role at a
unique point in history.
One of the anthropologists' most important discoveries was that the tradi-
tional distinction between village-dwelling and forest-dwelling monks is as
valid as ever. Thus, in the following sections, which present a short summary