During the war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Elle Gunavamsa made himself famous for writing war songs. They were published by the government and were sung as the Sri Lankan army went into battle. Here is a sample:
The sword is pulled from the [scabbard], it is
Not put back unless smeared with blood.
I turned my blood to milk to make you grow
Not for myself but for the country
My brave, brilliant soldier son
Leaving [home] to defend the motherland
That act of merit is enough
To reach Nirvāṇa in a future birth.[1]
Here we have the Buddhist equivalent of the radical Muslim Holy War, complete with promises of spiritual rewards. Yet another echo is the fact that Gunavamsa calls on Mahādevī, the great goddess that Hindu kings celebrated as they went to war. Although her cult is fading in contemporary Sri Lanka, this could be a reference to the goddess Pattini, an immigrant Tamil deity that alternatively combines the opposing qualities of the Hindu Pārvatī and Kālī.[2]
In 2009 the Tamil Tigers were finally defeated and the last stages of this particularly brutal war involved the deaths of an estimated 40,000 civilians. Buddhist militants have now turned to attacking Muslims and Christians. Based on charges that Muslim businessmen have attempted to monopolize trade, thirty Muslim shops have been attacked since September, 2011. In the course of 2012 and 2013, twenty mosques have been attacked, one during the Muslim holiday of Eid. Raw pork and pig’s heads have been thrown into mosques, Muslim leaders have been kidnapped and one arrested for sectarian agitation, and Muslim women and girls have been harassed because of their dress. Although they claim no involvement, these actions have been prompted by Buddhist militant organizations such as Bodu Bala Sena and Sinhala Ravaya, which have promulgated anti-Muslim propaganda. Some Buddhists, such as Naravila Dhammaratana, have spoken out against the militants: “While this Saṅgha. . . has democracy, it has neither [a] special country nor nation nor caste. To such a society which has no country, nation, or caste, every human being is the same. . . . Those who fight against the Tamils are not Buddhists.”[3] I am certain that he would now include violence against Muslims and Christians.
The flag of Sri Lanka contains two stripes, green embracing the Muslims and orange integrating the Hindus, thus validating their Sinhalese identity in the Country of the Lion (Sinhala). Buddhist nationalists have removed these colored strips from their flag, so the sword in the lion’s hand must now appear much more menacing to Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, the Hindus comprising 12 percent of the population, and Muslims and Christians claiming 8 percent each. After the most recent attack on a mosque in the capital Colombo, a spokesman for the Sri Lankan Thaheed Jamath despaired: “Earlier it was the Tamils, now they are clearly targeting us.”[4]
The persecution against Sri Lankan Christians has been even more fierce and determined. From 2002 to 2007 there were 320 reported cases of arson against churches and homes, smashing of statues and burning of Bibles and hymnals, and physical assaults on individual Christians. Routinely, Buddhist authorities request that the celebration of Christmas and Easter be cancelled. On July 6, 2007, 500 Buddhists surrounded Calvary Church northeast of Colombo. The Christian Post reported that “the mob, including monks, entered the church and completely destroyed everything within, leaving only the walls standing.”[5] Fortunately, deaths have been rare, but one missionary was murdered in February because of his conversion techniques. In 2012 there were fifty-two attacks on churches, and the count in 2013 up to the middle of August was seventy-five. Even after the nation’s highest court ruled that the Christians and their buildings may not be molested, the attacks continued. Members of a home church were confronted on August 7, 2013, and Sinhalese troops stormed a church one day later, on the presumption that it was not a legal building. On May 24, 2013, a monk the Venerable Thero Bowatte Indrarathana, after he appealed to the Parliament to ban Christian proselytizing, immolated himself as a “sacrifice” for the cause of Sinhalese nationalism.
Sri Lanka has the largest percentage of Christians in South Asia, and 25 percent of those are Tamils. (The father of Tamil nationalism was a Malaysian Christian by the name of J. V. Chelvanayakam.) Christians say that one reason they are being targeted is that they are accused of being Tamil sympathizers. The other reason is that Protestant Christian missionaries have had considerable success in recent years, which has led to Buddhist charges of unethical and/or forced conversions. One website claims that Evangelicals and Pentecostals have increased from 50,000 to 240,000 since 1980. American Buddhist blogger Barbara O’Brien confesses that there is no excuse for the violence, but she counters as follows:
There is an ongoing problem with over-aggressive Christian proselytizing conducted in a dishonest and unethical manner by some conservative evangelical groups. . . . They have distributed inflammatory literature, such as pamphlets condemning the Buddha as a reincarnation of Satan.[6]
The missionaries could counter that they are simply making up for lost ground, because, before the rise of a vigorous Buddhist revival in the late nineteenth century, there were many more Christians on the island.
Following the lead of Hindu fundamentalists, who have passed anti-conversion laws in seven Indian states, Sri Lankan Buddhist legislators have drafted a similar bill that would outlaw conversion, “by the use of force or by allurement or by any fraudulent means,” of a person from one religion to another. Some Buddhist extremists have spread rumors that Christians had assassinated the Buddhist monk who initiated the bill, even though an autopsy showed that he had died of a heart attack. Sri Lankan police have been criticized for being slow in making arrests and for dismissing the attackers as mere drunks, but some observers suspect that they are encouraged by radical elements of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a socialist party that has supported a strong nationalist platform for decades. The JVP is allied with Vidyālankara University, whose monks are disciples of Anagarika Dharmapala, the father of Buddhist nationalism and whose second generation monks, as H. L. Seneviratne contends, upset the nonviolent “delicate balance” established by his first generation followers with “violence, breaking it up into pieces, never to be put back together again.”[7]
Buddhist nationalism has its roots in the Dīpavaṃsa, Mahāvaṃsa, and Culavamsa, texts unique to Sinhalese Buddhism. Over the centuries effective rituals, described in the third section below, were developed to reconcile the presence of non-Buddhists in what some Buddhists perceive to be the cosmic center of the Dharma. These premodern systems of integrating the “other” have now been supplanted by a modernist concept of a Buddhist nation state that is exclusionary rather than inclusionary. Peter Schalk proposes that there is now a Sinhalatva (Sinhaleseness) that is just as rigid and uncompromising as Hindutva (Hinduness) in neighboring India.[8] The term “Sinhalatva” was first used in 2001 by Nalin de Silva, a retired physics professor and fervent Sinhalese nationalist. Schalk’s main task in his article “Relativizing Sinhalatva and Semnatic Transformation of the Dhammadipa” is to demonstrate that the claim that dhammadipa means “island of the dhamma” is a nationalist invention started by Angarika Dharmapala.
