This chapter traces how the “ideal Buddhist monk” in modern Sri Lanka was made, circulated, and contested as a specifically gendered figure of authority. Taking the late-colonial celebrity monk Hikkaduwe Sumangala (d. 1911) as an exemplary case, it begins with Western and local portrayals that celebrated the bhikkhu as selfless, rational, and intellectually “youthful”—a model of non-muscular masculinity that could even be mobilised against Christian moral ideals and colonial stereotypes of the “effeminate” colonised man. From there, the chapter shows how monastic education became the central infrastructure through which this ideal was stabilised: the pirivena reforms, the rise of Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara as internationally recognised centres of “oriental learning,” and their later transformation into “Buddhist universities” all reworked monkhood as scholarly leadership while embedding it in class/caste privilege, Sinhala-Buddhist heritage claims, and the gendered erasure of women from intellectual and institutional legitimacy. Finally, the chapter follows the afterlives of this intellectual ideal into the mid-to-late twentieth century, arguing that the apparent shift from “peaceful scholar-monk” to nationalist and sometimes militant monkhood was less a rupture than a re-authorisation of moral masculinity—now framed through idioms such as “sons of the Buddha” and “sons of the soil,” and through debates over what counts as authentic renunciation in moments of political crisis.