Buddhism runs deep in Sri Lankan life. The island was one of the first places to convert to the religion, in 247 BC, and has remained unswervingly faithful in the two thousand years since. As such, Sri Lanka is often claimed to be the world’s oldest Buddhist country, and the religion’s trappings are apparent everywhere, most obviously in the island’s myriad temples, as well as in its vibrant festivals and large and highly visible population of monks.
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, was (according to tradition) born the son of the king in the small kingdom of Lumbini in what is now southern Nepal during the fourth or fifth century BC – 563 BC is often suggested as a possible date, though modern scholars have suggested that it might have been as much as a century later. Auspicious symbols accompanied the prince’s conception and birth: his mother dreamt that a white elephant had entered her womb, and according to legend Siddhartha emerged from beneath his mother’s right arm and immediately talked and walked, a lotus flower blossoming beneath his foot after each of his first seven steps.
Astrologers predicted that the young prince would become either a great king or a great ascetic. His father, keen to prevent the latter outcome, determined to protect his son from all knowledge of worldly suffering, ensuring that Siddhartha knew only the pampered upbringing of a closeted prince. Not until the age of 29 did he even venture out of his palace to ride through the city. Despite his father’s attempts to clear all elderly, ugly and sick people from the streets, a frail elderly man wandered into the path of Siddhartha’s chariot. The young prince, who had never seen an old person before, was, not surprisingly, deeply troubled by the sight, having previously been spared all knowledge of the inevitability of human mortality and physical decay.
On subsequent occasions the prince travelled from his palace three more times, seeing first a sick person, then a corpse, and finally an ascetic sitting meditating beneath a tree – an emblematic representation of the inevitability of age, sickness and death, and of the possibility of searching for a state that transcended such suffering. Determined to discover the path that led to this state, Siddhartha slipped away from the palace during the night, leaving his wife and young son asleep, exchanging his royal robes for the clothes of his servant, and set out to follow the life of an ascetic.
For six years Siddhartha wandered the countryside, studying with sages who taught him to achieve deep meditative trances. Siddhartha quickly equalled the attainments of his teachers, but soon realized that these accomplishments failed to release him from the root causes of human suffering. He then met up with five other ascetics who had dedicated themselves to the most extreme austerities. Siddhartha joined them and followed their lifestyle, living on a single grain of rice and a drop of water each day until he had wasted away virtually to nothing. At which point Siddhartha suddenly realized that practising pointless austerities was equally unhelpful in his spiritual quest. He therefore determined to follow the so-called middle way, a route that involved neither extreme austerities nor excessive self-indulgence.
His five companions having contemptuously abandoned him on account of his apparent lack of willpower, Siddhartha sat down beneath a bo tree and vowed to remain there until he had found an answer to the riddle of existence and suffering. Siddhartha plunged himself into profound meditation. Mara, the god of desire, seeing that the prince was attempting to free himself from craving – and therefore from Mara’s control – attempted to distract him with storms of rocks, coals, mud and darkness. When this failed, he sent his three beautiful daughters to tempt Siddhartha, but this attempt to distract the prince also proved fruitless. Finally, Mara attempted to dislodge the prince from the ground he was sitting on, shaking the very earth beneath him. Siddhartha extended his right hand and touched the earth, calling it to witness his unshakeable concentration, after which Mara withdrew.
Having conquered temptation, Siddhartha continued to meditate. As the night progressed he had a vision of all his millions of previous lives and gained an understanding of the workings of karma and of the way in which good and bad actions and desires bear fruit in subsequent lives, creating a potentially infinite and inescapable sequence of rebirths. During the final phase of his great meditation, Siddhartha realized that it was possible to pass beyond this cycle of karma and to reach a spiritual state – which he called nirvana – where desire, suffering and causality finally end. At this point he attained enlightenment and ceased being Prince Siddhartha Gautama, instead becoming the Buddha, “the Enlightened One”.