Sinhalatva is based on a reverse Orientalism that essentializes ethnic identities and leverages the supposed superiority of Aryan Buddhists to attack Dravidian Tamils and other “aliens” in Sri Lanka. The fact that even a moderate such as monk Bhikkhu Dhammavihari, similar to Hindu nationalists denying Muslims citizenship, labels the Tamils “non-Sri Lankan” is particularly unfortunate. It does not help Dhammavihari’s anti-Tamil brief to claim historical authority for the Mahāvaṃa and then state, quite incongruously, that the chroniclers “bungle” when their accounts are embarrassing or do not fit his thesis.[9] We shall see that the traditional texts do not support Dhammavihari’s bigotry.
For the purposes of this book a premodern worldview is one in which totality, unity, and purpose are paramount. These values were celebrated in ritual and myth, the effect of which was to sacralize the cycles of seasons, the generations of animal and human procreation, and to integrate the presence of aliens. The human self, then, is an integral part of the sacred whole, which is greater than and more valuable than its parts. Generally speaking, the premodern mind resolves conflict dialectically, the polarities of yin and yang being the best examples. (The exception to this rule is the radical dualism of Manicheanism and Gnosticism, found in Jainism and even in Gandhi’s writings.) Robert Bellah has observed that modern religion rejects the premodern mediation of ritual and myth in favor of an unmediated personal salvation.[10] Interestingly enough, there are anticipations of this religious individualism in the world’s ascetic traditions, but it did not come to full fruition until the Protestant Reformation. Elsewhere I have argued that premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism are best understood conceptually rather than in strict chronological terms.[11]
In contrast to premodern polarity, the modern mind loves to dichotomize: it separates the mind from the heart, fact from value, science from faith, the public from the private, and theory from practice. As opposed to the premodern relational self, the modern self is self-contained and self-legislating—a social atom as it were. The modern nation state is this autonomous self writ large, and it is expressed as the will of a people defined by language, culture, religion, and race. Just as selves as social atoms become dysfunctional, nation states tend to behave in similar ways. They draw strict boundaries that set up unnecessary barriers to natural human intercourse and fellowship.
One can also trace a move from premodern orality to modernist textuality, where the priest/pastor/monk now exhorts his congregation to act on the meaning, sometimes quite untraditional and arbitrary, of selected texts of vernacular scripture available to a literate population. There is a significant difference between finding noncognitive meaning in a ritual performed in a sacred language that the believer does not know, and a much more cognitive gnōsis by which modern believers shape their religious worldviews and sometimes act on them in a political way. Here we find a movement from premodern sacred “sound as the message” to a modern vernacular text with an intellectual meaning. In this chapter I will critique Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism using this premodern/modern heuristic, and then in the final chapter, I will offer a constructive postmodern solution to religious nationalism and fundamentalism.
Nationalist claims to ethnic and religious purity have never been borne out by the facts. Sri Lanka’s founding myth involves the intermingling of native peoples with Hindu immigrants from North and South India. Historically, Buddhism did not arrive in Sri Lanka until the third century BCE. It is a fact that Buddhist kings frequently fended off military invasions from South India, but just as often they formed alliances with Hindu rulers and traders from Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Bahu I (1272–84) welcomed South Indian Śaivites with open arms, giving them lands and titles, just as South Indians welcomed Jews and Christians to their Malabar coast. The supreme irony is that the Tamil kings of the Nayakkar line (1739–1815) did the most to restore the Sinhalese Buddhist priesthood and promote Buddhist art and architecture. The other significant fact is that at this time Tamils and Sinhalese were usually not divided by race as they have been since the late nineteenth century.[12] The main factor here was the introduction of the European discovery that that Sinhalese was an Indo-European (Aryan) language whereas Tamil was a Dravidian language. The caustic mix of race, language, and Buddhist nationhood had its origins in this colonial context.
The Tamil Tigers are just as much to blame for their many atrocities—they have done more suicide bombings than all other world terrorist groups combined—but terrorists, whatever their nationality or religion, are made not born. Some argue that Tamil claims to an ancient homeland and distinct ethnic identity are groundless,[13] but comparable Buddhist claims of Aryan racial purity are similarly without merit. There are some instructive similarities to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An aggrieved minority has been radicalized by a perception that Israel and its American ally do not care about them, and Israeli military superiority has forced some Palestinians to use terrorist tactics to fight back. Both sides in both conflicts have legitimate claims to live on the land that is in dispute. A long, bitter, polarizing struggle with no easy solution has been the result in both countries.
For decades Tamil moderates proposed a reasonable federal solution as they pleaded for social, economic, and linguistic inclusion with some autonomy. (Ironically, medieval Sinhalese polity was a loose federation rather than the homogenous state imputed to it by contemporary Buddhist nationalists.) Until the 1970s a great majority of Tamils would not have supported a separate Tamil state, just as most Indian Muslims did not support Partition. As D. Amarasiri Weeratane states: “When all attempts to settle the problem by democratic methods failed, the Tamils were driven into the arms of the terrorists who posed as the saviours of the Tamil people.”[14] Tragically, Muslim and Hindu extremists won out in 1948, and while there has been no Sri Lankan “Partition,” there were far too many unnecessary casualties at the Sinhalese civil war against the Tamils. Significantly, the Tamil Tigers did not embrace the ideology of Hindu essentialism because their grievances were primarily economic and linguistic, not religious. The first step to a general peace for Sri Lankans is to acknowledge the fact that for over 2,200 years their beautiful island has been, is now, and must always be a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.
The Mahāvaṃa (written in the sixth century CE) tells the story of Sinhabahu, a North Indian who, along with a twin sister Sinhasivali, was born of the union between a lion and a maiden. He was not a Buddhist but a Vaiṣṇava Hindu, and he founded a city called Sinhapura in the lion’s territory, and together with his sister as queen, fathered thirty-two sons, the eldest of whom was Vijaya. The Mahāvaṃa explains that “Vijaya was of evil conduct and his followers were even (like himself), and many intolerable deeds of violence were done by them.”[15] Vijaya and 700 of his men were banished and sent away to sea, landing in Sri Lanka at the time, the chronicle claims, of the Buddha’s death. This is the mythological source of the Sinhalese people, those who came from a lion (sinha) and who established Sinhala “the country of the lion.”
