Sri Lanka is majority Theravada Buddhist, at roughly 70 percent per Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, concentrated among the Sinhalese ethnic majority, alongside a Hindu minority of about 12 percent found chiefly among Tamil communities in the north and east, and Muslim and Christian minorities each near 7 to 10 percent.
Buddhism arrived from India in the third century BCE, traditionally dated to the mission of Mahinda, son of the emperor Ashoka, and the island has preserved one of the longest continuous Theravada lineages anywhere, centered on the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha housed at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. Hindu presence reflects both ancient Tamil settlement and colonial-era indentured labor migration under British rule; the Jaffna peninsula and eastern coast remain centers of Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu and Christian life.
Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rule from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries introduced Catholic and Protestant Christianity while also disrupting Buddhist and Hindu institutions, provoking a nineteenth-century Buddhist revivalist movement associated with figures such as Anagarika Dharmapala that fused religious identity closely with Sinhalese nationalism.