Following his enlightenment, the Buddha at first felt reluctant to talk to others of his experience, doubting that it would be understood. According to tradition, it was only at the intervention of the god Brahma himself that the Buddha agreed to attempt to communicate his unique revelation and help others towards enlightenment. He preached his first sermon to his former ascetic companions, whom he found in the Deer Park in Sarnath, near present-day Varanasi in north India. In this sermon he outlined the Four Noble Truths. The five companions quickly understood the Buddha’s message and themselves became enlightened.
After this, the Buddha’s teaching spread with remarkable rapidity. An order of monks, the Sangha, was established (as well as an order of nuns, or bhikkuni) and the Buddha appears to have travelled tirelessly around northeast India preaching. He continued to travel and teach right up until his death – or, to be precise, his passing into nirvana – at the age of around eighty at the town of Kusinagara.
Over the centuries following the Buddha’s death, Buddhism rapidly established itself across much of India, becoming the state religion under the great Indian emperor Ashoka. Ashoka despatched various Buddhist missions to neighbouring countries, one of which, under the leadership of his son Mahinda, arrived in Sri Lanka in 247 BC. Mahinda’s mission was spectacularly successful and Buddhism quickly became the dominant faith on the island, the religion giving the Sinhalese people a new-found sense of identity. Buddhism and Sinhalese nationalism have remained closely connected ever since, linked to a view of Sri Lanka as the chosen land of the faith – a kind of Buddhist Israel.
Buddhism gradually withered away in India over the following centuries, but continued to flourish in Sri Lanka despite repeated Tamil invasions and the attendant influx of Hindu ideas. It was the chaos caused by these invasions, and the fear that the principal Buddhist teachings, the so-called Tripitaka (which had hitherto been passed orally from generation to generation), would be lost that prompted King Vattagamini Abhaya to have them transcribed in the first century BC in the monastery at Aluvihara – the first time that the key Buddhist texts were committed to writing.
Although Buddhism in India had fallen into terminal decline by the fourth century AD, it continued to spread to new countries. From India it travelled north into Nepal, Tibet and China, developing in the process a new type of Buddhism – Mahayana. Sri Lanka, by contrast, preserved the Theravada tradition, which it subsequently exported to Burma and Thailand, from where it spread to neighbouring countries – Buddhists in Southeast Asia still regard Sri Lanka as the guardian of the original Theravada tradition.
Buddhism continued to flourish throughout the Anuradhapuran and Polonnaruwan eras. For much of this period Sri Lanka was virtually a theocracy: huge monasteries were established and much of the island’s agricultural surplus went to supporting a vast population of monks. The resources devoted to maintaining the clergy meant that the practice of begging for alms largely disappeared in Sri Lanka from an early date, while the Buddha’s traditional requirement that monks lead a wandering life in order to spread the religion was similarly ignored.
Not until the abandonment of Polonnaruwa in the face of further Tamil assaults in the thirteenth century did Sri Lankan Buddhism begin to face serious difficulties. As Sinhalese power and civilization fragmented, so Buddhism lost its central role in the state. Monasteries were abandoned and the population of monks declined. Hinduism became entrenched in the north, where a new Tamil kingdom had been established in the Jaffna Peninsula, while further religious competition was provided by the traders who began to arrive from Arabia from around the eighth century, and who established sizeable Muslim enclaves around parts of the coast.
Buddhism reached its lowest point in Sri Lanka during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the coast fell to Portuguese (and later Dutch) colonists. Portuguese missionaries set about winning over the natives for the Roman Catholic faith with a will, ordering the destruction of innumerable temples and converting considerable sections of the population. Meanwhile, the throne of the Kingdom of Kandy, the island’s last independent region, passed into Tamil hands, and Hindu influence gradually spread.