Vijaya’s first task was to rid the island of its indigenous population, known in Hindu epics as a country of yakṣas and rakṣasas, the most famous being Ravāna of the Rāmāyaṇa. The first chapter of the Mahāvaṃa relates that the Buddha himself did preparatory work during three trips to the island, converting “many koti of living beings” to Buddhism, founding stupas, and otherwise preparing the way for the Dharma, which historically did not come for another 300 years. While it is clear that the resident nagas were converted, the Mahāvaṃa (chapter 1) relates that Buddha relieved the yakṣas of their fears in return for the possession of their island. The Buddha did no violence to them and exiled them to a “rocky island,” but they were back on the main island when Vijaya arrived. Furthermore, the Mahāvaṃa does not record any encounter by Vijaya with Buddhists or the discovery of stupas.
According to chapter 7 of the Mahāvaṃa, Vijaya did have two children by the yakṣi Kuvani. Following the ancient theme of a maiden betraying her people to the foreigner, Vijaya, with Kuvani’s help, slaughters her fellow yakṣas, but in the end Kuvani is banished along with her children. This mytheme allows us to assume that there was intermarriage with native people, the Vaddas, who, in ancient times, were hunter gatherers spread throughout the island. Most of them were converted to Buddhism after the fifteenth century and became rice farmers in the western regions of the country. Only several thousand preserve their original identity today and some claim Vijaya as their ancestral father. In the next section we will see how the Vaddas gained a Sinhalese identity through premodern modes of ritual inclusion.
In addition to mixing genes with the locals, Vijaya married a Śaivite Tamil princess and she brought women for Vijaya’s ministers and thousands of craftsmen and their families. As Gananath Obeyesekere states: “Unlike the Vaddas, the Tamils are not only kinfolk but also co-founders of the nation. This aspect of the myth has been almost completely forgotten or ignored in recent times.”[16] Bhikkhu Dhammavihari grossly underestimates the influx of South Indians to the island when he admits that “a few people from the neighbourhood of the adjacent country moved in here from time to time and soon learnt to co-exist in a spirit of friendship with the people of their new homeland.”[17] Obeyesekere counters this claim by declaring that “viewed in long term historical perspective Sinhalas have been for the most part South Indian migrants who have been sasanized,”[18] that is, either having been converted to Buddhism or having come under the umbrella of the Buddhist “church” (śāsana). Referring to the Mahāvaṃa’s myth of Sinhabahu, one can make an even stronger argument: the original “people of the lion” were North Indian Vaiṣṇavas not Buddhists. In the next chapter we will see that this is the case for the original Burmese.
Buddhist nationalist claims to racial purity are nipped in the proverbial bud: the mythical seed of the Sinhalese Buddhist nation is a hybrid of immigrant Hindus, Indian Buddhists (some Mahāyānists), and indigenous people. The Pāli word sihala is found infrequently in the early chronicles, and when it is used even Dhammavihari admits that it is not in the sense of a “religio-nationalism.”[19] It definitely does not refer to a pure race of people, as some nineteenth-century Europeans proposed and Buddhist nationalists, in an ironic reverse Orientalism, assumed. Buddhist nationalists sometimes use the testimony of Chinese pilgrims as proof that a distinct Sinhalese identity is not just projection of current beliefs on a distant past. The fact that Fa Xian (fifth century CE) and Hiuen Ziang (seventh century CE) refer to Sri Lanka as “the country of the lion” does not prove ethnic or religious purity at all. The original myth of the lion was North Indian and the founder was a devotee of Viṣṇu.
When Vijaya arrives on the island, Viṣṇu is there to greet the newcomers. (He had been designated guardian deity of Sri Lanka by the Buddha himself.) Viṣṇu is asked “What island is this, sir?” “The island of Lanka,” he answered. “There are no men here, and here no dangers will arise.”[20] And when a delegation returns to the original “lion country” in India, it brings back a Vaiṣṇava prince, Panduvasudeva, who succeeds Vijaya as king of Sri Lanka, still a country of Vaddas, Śaivite Tamils, and North Indian Vaiṣṇavas, but, significantly, no Buddhists.
Obeyesekere points out that “it is one of the ironies of ethnicity that the Tamils want a separate state of Ilam, which means ‘Sinhala country’; while the Sinhalas want to hang on to Lanka which is derived from ilankai the Tamil word for ‘island.’”[21] Obeyesekere also confirms that “in my reading of literally hundreds of ritual texts I have not come across one instance of the country being called other than Lanka or Sri Lanka . . . , except when foreign gods or traders come to these shores and hail it as the country of the Sinhala (sinhaladesa).”[22] Obeyesekere asserts that it is common for outsiders to name a country in terms of its dominant group: “outsiders see it as a single entity whereas the insiders are sensitive to the complexities of internal differentiation,”[23] differences about which the precolonial rulers of the island were aware and respected.
One incident from the Mahāvaṃa (chapter 19) demonstrates the ethnic and religious harmony that existed during the reign of King Devanamtissa (247–207 BCE), who introduced Buddhism to the island. The chapter begins with an elaborate description of the transport of the Bodhi tree from King Aśoka in India and its arrival in the northern port of Jubukola. There a brahmin priest named Tivakka was one of the first to worship the holy tree. Two weeks later it arrived in the capital city of Anuradhapura and the tree miraculously sprouted thirty-two saplings. One was given to Tivakka to plant in his own town, and two others were given to Hindu kṣatriyas in the north. This demonstrates that not only was there ethnic harmony, but Hindus and Buddhists, as many still do today in India and Nepal, worshipped together honoring common sacred sites and objects.
