Of the world’s major faiths, Buddhism is often characterized as being a religion of peace, tolerance, and compassion. The Western encounter with Buddhism has largely been distilled through yoga, the beatniks, Hollywood, and Dalai Lama quotes shared on Facebook. But even a cursory glance at the news that emanates from the Buddhist world reveals a more sanguinary state of affairs.

In Myanmar, ultra-nationalist monks have fueled a genocidal crusade against the country’s Rohingya Muslim population. In Thailand, the government has responded to a long-running Malay Muslim insurgency in its southern provinces by fostering a Buddhist militarism, encouraging monks in local temples to ally with the armed forces. And in Sri Lanka, the Buddhist-majority Sinhalese were engaged in a bitter civil war against the Hindu-minority Tamils for decades. More recently, Buddhist nationalists there have stoked anti-Muslim riots.

COLD WAR MONKS: BUDDHISM AND AMERICA’S SECRET STRATEGY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA by Eugene Ford Yale University Press, 392 pp., $40.00

Still, Buddhism continues to have an alien aura, as if it were an “entirely otherworldly religion with a gnostic distaste for the worldly order,” as the scholar Ian Harris has written. There is a tendency to frame the rise of Buddhist nationalism as an anomalous phenomenon. In fact, as the historian Eugene Ford shows in his book Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia, the Buddhist world was a laboratory of competing visions and ideologies in the Cold War—an experiment that helped politicize Buddhism into the often violent, reactionary force we see in Southeast Asia today.

Buddhism and statecraft have long been joined at the hip. The religion supplied the symbols of kingship in courts, capitals, and urban centers from Burma (now Myanmar) to Siam (Thailand) to Laos, as monastic orders and ruling elites forged intimate ties. Following the seventeenth century, European imperialism disrupted the symbiosis of religion and state in places where colonial regimes were installed. By the early half of the twentieth century, anti-colonial movements saw monks participate in dissent, laying the foundations for the clergy to enter secular affairs.

The exception was Thailand, the only country in the region to avoid formal colonization. It was a distinction that shaped its nationalist narrative, which glorified the monarchy while sheltering its monks from the activism of their counterparts in neighboring countries. However, during World War II, imperial Japan’s occupation of Bangkok offered a harbinger of the outside pressures that would be released upon Buddhism in the postwar era. Tsusho Byoto, an obscure Japanese scholar-monk, advocated a militarized conception of Zen in an attempt to recruit the guarded Thai monastic order to the fascist cause. While he ultimately failed, Byoto’s “vision of an internationalized Thai monkhood would in many ways prove prophetic,” Ford writes.