Buddhism is Sri Lanka's main religion, followed by about 70 per cent of the population, almost all of them Sinhalese Theravada Buddhists. Hindus make up about 13 per cent, mostly Tamils in the north, east and the tea-growing hills. Muslims are about 10 per cent and Christians about 7 per cent, most of them Catholic. The constitution gives Buddhism "the foremost place" and commits the state to protect it, while guaranteeing freedom of religion to all. The four faiths map closely onto ethnicity and region, which is why religion in Sri Lanka is best understood place by place.
| Religion | Share (2012 census) | Main communities |
|---|---|---|
| Buddhism | 70.2% | Sinhalese, across the south, west and centre |
| Hinduism | 12.6% | Sri Lankan Tamils in the north and east; Hill Country Tamils |
| Islam | 9.7% | Sri Lankan Moors and Malays, especially on the east coast |
| Christianity | 7.4% | Sinhalese and Tamil Catholics, largely on the west coast |
Anuradhapura and Mihintale: Where Buddhism Began
According to the island's chronicles, Buddhism reached Sri Lanka in the third century BCE with Mahinda, a monk who was the son of the Indian emperor Ashoka. He is said to have met King Devanampiya Tissa on the hill of Mihintale, near the old capital of Anuradhapura, and converted him. The event is commemorated every June at the Poson full moon, when pilgrims in white climb Mihintale's stone stairs.
Mahinda's sister, the nun Sanghamitta, is said to have brought a cutting from the tree in Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. The tree grown from it, the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, is traditionally dated to 288 BCE, which would make it the oldest living human-planted tree with a recorded planting date. Anuradhapura's enormous brick stupas, some among the largest structures of the ancient world, show how central Buddhism was to the early kingdom.
Aluvihara: Where the Buddha's Words Were Written Down
For centuries the Buddha's teachings were memorised and passed on orally. In the first century BCE, during famine and invasion, monks at the Aluvihara rock temple near Matale wrote the teachings down on palm leaves, in Pali, for the first time. Not far north, the Dambulla cave temple, a World Heritage Site since 1991, holds more than 150 Buddha images carved and painted across five caves. That collection, the Pali Canon, is the scripture of Theravada Buddhism. Sri Lankan monks later helped restore Theravada ordination lines in Myanmar and Thailand, which is why the island is regarded as a guardian of the tradition. Our guide to religion in Myanmar follows the same tradition on the mainland.
Kandy and the Sacred Tooth
The most sacred object in Sri Lankan Buddhism is a tooth said to be the Buddha's, brought to the island in the fourth century CE, hidden, according to legend, in a princess's hair. Possession of the relic came to symbolise the right to rule, so it moved with the capital, ending up in Kandy, the last independent Sinhalese kingdom, which fell to the British in 1815. The Temple of the Tooth, Sri Dalada Maligawa, is part of the Sacred City of Kandy World Heritage Site. In January 1998 the Tamil Tigers attacked it with a truck bomb, damaging its facade and killing several people.
Every July or August, the Esala Perahera parades a replica of the relic casket through Kandy on a decorated elephant, with drummers, dancers and fire performers, over ten nights. It is one of the largest religious processions in Asia.
Sri Pada and Kataragama: Shared Holy Places
Two sites show how Sri Lanka's faiths overlap. Sri Pada, also called Adam's Peak, rises to 2,243 m in the central highlands. At its summit is a rock with a mark about 1.8 m long that Buddhists revere as the Buddha's footprint, Hindus as Shiva's, and many Muslims and Christians as Adam's, left where he first stood after being expelled from Eden. Some Christian traditions connect it with St Thomas instead. During the pilgrimage season, from December to May, thousands climb through the night to reach the top for sunrise.
In the far south-east, the shrine town of Kataragama is sacred to Hindus as a home of the war god Murugan, to Buddhists who honour the same deity as a guardian of the island, to Muslims who visit a Sufi shrine there, and to the Indigenous Vedda people. Its summer festival, in July and August, draws all four communities.