The next major event is the campaign of King Dutthagamani (161–137 BCE) that led to the unification of the island under this Buddhist king. The Dīpavaṃsa (18.50–54), the earliest chronicle from the fourth century CE, portrays the Tamil king Elara as a just ruler and there appear to be no anti-Buddhist allegations against him. The fact that Dutthagamani starts from the periphery of power in the south and must fight thirty-two other provincial rulers, some of them presumably Buddhists, on his way north indicates that the actual motivations for Dutthagamani’s campaign could not have been primarily religious. The 1912 English version of the Mahāvaṃa contains an unfortunate mistranslation that moves a Buddhist relic from the royal scepter to Dutthagamani’s spear, and this error has given Buddhist militants an illicit, but even stronger justification for Buddhist warfare.[24]
While the Dīpavaṃsa contains only thirteen stanzas about Dutthagamani, more than half the Mahāvaṃa is devoted to the famous king. The authors are determined to glorify Dutthagamani and they design an edifying narrative framework based on the story of Aśoka. The number of provincial rulers who resisted Dutthagamani is obviously exaggerated and most likely is drawn from the thirty-two opponents of Aśoka. But the most significant similarity to Aśoka is the post-battle malaise that Dutthagamani suffers over the great number of Tamil casualties. In chapter 25, a group of arhats come to console the grieving king and report a remarkable calculation concerning those killed in the war. According to the wise monks, only one enemy soldier had taken full refuge in the Dharma and another had embraced only the Five Precepts. This means that there had been only one and a half real persons killed among thousands of casualties. This demonstrates that there has been substantial anti-Tamil sentiment for centuries, and it provides ready fodder for contemporary Sinhalese propagandists. Even the great Buddhist scholar Wapola Rahula uses this incident without questioning its veracity in his defense of Sinhalese nationalism.[25]
Stanley Tambiah demonstrates how Buddhist chroniclers regularly invented scenarios in order to explain the presence of so many South Indians in their midst. A very instructive example of this fictitious history is the rājavaliya (lineage of kings) that gives an account of a Sinhalese invasion of the Chola kingdom in South India in the twelfth century.[26] The Buddhist king Gajabahu wins a great victory and brings home not only 12,000 Sinhalese prisoners from previous Tamil campaigns but also an equal number of new Tamil prisoners. The Tamils were incorporated into Sinhalese society as low caste workers spread throughout the ancient kingdom of Kandy. The Buddhist chroniclers, sensing the national shame of one South Indian invasion (tenth century) and another from Kālīnga (thirteenth century), established a rhetorical quid pro quo as well as explaining the presence of Tamils in their southern kingdom. Incidentally but significantly, the Tamils in the north placed their Sinhalese captives in subcaste positions as well. The Sinhalese most likely learned caste consciousness from the Hindus, and the principal motivation for marrying into Hindu families was to validate their position as authentic Hindu rulers (kṣatriyas).
As strict Theravādins, the Buddhist chroniclers also failed to mention the influx of Mahāyāna Buddhists from South India. The Lotus Sūtra has Gautama Buddha born in Sri Lanka and he is given the name Sinhala, a favor that its Mahāyāna authors should not have offered to Sinhalese Buddhists who did not welcome South Indian Mahāyānists to their island. Nonetheless, the presence of Mahāyāna Buddhists is recorded faithfully in wall paintings, sculpture, and religious practices. (Dharmapala’s focus on a savior Buddha who suffered for others may have come from Mahāyāna as well as Christianity.) Furthermore, most Sinhalese Buddhists apparently do not realize that Buddadatta and Dhammapala, Buddhist scholars that Sinhalese scholars used as trusted commentators on the Pāli canon, were South Indian Tamils.
Mahāyāna Buddhist immigrants from Kerala rose to prominence in trade and political administration, and the Sinhalese king Bahu VI dedicated a shrine to their goddess Pattini, whose worship is now wide spread in Sri Lanka.[27] Significantly these South Indians stood by their Buddhist king when, in the late fourteenth century, he had to defend his territory from the Tamil king of Jaffna. One Keralite family from Southwest India married into Sinhalese royalty, and another became so strong that it operated as a separate principality and played a key role in turning back the Tamil invasion. The historical lesson that we can learn is that during this period the motivations for warfare on all sides were not primarily religious in nature, and the notion of a pure Buddhist Sinhalese race constantly defending itself against South Indian “unbelievers” has no foundation in historical reality.
Let me conclude this section with an account of Kīrti Śrī Rājasinha (1747–82), who was anathemized by militant monks as “the heretic king” for doing Śaivite worship in private. Kīrti Śrī was the most famous of the Tamil Nayakkar kings who ruled from 1739 until 1815, when the British, with aid from Buddhists aristocrats and monks, overthrew the dynasty. The Nayakkar line in Sri Lanka actually started much earlier in the reign of Rājasinghe II (1635–87), who married two Tamil women from this family. The Mahāvaṃa has nothing but praise for King Kīrti Śri, who sent an embassy to Thailand to bring back priests who reestablished the Sinhalese Saṅgha. (The last ordained monk had died in 1729.) He also gave lavish support to Buddhist art, monasteries, and temple building, including the establishment of the now famous Temple of the Tooth, which, sadly, has recently been attacked by the Tamil Tigers. During his reign vipasanā meditation techniques were developed, which have now become popular throughout the world.
Even a prominent Buddhist nationalist R. A. L. H. Gunawardena had to concede that Kīrti Śri was an authentic Buddhist king, one of “the divine lords who had come down in the lineage of Mahāsammata [Buddha King] through Vijaya and other rulers of Sri Lanka.”[28] One black mark against Kīrti Śri was that he did put some Roman Catholic priests on trial for distributing anti-Buddhist literature, but he eventually called off the anti-Catholic campaign and ordered the rebuilding of a church that had been destroyed. Kīrti Śri appeared to have good relations with the Muslim population, and he gave one Muslim trader a large tract of land that once belonged to one of the conspirators who tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him.
In his book on Kīrti Śrī, John Holt demonstrates how committed he was to fulfilling his duty as “the quintessential Thervāda Buddhist king.”[29] Kīrti Śrī had studied Aśoka’s reign very carefully (albeit via the unreliable Mahāvaṃa), and Holt describes one ritual that he borrowed from Aśoka that had substantial dramatic effect. It is an ordination rite, still performed in Kandy today, in which the king symbolically abdicates in favor of the monk who is being ordained. The monk is honored as if he were king, being entertained by the royal dancers and riding on the royal elephant. Holt claims that the art that Kīrti Śrī sponsored was a “superb distillation of an authentic Sinhalese Theravāda Buddhist worldview that has been genuinely embraced by Kandyan Buddhists”; and he “laid the foundation for the manner in which Buddhism has become a type of civil religion in Kandy for up-country Sinhalese.”[30] In addition to the Aśokan model of Buddhist kingship, Kīrti Śrī also used Śakra (Vedic Indra) and King Manu, the latter taken from the god-king of the Laws of Manu. Kīrti Śrī also styled himself as a Bodhisattva, a strategy, Holt claims, that had much appeal to the peasants and the oppressed.
