Tovil lives in an instructive tension with the Buddhism that frames it. Theravada doctrine gives demons no ultimate standing, and the monkhood does not perform exorcisms; yet the rite works entirely through Buddhist authority, opening with homage to the Buddha, compelling the yakku by his warrant, and staging, in every encounter, the cosmological rule that demons are low, disorderly beings who must obey.
Scholars describe the arrangement as a division of labour within a single religious field: the monks hold the summit, the adura, the lay ritual specialists from hereditary drummer and dancer communities, manage the dangerous lower reaches, and the tovil enacts the hierarchy each time it is performed. Bruce Kapferer's study pressed the analysis further, arguing that the ceremony's power is aesthetic: the patient's solitary terror is progressively objectified in music, dance and masks, shared by the gathered community, and finally dissolved in comedy, so that the rite transforms the experience of illness rather than merely symbolising its end, an argument that made A Celebration of Demons a standard work on ritual healing far beyond Sri Lanka. The tradition's modern circumstances are mixed: biomedicine has absorbed much of its caseload, urban Sinhala society patronises it unevenly, and the spectacular masks and dances have migrated into cultural performance and the tourist stage, while in the southern villages commissioned tovil ceremonies continue, and the adura families keep transmitting a repertoire that remains, in performance, one of the world's great dramaturgies of affliction.