By 1753, the situation had become so bad that there were not enough monks left to ordain any further Buddhist clergy. The king of Kandy, Kirti Sri Rajasinha, sent out for monks from Thailand, who performed the required ordination services, thus re-establishing the Sangha in the island and founding the so-called Siyam Nikaya, or “Siam Order”. The revived order flourished, although it became increasingly exclusive, allowing only those belonging to the land-owning Goyigama caste to be ordained (a very un-Buddhist practice). A second sect, the Amarapura Nikaya, was established, again with Thai monks providing the initial ordinations. Further disputes over points of doctrine led to the foundation of the Ramanna Nikaya in the late nineteenth century. These three nikayas remain the principal orders right up to the present day, with each sect preserving its own ordination tradition.
Sri Lankan Buddhism was also threatened by Victorian missionary Christianity – and the influence of Western ideas generally – for much of the British colonial period. Faced with the Western onslaught, many local Buddhists reaffirmed their traditional beliefs and the later part of the nineteenth century saw something of a Buddhist revival. This was stimulated by the arrival of Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, the founders of Theosophy, who arrived in Sri Lanka in 1880 and declared themselves to be Buddhists. Olcott returned many times to the island, playing a major role in the revival and establishing hundreds of Buddhist schools islandwide to counterbalance the influence of the increasingly dominant British Anglican educational system. One of Blavatsky and Olcott’s young assistants, Angarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) subsequently became the movement’s leading figure, travelling the world in order to promote the Buddhist cause – and also sparking a modest Buddhist revival in India in the process. He remains a revered figure in Sri Lanka to this day, with many streets renamed in his honour.
The Buddha’s teachings, collectively known as the dharma, were codified after his death and passed on orally for several centuries until finally being written down at Aluvihara in Sri Lanka in the first century BC. The essence of Buddhist belief is encapsulated in the Four Noble Truths. Simply put, these are (1) life is suffering; (2) suffering is the result of craving; (3) there can be an end to suffering; and (4) that there is a path that leads to the end of suffering, encapsulated in the so-called Noble Eightfold Path, a set of simple rules to encourage good behaviour and morals.
All beings, Buddhism asserts, will experience a potentially infinite sequence of rebirths in various different forms: as a human, an animal, ghost or god, either on earth or in one of various heavens or hells. The engine that drives this permanent sequence of reincarnations is karma. Meritorious actions produce good karma, which enables creatures to be reborn higher up the spiritual chain; bad actions have the opposite result. In this classically elegant system, good deeds really are their own reward. No amount of good karma, however, will allow one to escape the sequence of infinite rebirths – good behaviour and the acquiring of merit is simply a stage on the route to enlightenment and the achievement of nirvana. Every desire and action plants seeds of karma that create the impetus for further lives, and further actions and desires – and so on. Some schools of ancient Indian philosophy took this idea to its logical conclusion – the Jains, for example, decided that the best thing to do in life was nothing at all, and more extreme proponents of that religion still occasionally sit down and starve themselves to death in order to avoid involvement in worldly actions, for good or bad.
The exact route to enlightenment and nirvana is long and difficult – at least according to the older schools of Buddhism – requiring millions of lifetimes. Exactly what nirvana is meant to be remains famously vague. The Buddha himself was notoriously elusive on the subject. He compared a person entering nirvana to a flame being extinguished – the flame doesn’t go anywhere, but the process of combustion ceases.
Theravada Buddhism (the “Law of the Elders”) is the dominant form of the religion in Sri Lanka, as well as in Southeast Asia. It is the older of the two main schools of Buddhism and claims to embody the Buddha’s teachings in their original form. These teachings emphasize that all individuals are responsible for their own spiritual welfare, and that any person who wishes to achieve enlightenment must pursue the same path trodden by the Buddha himself, giving up worldly concerns and developing spiritual attainments through meditation and self-sacrifice. This path of renunciation is, of course, impossible for most members of the Theravada community to follow, which explains the importance of monks in Sri Lanka (and in other Theravada countries), since only members of the Sangha are considered fully committed to the Theravada path, and thus capable of achieving enlightenment – and even then only in rare instances. Lay worshippers do have a (limited) role in the Theravada tradition, though this is mainly to earn merit by offering material support to monks. Otherwise they can hope for little except to lead a moral life and to be reborn as a monk themselves at some point in the future.