Despite frequent conflict and a deeply felt anti-Tamil sentiment among many Buddhists, why is it that the people of this beautiful island have lived in relative peace for centuries? The key, I believe, lies in how premodern Sinhalese socially and psychologically processed the presence of the Other in their midst. Obeyesekere offers a fascinating account of the worship of various indigenous deities under the umbrella of the dominant Buddhism: “In Rambadeniya, after each harvest, villagers will gather together in a collective thanksgiving ritual for the gods known as the adukku (“food offering”). During this festival the priest of the deity cults (never the Buddhist monk) pays formal homage to the Buddha and the great guardian deities and then actively propitiates the local gods. . . .”[31] After this the people trek thirty-five miles to a Buddhist temple where they join many other villagers, who had just paid respect to their local deities, in an exclusive Buddhist ceremony.
Obeyesekere also describes an elaborate ritual in which the Vaddas, the indigenous people who were originally hunters and gathers, are validated within the larger Buddhist society. There is a simulated battle in which armed Vadda warriors attack a Buddhist temple but are thwarted by temple guardians. They continue their fake battle until their spears are broken and thrown against the temple. After worshipping at their own altars, they purify themselves in a nearby river, and then return to the temple where a Buddhist priest anoints them with sandalwood water. They end their ceremony with the chant of haro-hara to the god Skanda, a god they share not only with Buddhists, but also with Hindus, because hara is a name for Śiva and Skanda is his second son. This ritual of dialectical reconciliation of identity and difference demonstrates the genius of the premodern worldview, which produces resolved polarities rather than strict dichotomies and particularized inclusion rather than complete exclusion.
Obeyesekere further describes a ritual that allows the “naturalization” of Tamils into the Sinhalese community. As in the Vadda ceremony above, the Tamils, outfitted either as merchants or deities, are stopped at a symbolic gate by two guardian deities. The Tamil actors speak with “a strong Tamil accent and they constantly utter malapropisms, unintended puns, and spoonerisms. In their ignorance they make insulting remarks about the gods at the barrier; they do not know Sinhala and Buddhist customs and the audience has a lot of fun at their expense.”[32] Like the Beast in ballet versions of Beauty and the Beast, who dances more eloquently as Beauty accepts him, the Tamil players begin to speak more fluently and accurately, and are then accepted by the Sinhalese community by a symbolic opening of the previously barred gate.
Not only does ritual provide a way of reconciling conflict and otherness, but so does myth. Under the section title “The Processes of Incorporation and Inclusion,” Tambiah analyzes the story of Pitiye Deviyo, a Hindu Chola prince/deity, who is cursed and exiled because he killed a calf. Transformed into a demon, he invades Sri Lanka and defeats Natha, one of the four Buddhist guardian deities. (It is significant to note that the three other guardian deities—Skanda, Viṣṇu, and Saman—appear to have Hindu origins.) Natha’s defeat is mythically rationalized by his decision not “to commit sin by waging further war.”[33] Natha is promoted to the status of a Bodhisattva because of this vow of non-violence, and, significantly enough, Pitiye is incorporated as a subordinate regional deity. Here is another excellent example of premodern inclusion, whereas modern Christian missionaries, especially Protestant, would insist on total exclusion of the alien deity. According to the legend, Pitiye established irrigation systems and rice farming, and the locals turned from hunting and raising cattle. Rice farming in Sri Lanka now enjoys high caste status, whereas hunting (the original occupation of the Vaddas) and cattle raising are low caste.
Obeyesekere observes that “‘nation’ is an alien word that has no parallel in the Sinhala lexicon. It is śāsana that takes its place.”[34] He translates śāsana as “church,” but not in the sense of an established church where every citizen must join and foreswear all other beliefs, but more in the sense of an overarching moral community in which people find meaning without losing deeply rooted ties to their villages. This fusion of local and central worship parallels the relation between the authority of the king, who, unlike the modern nation state, allows considerable autonomy in his outlying realm. Stanley Tambiah explains: “The polities modeled on mandala-type patterning had central royal domains surrounded by satellite principalities and provinces replicating the center on a smaller scale and at the margins had even more autonomous tributary principalities.”[35] Tambiah gives this type of polity the engaging name “pulsating galactic polities,” and he believes that this form of political organization is better at integrating minorities and respecting their autonomy. Ironically, Buddhist nationalists frequently use medieval symbols of Sinhalese political unity that are actually more federalist in meaning than the modernist homogenous unity that they impose on them.[36]
By keeping church and state separate, the modern nation state has succeeded thus far in satisfying its minorities, but serious problems are beginning to arise as Muslims in Europe feel alienated in an overwhelmingly secular society. In the United States increasingly larger numbers of Christians are concerned about a society that has lost its basic values. The homogenizing effects of modern secular culture do indeed appear to be destructive of traditional values. Obeyesekere observes that contemporary Sri Lankan society is also in the midst of a moral crisis with high murder and suicide rates, and the fact that there are more liquor shops in the countryside than rural banks. Obeyesekere also reports drinking, meat eating, and financial corruption among the monks and lay supporters. The ancient Buddhist śāsana (“church”) appeared to serve the diverse society of Sri Lanka relatively well until Europeans came with exclusivist notion of church that tore open the fabric of native religious communities.
The neo-Hinduism and neo-Buddhism of the last two centuries can be instructively explained as a form of “affirmative” or “reverse” Orientalism, a response to the negative Orientalism that arose out of the first European encounters with Indian culture. Negative Orientalism viewed the South Asian people as uncivilized, irrational, superstitious, lazy, cowardly, and effeminate. (The British exempted the Pashtuns, the Sikhs, and the Gurkhas from this characterization.) While granting the technological advantage of western culture, Annie Besant and the theosophists promoted affirmative Orientalism, a view that proclaimed the spiritual superiority of South Asian civilization and the nobility of its commitment to the virtues of peace, non-violence, and compassion. Ironically, Gandhi learned to appreciate the value of his own Indian tradition from his association with theosophists in London. Gandhi joined most Hindus in accepting the theosophical axiom that Buddhism and Jainism were essentially the same as Hinduism. What was lost in this rather superficial universalism was a respect for the autonomy and integrity of Buddhism and Jainism, not to mention the other religions that were fused together in the unscholarly amalgam sometimes called the Perennial Philosophy.