Colombo: Monks and Politics
The Buddhist clergy, the Sangha, has always been a political force in Sri Lanka. The monasteries of the Siam Nikaya, the largest order, founded in 1753 with monks brought from Thailand to restore ordination, still admit only men of the Govigama caste. In the twentieth century, monks were at the centre of the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism that followed independence in 1948. They campaigned for the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, which made Sinhala the sole official language and alienated Tamil speakers. In September 1959 the prime minister who passed it, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, was shot dead at his home by a Buddhist monk, over a dispute about his government's policies.
Monks have sat in parliament since 2004, when the Jathika Hela Urumaya, a party whose candidates were all monks, won nine seats. Groups such as the Bodu Bala Sena, founded in 2012, have been accused of stirring hostility towards Muslims and Christians. At the same time, many monks run schools, clinics and village temples that are the centre of rural life, and the Sangha remains highly respected.
Jaffna and the Hindu North
Hinduism in Sri Lanka is mainly the Shaivism of the Tamil population, whose ancestors settled from southern India over many centuries. The north's great temple is the Nallur Kandaswamy temple in Jaffna, whose 25-day summer festival is the largest Hindu event on the island. On the east coast, the Koneswaram temple stands on a cliff above Trincomalee harbour. The Portuguese pulled it down in 1622 and used its stones to build a fort, and it was rebuilt in the twentieth century.
A second Hindu community lives in the central hills. The British brought Tamil labourers from southern India in the nineteenth century to work coffee and then tea estates. Many of their descendants were denied citizenship after independence, and the last large group was granted it only by a 2003 law. Most remain Hindu, and small temples stand among the tea bushes on almost every estate.
The East Coast and Sri Lanka's Muslims
Islam arrived with Arab traders who used Sri Lanka's ports on the Indian Ocean routes from about the eighth century. Their descendants, the Sri Lankan Moors, speak Tamil and are mostly Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school. A smaller Malay community descends from soldiers and exiles the Dutch brought from Indonesia. The Muslim population is concentrated on the east coast, around towns such as Kattankudy and Kalmunai, and in trading districts of Colombo.
Sri Lankan Muslims have faced violence from several directions. In 1990 the Tamil Tigers killed 147 men and boys at prayer in Kattankudy's mosques and expelled the entire Muslim population, about 75,000 people, from the Northern Province. Anti-Muslim riots broke out in Aluthgama in 2014 and around Kandy in 2018. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government's forced cremation of Muslim victims, against Islamic burial practice, caused deep distress until it was reversed in 2021, and the cabinet later formally apologised.
Negombo, Madhu and the Easter Attacks
Christianity came with the Portuguese, who arrived in 1505 and converted many coastal communities to Catholicism. The Dutch, who took the coast in the seventeenth century, promoted the Reformed church. The British brought Anglicans and Methodists. Catholicism kept the strongest roots, especially in the fishing towns north of Colombo. Negombo is nicknamed "Little Rome" for its many churches. The shrine of Our Lady of Madhu in the north is visited by Catholics of both Sinhalese and Tamil backgrounds, and it stayed a place of refuge through the civil war.
On Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019, suicide bombers from a local Islamist group attacked three churches, St Anthony's Shrine in Colombo, St Sebastian's Church in Negombo and Zion Church in Batticaloa, together with three luxury hotels. The attacks killed 269 people, the deadliest in the country since the civil war ended in 2009. In 2023 the Supreme Court ruled that former president Maithripala Sirisena and senior officials had ignored prior intelligence warnings, and ordered them to pay compensation to the victims.
Poya Days and the Buddhist Calendar
Buddhism shapes the national calendar in a way almost unique in the world. Every full-moon day, called Poya, is a public holiday, twelve or thirteen times a year, and on Poya days the sale of alcohol and meat is suspended. The most important is Vesak in May, marking the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death, when towns are hung with lanterns and roadside stalls called dansal give out free food and drink. Sri Lanka also played an unexpected part in modern Buddhism worldwide. The Buddhist flag, now used around the world, was designed in Colombo in 1885 during a Buddhist revival that the American Henry Steel Olcott supported. Buddhism's older roots lie across the Palk Strait, as our overview of religion in India explains.