The Buddhist Flag
One of Sri Lanka’s most instantly recognizable Buddhist symbols is the multicoloured Buddhist Flag, which can be seen flying from temples and bo trees across the island, and many other places besides. The flag was designed in 1885 by a panel of local notables and first raised on Vesak Poya day, April 28, 1885, the first time Vesak had been celebrated as a public holiday under British rule. The flag was subsequently adopted by Buddhist countries around the world (sometimes with minor variations in colour), serving as an international symbol of the religion.
The flag consists of six vertical strips, representing the six colours of the aura that is said to have shone out of the body of the Buddha following his enlightenment. The colours are: blue (nila; symbolizing universal compassion); yellow (pita; The Middle Way); red (lohita; the blessings arising from the practice of Buddhism); white (odata; the purity of the Buddha’s teachings and the liberation they bring); and orange (manjesta; the Buddha’s teachings – wisdom). The wider sixth strip shows all five colours superimposed, symbolizing the compound hue said to be formed by their combination, known as pabbhassara, or “essence of light”.
The rather elitist aspect of Theravada doctrine led to it being dubbed Hinayana Buddhism, or “Lesser Vehicle”, a slightly pejorative term which compares it unfavourably with the Mahayana, or “Greater Vehicle”, sect. Mahayana Buddhism developed as an offshoot of Theravada Buddhism, eventually becoming the dominant form of the religion in China, Tibet and Japan, although it has had only a slight influence on Sri Lankan Buddhism. As Theravada Buddhism developed, it came to be believed that the Buddha himself was only the latest of a series of Buddhas – Sri Lankan tradition claims that there have been either sixteen or 24 previous Buddhas, and holds that another Buddha, Maitreya, will appear at some point in the remote future when all the last Buddha’s teachings have been forgotten. The Mahayana tradition expanded this aspect of Buddhist cosmology to create a grand array of supplementary deities, including various additional Buddhas and bodhisattvas – a Buddha-to-be who has chosen to defer entering nirvana in order to remain on earth (or in one of the various Buddhist heavens) to help others towards enlightenment. Instead of trying to emulate the Buddha, devotees simply worship one or more of the Mahayana deities and reap the spiritual rewards. Not surprisingly, this much more populist – and much less demanding – form of the religion became widely established in place of the Theravada tradition. Compared with the countless lifetimes of spiritual self-improvement that Theravada Buddhism requires its followers to endure, some schools of Mahayana claim that even a single prayer to the relevant bodhisattva can cause one to be reborn in one of the Buddhist heavens – hence its description of itself as the “Greater Vehicle”, a form of the religion capable of carrying far greater numbers of devotees to enlightenment.
While it’s true that Buddhism in Sri Lanka hasn’t experienced the byzantine transformations it has undergone in, say, China, Tibet or Japan, the religion in Sri Lanka has acquired its own particular flavour and local characteristics – mainly the result of the strong influence of Hinduism over many centuries. Buddhism evolved from the same roots as Hinduism and makes many of the same assumptions about the universe, so the inclusion of many Hindu deities within the Sri Lankan Buddhist pantheon isn’t as inconsistent as it might initially appear. (The Buddha himself never denied the existence or powers of the myriad gods of ancient Indian cosmology, simply arguing that they were subject to the same laws of karma and rebirth as any other creature – indeed according to tradition, the Buddha ascended to the various heavens to preach to the gods on several occasions.) Thus, although other gods may be unable to assist in helping one towards the ultimate goal of attaining nirvana, they still have power to assist in less exulted aims – the success of a new business, the birth of a child, the abundance of a harvest – and are therefore to be worshipped alongside the Buddha.
