Sri Lanka’s Buddhist monkhood is split into three caste-ordered sects with no unified hierarchy.

Evidence

Three main Buddhist nikayas (sects), organized along caste lines, exist in Sri Lanka: Siam (comprising the Asgiriya and Malwatte chapters), Amarapura, and Ramanna. The Siam Nikaya is the largest and numbers close to 18,000 monks, while the Amarapura Nikaya has over 11,000 monks. The Ramanna Nikaya only consists of around 7,500 monks. Although each nikaya maintains a hierarchy, no clear-cut, indisputable hierarchy exists across the sangha (as, for example, one sees in the Catholic Church), and the sangha has often been unruly (de Silva and Bartholomeusz 2001: 14). — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 137

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the divisibility/factionalism theme in the reader’s work on manufactured solidarity — even the sangha itself is fragmented by caste, not united as primordial identity would predict. — connects to: A tolerant faction of monks lost to a supremacist faction within Sri Lankan Buddhism. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 118; A Buddhist monk conspiracy assassinated Prime Minister Bandaranaike in 1959. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 46