Buddhism is the daughter of Hinduism and nowhere is it more vividly obvious than in Sri Lanka where visitors, having prayed and made offering of flowers to the Buddha, do the same in the shrine next door dedicated to Shiva, Ganesh or other Hindu gods.

But if the Buddha cohabits happily with Hindu deities, humans do not. Tamils, a Hindu minority who were brought in by the British to work the tea plantations, complain of discrimination by the Sinhalese who are Buddhist. A brutal 26 years-old war by Tamil separatists came to an end only recently.

Hard-line Buddhist clergy, organised in a political...