Various Hindu gods have been appropriated by Sri Lankan Buddhism over the centuries, going in and out of fashion according to the prevailing religious or political climate. There are countless shrines across the island dedicated to these subsidiary gods, either as lesser shrines within Buddhist temples or as separate, self-contained temples – these shrines or temples are known as devales to differentiate them from purely Buddhist temples (viharas) and Hindu temples (kovils). Thus, the supreme Hindu deity, Vishnu (often known locally as Upulvan), is regarded in Sri Lanka as a protector of Buddhism and is worshipped by Buddhists, as is the god Kataragama, another deity of mixed Hindu–Buddhist descent. Other popular gods in the Buddhist pantheon include Saman and Pattini, while the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh is also widely worshipped.
Despite the Buddha’s emphasis on the search for enlightenment and nirvana, for most Sri Lankans, daily religious life is focused on more modest goals. Theravada Buddhism traditionally states that only monks can achieve enlightenment, and even then only on very rare occasions: Sri Lanka’s last arhat (enlightened monk) is supposed to have died in the first century BC. Thus, rather than trying to emulate the Buddha’s own spiritual odyssey and attempt the near-impossible task of achieving enlightenment, the average Sri Lankan Buddhist will concentrate on leading a moral life and on acquiring religious merit in the hope of ensuring rebirth higher up the spiritual ladder.
To become a Buddhist, one simply announces the fact that one is “taking refuge” in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. There is no form of organized or congregational worship in Buddhism, as there is in Christianity or Islam – instead, devotees visit their local temple when they please, saying prayers at the dagoba or Buddha shrine (or that of another god), perhaps offering flowers, lighting a candle or reciting (or having monks recite) Buddhist scriptures, an act known as pirith. Although Theravada holds that the Buddha himself should not be worshipped, many Sinhalese effectively do so.
Buddhist places of pilgrimage and festivals play a vital role in sustaining the faith. The island’s major places of pilgrimage – the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, the revered “footprint” of the Buddha at Adam’s Peak, and the Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura – attract thousands of pilgrims year-round. The timing of pilgrimages is often linked to significant dates in the Buddhist calendar, which is punctuated by a further round of Buddhist holidays and festivals. Full-moon – or poya – days are considered particularly important, particularly Vesak Poya, the day on which the Buddha is said to have been born, achieved enlightenment and passed into nirvana. Buddhist devotees traditionally visit their local temple on poya days to spend time in prayer or meditation; they might also practise certain abstinences, such as fasting or refraining from alcohol and sex. Some poya days are also celebrated with elaborate festivals, often taking the form of enormous processions (peraheras), when locals parade along the streets, sometimes accompanied by elaborately costumed elephants. Nowhere are these processions more extravagant than during the magnificent Esala Perahera in Kandy, one of Sri Lanka’s – indeed Asia’s – most visually spectacular pageants.
Even if you don’t go near a temple, you won’t travel far in Sri Lanka without seeing a shaven-headed Buddhist monk clad in striking orange or red robes. Collectively known as the Sangha, the island’s fifteen thousand or so monks form one of the most visible and distinctive sections of Sri Lankan society, and serve as living proof of the island’s commitment to the Buddhist cause. The monastic tradition is deeply embedded in the national culture, and the importance of the Buddhist clergy can be seen in myriad ways, from the monks who sit in the nation’s parliament to the seats in every bus that are reserved for their use. The Sinhala language, meanwhile, features special forms of address only used when talking to a monk, even including a different word for “yes”.