On May 17, 1880, theosophists Madam Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steele Olcott arrived in Sri Lanka and proclaimed that Buddhism was a natural expression of their own spiritual universalism. They quickly established the Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society one month later. Colonel Olcott stayed on to inspire Sinhalese Buddhists not only to recover, but to substantially redefine, their own tradition, and to respond to what they perceived to be the destructive effects of increasing numbers of Christian missionaries. When the British took over in 1815, they promised to protect the integrity of Buddhism, but instead they established English medium schools in which Buddhism was portrayed as a superstitious and other worldly religion. Under Olcott’s leadership 460 Buddhist schools, including leading colleges such as Ananda, Nalanda, Dharmapala, Dharmarāja, Visakha, and Musaeus College were established. One of the results of this Buddhist Counter Reformation is that there are far fewer Christians in Sri Lanka today than there were in the nineteenth century, a fact that contemporary missionaries use to counter the anti-conversion bill. Colonel Olcott’s claim that Buddhism was a rational philosophy and not a religion led Sinhalese Buddhists to reformulate their faith in a way that made it more European than Asian. Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism, published in 1881, translated into twenty-two languages and now in its fortieth printing, has had a powerful effect on how many Euro-Americans understand Buddhism. More significantly, however, this fully modernist book about Buddhism is still part of the curriculum of Sri Lankan schools.
By the far the most influential Sri Lankan to come out of this historical setting was Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), the founding father of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism. Born into a petite bourgeois family, Dharmapala went to Christian schools where, early on, he was very sensitive to the negative way in which Buddhism was being portrayed. He changed his name from David to Dharmapala (“Guardian of Dharma”), and in taking on the other honorific Anagarika (“homeless”) he, in anticipation of Gandhi, wanted his followers to interpret this as a form of this-worldly renunciation. Even in his asceticism he still preserved the entrepreneurial virtues—“methodism, punctuality, cleanliness, orderliness, time-consciousness,” as Seneviratne lists them[37]—that he learned in his family business and subtly made part of his vision of a modernized Buddhism.
Dharmapala worked closely with Olcott and together they made a very successful journey to Japan in 1888. Although Dharmapala had some disagreements with Olcott, he followed him in the “Protestant” form of Buddhism that we see in his followers today. He founded the Mahabodhi Society in 1891 and initiated campaigns to return Bodhgaya, the site of the Buddha’s Temptation and Enlightenment, to Buddhist hands and to established Buddhist missions throughout the world. In this regard, Dharmapala declared that “with Buddhism Ceylon shall yet become the beacon light of Religion to the World,”[38] echoing similar nationalist sentiments of America as, in Ronald Reagan’s words, “a great shining city on a hill,” derived from Jesus’ proclamation that his followers would be “the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5:14). Dharmapala, however, claims precedence for Buddhism as the true beacon of civilizing light, which established a land of righteousness in Sri Lanka long before the birth of Jesus Christ. It was “Semitic barbarism,” which includes both Dravidian Tamils and Judeo-Christians, who destroyed this great cultural and religious achievement.[39]
The Buddhist canon does not use ārya as a racial term; rather, it is an honorific for all those who embrace the Dharma. Furthermore, as Mahinda Palihawadana has argued, the Buddha believed that racism and nationalism are the result of flawed perception. Like the Body of Christ, there are no distinctions at all within the Body of the Buddha. Perceiving a “difference by birth” is, as Palihawadana explains,
a mental propensity (ditthanusaya), something invested with emotional content. The classic example is the idea of me, my self; and, compounded with other conventional views, my clan, my country, my language, my nation, and not least, my creed.[40]
Ultra nationalists take their own nāma-gotta—name and clan—and mistakenly believe that it is an essential part of their identity.
In 1908 Dharmapala declared that Buddhism was “completely identified with the racial individuality of the people.”[41] As Peter Schalk states: “This is probably one of the most conflict creating public statements made in the 20th century. It is also a statement that is detrimental nationally and internationally to the reputation of Buddhism. . . . He stated explicitly that Lanka belongs to the Buddhist Sinhalese and for the Tamils there is South India.”[42] It is unfortunate that American evangelical Christian activists unwittingly spread the myth of the Aryan Sinhalese. One of their websites states that the Buddhist portion of the island’s population (75 percent) is Sinhala and Aryan, obviously implying that the Sri Lankan Christians, Muslims, and Hindus are not. Incidentally, if there is any historical substance to a North Indian origin of the original immigrants to the island, then one could claim an Aryan origin, but only linguistically, for these people.
It is significant to note that in 1935, two years after Dharmapala’s death, three Tamil members of the State Council supported the effort to return Bodhgaya to Buddhist control, most likely assuming that, in addition to a gesture of goodwill, that they would receive something in return for their own projects. Sadly, the favor was not reciprocated as Buddhists hardened their nationalist prejudices. In 1936, embracing a reverse Orientalism and drawing on an alleged racial superiority of Aryan Buddhists, non-Buddhists were excluded from the Board of Ministers of the Donoughmore Constitution. Later the Citizenship Act of 1948 withdrew citizenship from the Estate Tamils, those on the tea plantations, and was not restored until the 1980s. Finally, in 1956 English and Tamil were suppressed in favor of Sinhalese as the only official language. This made it very difficult for most Tamils to read and fill out government documents and to communicate their grievances. The supreme irony is that multilingualism was one of cultural ideals of medieval Sinhalese society, where the mastery of six languages was considered to be the educated norm.
The most striking evidence of reverse Orientalism in Dharmapala’s thought is his attempt, one initiated earlier on behalf of Hinduism by the Brahmo Samāj in Calcutta, to show that Buddhism is fully compatible with European science and rationalism. In his History of an Ancient Civilization, Dharmapala claims that “higher Buddhism is pure science. It has no place for theology. . . . It is the religion of absolute freedom, which is to be gained avoiding all evil, doing all good, and purifying the heart. . . . It is the friend of enlightened progress, and preaches the sublimest truths of meritorious activity.”[43] In his journal Dharmapala wrote a weekly column entitled “Facts That You Should Know,” a modernist title that would have sounded quite alien to a medieval Buddhist. It is true that the Buddha’s method can be called “empiricist,” and there are constructive parallels that can be drawn to David Hume, and even better comparisons to William James, but these insights should be used to erase the negatives of European Orientalism, not to propose an equally destructive Asian exceptionalism.
