Losing the royal patron
Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam had depended on kings for a thousand years: for land, for the appointment of monastic heads, for the discipline of the order. The British took the Kandyan kingdom in 1815 and deposed the Burmese monarchy in 1885, and the Buddhist order was left with no head, no state support and no mechanism for resolving its own disputes.
Mission and government schools offered the education that led to employment. Monastic education, which had taught most of the population to read, was pushed to the margins.
Argument as a weapon
Missionary preaching and printing provoked an organised reply. In Sri Lanka, monks took to public debate, culminating at Panadura in 1873, where Migettuwatte Gunananda argued against a Christian preacher before a crowd of thousands. The transcript was printed, translated and read abroad, and it drew Colonel Henry Olcott to the island.
Buddhists adopted the tools of their opponents: printing presses, schools, Sunday classes, youth associations, tracts, a flag. These were new forms used to defend an old tradition.
A tradition described from outside
Colonial officials and scholars catalogued, translated and explained Buddhism to the world. Much of that work was careful and is still useful. But it arrived with a judgement attached: that the texts were the real Buddhism and that what living Buddhists actually did, with relics, offerings, spirits and festivals, was later corruption.
That judgement was then taken up by some reformers themselves, which is one reason modern Buddhism is often presented as a philosophy stripped of ritual.
Why it matters
Buddhists must redefine their traditions in relation to empire, Christianity and modern science.
History and tradition
What historians can say
Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere call the Sri Lankan result Protestant Buddhism: lay led, text centred, suspicious of ritual, formed in the colonial encounter and still very influential. Donald Lopez and Philip Almond trace how Western scholarship built its own object of study, and how much of the Buddhism Europeans discovered was assembled in Europe.