Young boys are traditionally chosen to be monks if they show a particular religious bent, or if their horoscope appears favourable – although many are given to the Sangha by poor Sinhalese families in order to provide them with a decent standard of living and an education. Boy monks are first initiated into the Sangha as novices around their tenth birthday, going to live and study in a monastery and largely severing their ties with home (there is no minimum age at which boys can be ordained – according to tradition, a boy can become a novice when he’s old enough to chase away crows). Higher ordination occurs at the age of 20. At this point the monk becomes a full member of the Sangha. Monks are supposed to commit themselves to the Sangha for life – the custom, popular in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), of laymen becoming monks for a short period then returning to normal life is not considered acceptable in Sri Lanka – although in practice significant numbers of monks fail to last the course and return to secular society, often once they’ve secured an education.
On entering the Sangha the new monk shaves his head and dons the characteristic robes of a Buddhist cleric (usually saffron, sometimes red or yellow – the precise colour has no significance, and monks wear whatever is given to them, apart from forest-dwelling monks, who tend to wear brown robes). He also takes a new name: the honorific thero or thera is often added after it, along with the name of the town or village in which the monk was born, while “The Venerable” (or “Ven.”) is frequently added as a prefix. Monks commit themselves to a code of conduct that entails various prohibitions. These traditionally include: not to kill; not to steal; not to have sex; not to lie about spiritual attainments; not to drink alcohol; not to handle money; not to eat after midday; and not to own more than a bare minimum of personal possessions.
The great monastic foundations of ancient Sri Lanka have largely vanished, and most monks now live in local village temples. These temples are intimately connected to the life of the village they serve, which usually provides the resident monks with their only source of material support via regular offerings, in return for which the monks act as teachers and spiritual mentors to the local population. The actual functions required of a Buddhist monk are few. The only ceremonies they preside at are funerals, although they are sometimes asked to recite Buddhist scriptures (pirith). Monks traditionally act as spiritual advisers; some monks also gain reputations as healers or astrologers.
A less savoury aspect of the Sri Lankan Buddhist clergy has been their involvement in ultra-nationalistic politics – the view that many monks hold of Sri Lanka as the “chosen land” of Buddhism has disturbing parallels with hard-line Jewish attitudes towards Israel. In 1959, Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike was shot dead by a Buddhist monk, and the clergy have constantly involved themselves in politics ever since; some of the more right-wing monks reputedly formed a clandestine ultra-nationalist group called the Circle of Sinhalese Force, whose members used Nazi salutes and spouted wild propaganda about the perceived threat to their land, race and religion – a mixture of Mahavamsa and Mein Kampf.
In earlier decades, monks had contented themselves with influencing politicians, though since the turn of the century they have started entering politics on their own account, representing the monk-led Jathika Hela Urumaya party (National Heritage Party; JHU). A Buddhist monk was first elected to parliament in 2001, and they also formed a small but significant fraction of Mahinda’s Rajapakse’s ruling coalition, although subsequently sided with Sirisena in the 2015 presidential election.
Recent years have also seen the emergence of the even more rabidly xenophobic Bodu Bala Sena, founded in 2012 by a splinter group of the JHU which was widely suspected (possibly with government encouragement) of being behind the anti-Muslim riots of 2014 and also of sponsoring attacks on Muslim-owned businesses – although it appears not to have been involved in the 2018 riots.
Throughout the later war years, leading monks consistently denounced any attempts by the government to cede autonomy to the Tamils of the north and campaigned vigorously for a military rather than a negotiated solution to the conflict, led by the vociferous former JHU leader Athurliye Rathana, dubbed the “War Monk” by the Sri Lankan press. Even following the end of the conflict certain monks appear determined to continue stoking up sectarian tensions. In late 2011, cleric Amatha Dhamma led a group of other monks and lay followers in destroying a Muslim shrine in Anuradhapura – a confrontational and inflammatory act with disturbing parallels to the notorious destruction of the Babri Mosque in India in 1992. Unfortunately, some at least of Sri Lanka’s Sangha apparently see no contradiction between the Buddhist ideals in which they profess to believe and their frequently xenophobic, intolerant and rampantly sectarian rhetoric – all the more unfortunate, given that they continue to command widespread popular support and respect.