Dharmapala learned much from his sojourn in Calcutta. Both he and the Indian nationalists rejected the sacred power of images, myth, ritual, and priestly mediation. Both were enamored by modernist concepts of individual reason, progress, and the importance of social activism. Both believed in a Protestant-like priesthood of all believers and that spiritual liberation would be both personal and social. Dharmapala may not have known that the Ramakrishna mission was modeled directly on the Buddhist Saṅgha, but its social activism derived much more, as Seneviratne maintains,[44] from Christianity than any South Asian tradition. (Similarly, ahiṃsā is an Indian concept, but it is clear that Gandhi’s social and political use of it was mostly due to his reading of Socrates, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Ruskin.) Walpola Rahula’s thesis that the Buddha meant his disciples to be like the social workers of the modern welfare state has been roundly criticized as anachronistic and yet another form of reverse Orientalism.
It is significant, nevertheless, that the immediate followers of the Hindu nationalist Dayananda and the Buddhist Dharmapala went into social service not politics. Indeed, one could say early signs indicated that Hindu and Buddhist nationalism would be progressive and constructive. The darker aspects of Dharmapala’s religious nationalism did not come to the fore until 1956. A first generation disciple Kalukondayave (1895–1977) did not believe that monks should be involved in party politics. Working closely with Tamil and Muslim officials, he saw himself primarily as a social worker and teacher of morality.[45] Hendiyagala Silaratna (1913–1982), another Dharmapalite monk, learned Tamil and wrote a booklet praising the Tamils for preserving their culture against European advances.[46] In comparison he thought that his own culture was far more decadent; he especially commended Tamil women for their modest dress.
Seneviratne describes the early Dharmapalite monks as “overlooking cultural and ideological differences among the lay leadership, astutely addressing their commonness rather than their differences. . . .” and he also praises the next generation of monks in the Vidyodaya monastery for their “healthy and realistic attitude towards western influences which [they] were able to creatively generate, as they bravely resisted the ethno-religious exclusivist impulse that constituted one half their progenitor Dharmapala’s philosophy and activist project.”[47]
Buddhist nationalism has been more successful in Sri Lanka for several reasons. Compared to India, religious authority is much more centralized and unified in Sinhalese Buddhism. In the absence of Sinhalese royalty, Buddhist monks with the Dharmapalite vision were to do the “work of kings,” the title of Seneviratne’s thorough study of Dharmapala’s legacy. (In the next chapter we will see a similar development, with the same negative, nationalist consequences, in Burma.) A much higher literacy rate has allowed for an effective spread of Buddhist Protestantism through print media and the radio. A Dharmapalite monk Hinatiyana Dhammaloka (1900–1981) sometimes did ten sermons a week and was considered to be the best Buddhist preacher in Sri Lanka.[48] Copying the Christian model, Dharmapala proposed that long rituals be replaced by short sermons that focused on morality and social action.
On February 13, 1946, the faculty at the Vidyālankara monastery approved without dissent a resolution declaring that monks should become politically active. There was strong reaction from the press and the government; some critics said it was a Communist plot and some proposed that political monks be disrobed or even imprisoned. The monks’ Marxist sympathies became evident when they allied themselves with the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a radical socialist party with a strong Buddhist nationalist platform and a propensity to violence. The conservative monks at Vidyodaya University published their protest to political monks in a journal founded by Dharmapala. They also criticized the dissident monks on doctrinal grounds, alleging that they rejected the Buddha’s omniscience and the theory of karma and rebirth.
The Vidhyālankara monks moved the Dharmapalite revolution from nonsectarian social action in the villages to a political ideology that fused language, religion, and state. In their 1946 resolution they stated: “We hope from this campaign to make Sri Lanka a dharmadvipa (“light of dharma”), to enrich Buddhism, and to make people free of suffering and disease and make them whole; and to make monks a category of people who do not simply exist [doing nothing] but who work selflessly for the good of the religion and its adherents.”[49] The original intention was that this was to be accomplished outside of party affiliation. But already in April 1946, the radical monks had formed the Lanka Eksat Bhiksu Mandalaya, the United Bhikku Organization of Sri Lanka. Their manifesto accused the British of introducing the idea of private, apolitical religion, which actually is quite correct according to the arguments of this book. In the election of 1956 the United Bhikkus appeared at the polling places and told the people how they should vote. The seeds of a highly politicized Sinhalese Buddhism were now sown. As Seneviratne states: “By the mid-1950s [it] turned into a hegemonic Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism.”[50] Celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha’s birth in 1956–57, Sri Lankan Buddhists declared that the Sinhalese nation “had come into being with the blessing of the Buddha as a ‘chosen race’ with a divine mission to fulfill.”[51]
In its world-wide policy of divide and conquer, the British favored the Tamil minority and a majority of governmental posts were held by them during the colonial period. In the British constitutional reforms of 1911, the Tamils, with only 10 percent of the population, were given 42 percent of the representation. In a move to protect their position, high caste Tamils, previously favored by the British, did object to a more equitable formula in the first Donoughmore proposals in 1927. These high caste Tamils, distinct from the more recent, much poorer Estate Tamils, thought the Sinhalese were an “uncivilized and backward community,” and their spokesman Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan stated: “Although we may be small in numbers, in terms of caste, official power etc., we are the most powerful community in Sri Lanka. Both the Sinhalese and the Muslims have accepted this. Therefore, when the British leave, it is the Tamils who should rightfully inherit political power.”[52]
Even though the British capped Sinhalese representation at 55 percent in 1947, the Tamils gradually realized that they were not going to achieve majority power in the legislature. Support for a separate Tamil state slowly gained support. The Tamil State Party was established in 1949, almost a decade before the pogrom of 1958 took upward of 300 Tamil lives, but moderate Tamils still prevailed until the Tamil Tigers came to prominence in the late 1970s. The adoption of the 1972 constitution that strengthened the Buddhist Sinhalese majority was an event that radicalized many Tamils. Unfortunately, Tamil moderates did not fare very well among the militants and many were executed on the orders of Tamil Tiger leaders. The stage was set for the militant Buddhist reaction, so let us discuss briefly the political background of that development.
In 1945 Dudley S. Senanayake established the United National Party (UNP) and for a while the followers of Dharmapala, under the leadership of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and his conservative Sinhala Maha Sabha, allied themmselves with the UNP. In 1951, however, Bandaranaike broke with the UNP and formed the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). With the help of some small Marxist parties the SLFP won the election of 1956. Its party platform included a socialist economic program, replacing English with Sinhalese as the national language, and establishing Buddhism as the state religion. Even though it switched its position on national language at the last minute (losing Tamil votes in the process), the UNP came in a distant fourth place with eight parliamentary seats, while the Bandarnaike’s coalition won fifty-one votes in the ninety-five-seat Parliament. Two Tamil parties obtained eleven seats, and the largest party, the Tamil Federal Party, gave up an earlier position that Tamil should be a national language along with Sinhalese.
