This is the script for my video posted on June 15, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
The Western image of Buddhism as a completely serene and apolitical religion is not really accurate. Buddhist monks have blessed armies. Buddhists have run nationalist political parties and helped commit crimes against humanity. Today, Buddhism is a dominant religion across much of Asia, but how does it actually influence geopolitics?
There are differing estimates of exactly how many Buddhists there are in the world today, but there are certainly more than 300m, or about 4% of the global population, and 98% of these live in the Asia-Pacific region. About half of them live in China alone. Buddhism has three main branches, each of which has its own territory. The largest branch, Mahayana, dominates China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Singapore. Doctrinally, Mahayana is very diverse and often blended with Confucianist and Daoist principles. In China specifically, the Buddhist Association of China is the official state supervisory body for the religion, directly overseen by the Communist Party.
The second-largest branch is Theravada, which is dominant in much of Southeast Asia. It’s characterized by a uniquely close relationship between states and the monastic order, because historically kings protected the order while the order conferred legitimacy on kings. This mutual protection is the root of the Buddhist nationalism we’ve seen in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and Thailand actually has the single largest Theravada population.
The smallest major branch is Vajrayana, often known as Tibetan Buddhism. It’s naturally concentrated in Tibet and its surroundings, as well as Mongolia, northern India, and several Russian republics. Vajrayana’s defining feature is the tulku system, or the belief that high lamas, or spiritual leaders, consciously direct their own reincarnation to someone unrelated to them, so their authority transfers through rebirth rather than heredity or election. The two paramount lamas, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, traditionally recognize and legitimize each other’s reincarnations, and this will be important later.
Buddhism is unique in part because it’s not purely a private faith in most cases, but an identity marker fused with ethnicity and nationhood. To be Burmese, for example, is to be Buddhist. Thais identify with their ethnicity, their religion, and their king, which are all considered to be parts of the same whole. This fusion is what makes Buddhism geopolitically combustible, because an attack on the religion can be framed as an attack on a nation or a race as well.
To be clear, there is nothing inherently violent about Buddhism itself, just as there is nothing inherently peaceful. The trouble comes when people are afraid or threatened or there’s some kind of political incentive to commit violence, and people’s identity: their religion, their ethnicity, and their country, are entangled. We’ve seen this in places like Myanmar, where a Buddhist-nationalist movement felt threatened by Muslims. One prominent leader of this movement is quoted as saying “You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog.” In 2017, these Buddhist-nationalist sentiments helped fuel the Rohingya catastrophe, in which the Burmese military launched operations to force Muslims to flee into Bangladesh. That mutually beneficial relationship I mentioned under Theravada Buddhism comes into play here, because the unpopular military casts itself as the protector of Buddhism to buy legitimacy, while nationalist monks lend the regime divine legitimacy. Similar events have happened in Sri Lanka and in Thailand as well.
Meanwhile, despite the Chinese government’s official atheist stance and its persecution of Buddhists during the Cultural Revolution, China has been turning Buddhism into a tool for soft power projection. Since 2006, it has hosted the World Buddhist Forum to steer the religion broadly toward a pro-Chinese posture, folding Buddhist diplomacy into the Belt and Road Initiative for example. Understandably, many consider China’s interest in Buddhism to be disingenuous and manipulative.
In 1940, the 14th and current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was enthroned in Tibet. But as communist and nationalist forces waged war, eventually the People’s Republic of China annexed Tibet. The Dalai Lama supported the Tibetan government in rising up against China, but in 1959 he was forced to flee to India, where to this day he leads the Tibetan government in exile. China considers him a separatist and asserts that it alone may approve the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation. It may sound a bit odd for an atheist government to insist on that, and you’d be right, but their assertion is based on two precedents: a lot-drawing system for reincarnation that started in the 18th century under the Qing dynasty, and an official Chinese government order made in 2007 barring anyone from searching for or recognizing a reincarnation without authorization. Basically, China says a lama needs a permit to be reborn.
In 1995, the Dalai Lama recognized a six-year-old boy as the 11th Panchen Lama. Three days later, Chinese authorities abducted the boy and his family and he has not been seen by independent observers in over 30 years. China installed their own candidate, who now holds political posts under the Communist Party. Because the Panchen Lama traditionally helps identify the next Dalai Lama, this was a deliberate move to control the next Dalai Lama succession, and the likely outcome is that there will be two Dalai Lamas, one real one, and the other endorsed by the Chinese government. This whole situation is a thorn in the relationship between China and India because India is the birthplace of Buddhism and arguably its most legitimate ambassador, and it continues to host the Dalai Lama despite China’s protests.
Buddhism is a force for unification and soft-power influence through shared identity, but it is also a divisive and often dangerous ethnonationalist force. Regimes use the religion to manufacture legitimacy for themselves, and Buddhists who feel threatened by other religions are one of the greatest causes of instability in all of Asia. In the end, it’s a far more complicated geopolitical factor than it appears on the surface.
Keep reading
- Why has tiny Bhutan managed to stay independent between India and China?
- Why is Sri Lanka so important?
- Why does Myanmar (Burma) have two names?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.