In 1959 Bandaranaike was assassinated by a monk named Somarama Thero, who allegedly confessed that he had done it “for the greater good of his country, race and religion.”[53] He was chosen for this role by Mapitigama Buddharakkhita, the secretary of United Bhikku Organization, whose members thought that Bandaranaike was not doing enough to promote Buddhist causes. To make matters worse, the SLFP’s Marxists allies defected and that led to two elections in 1960. In March the UNP received the most votes, but it could not form a majority to govern. The second election in July led to a narrow SLFP victory with Bandaranaike’s widow Sirimavo Bandaranaike becoming the world’s first female prime minister. Both the SLFP and the UNP campaigned on a “Sinhala Only” platform, which included threats to deport the Estate Tamils. The UNP returned to power in 1965, but in 1970 the SLFP gathered even more Marxist allies and won an overwhelming victory: ninety-one seats to the UNP’s seventeen.
Over the next forty years the ruling parties traded turns governing the country as the civil war with the Tamil Tigers became more intense and brutal. Both parties became more authoritarian and there was much inter-party conflict and violence. The UNP government under J. R. Jayawardena essentially instituted one-man rule after the 1982 election. Playing to a radicalized Saṅgha, Jayawardena, as Donald Swearer explains, “promised to introduce a dharmishta society, a state of righteousness and justice based on Buddhist principles. An attack on [Jayawardena] was then tantamount to an attack on those very principles.”[54] On July 24, 1983, after the Tamil Tigers had murdered and mutilated fifteen government soldiers, riots broke out in Colombo when the bodies were brought there. Soon spreading beyond the capital, Sinhalese mobs burned Tamil businesses and properties, and voter registration lists were used to target individuals—suggesting that the government had been aiding in orchestrating the riots. By the end of what is now called “Black July,” there were upward of 3,000 dead and 13,000 Tamil properties destroyed. Over 150,000 were made homeless and many of the refugees fled to foreign countries. The Sri Lankan civil war had officially begun.
The election of 1989 was the most violent in the nation’s history, and the UNP again won the right to rule. When the 45,000-man Indian Peace Keeping moved into northern Sri Lanka to pacify the Tamil Tigers in 1987, the JVP (see above) took advantage of widespread anti-Indian sentiment and staged terrorist activities in the south of the country in 1988. In 1989 government forces were able to quell the violence they instigated. The JVP’s extreme Sinhalese nationalist views sometimes overshadowed its Marxist rhetoric. The JVP had been banned after the 1983 riots, because their youthful followers were accused of being the cause of most of the deaths and property destruction. Very soon after their arrival, the Indian “peace keepers” found themselves engaging the Tamil Tigers in battle. There was no chance of peace after Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tiger’s leader, called the Indians “anti-Tamil” and a “Satanic force.”[55] After suffering 1,200 fatalities, the Indians forces withdrew in March of 1990, but the Tamil Tigers were as strong as ever. On May 21, 1991, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and fourteen others were killed in Tamil Nadu, the Tamil majority state just across a narrow strait in southeastern India. The suicide bomber was a female Tamil Tiger.
In 2004 election the JVP did very well and was asked to join the SLFP in a broad coalition government, one that continued a hard-line Buddhist nationalism. There was no mercy on either side in the civil war. At their height the Tamil Tigers were perhaps 30,000 strong, and they fought a well-trained and equipped government army of 151,000 troops. It is estimated that from 60,000 to 100,000 people lost their lives in the conflict. Swearer concludes that the “conflict cannot be reduced to two relatively small groups of political extremists [the Tigers and the JVP]. . . . A major component in the violence has also been a cultural ethos of militant Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism. . . .”[56] Swearer was writing in the late 1980s, and that violence, unfortunately, continues today against Sri Lankan Muslims and Christians.
Quoted in H. L. Seneviratne, The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 274, 272. I have replaced “scaffold” with “scabbard” in the first line. The song is used with permission from the University of Chicago Press.
See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Cited in Seneviratne, The Work of Kings, vii.
“Muslims React Strongly Against Buddhist Mob Attack on Mosque in Colomo,” Tamil.net (August 11, 2013), accessed at www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=36550 on January 14, 2014.
“Buddhist Monks Destroy Church in Sri Lanka, Attack Pastor,” Christian Post (July 24, 2008), accessed at www.christianpost.com/news/buddhist-monks-destroy-church-in-sri-lanka-attack-pastor-33458.
Barbara O’Brien, “Buddhists v. Christians in Sri Lanka,” May 30, 2008, at about.com accessed on August 29, 2013.
Seneviratne, The Work of Kings, 105.
Peter Schalk, “Relativising Sinhalatva and Semantic Transformations of the Dhammadipa,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 10 (2003): 114–31. Dhammadipa means “island of the dhamma” and the word is used only once in the Mahāvaṃa (1.84). Here it means something like Sri Lanka will become the “light” of dhamma, which is connected with an earlier reference (1.20) where the Buddha proclaimed that on this island the śāsana (Buddhist teachings) would shine.
Bhikkhu Dhammavihari (Jotiya Dhirasekera), “Recording, Translating and Interpreting Sri Lankan Chronicle Data,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 10 (2003): 13, 17.
Robert Bellah, “Religious Evolution” in W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 2nd ed., 1965), 82. My premodern category includes Bellah’s “primitive” and “archaic,” and I include his “historic,” “early modern,” and “modern” in my “modernist” category.
See Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives, chap. 2.
V. Perniola, The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka: The Dutch Period (Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1983), xxiv; cited in John D. Rogers, “Post-Orientalism and the Interpretation of Premodern and Modern Political Identities: The Case of Sri Lanka,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53:1 (February 1994): 14.
See Athureliye Rathana, “Buddhist Analysis of the Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 10 (2003): 96–100.
D. Amarasiri Weeraratne, “Devolution Package and the Maha Sangha,” The Observer (March 17, 1996), reprinted in The Work of Kings, 331–32.
The Mahāvaṃa: The Great Chronicle of Lanka from the 6th Century BC to 4th Century AD, trans. Wilhelm Geiger. Internet translation accessed at http://lakdiva.org/mahavamsa/chapters. html on January 14, 2014.
Gananath Obeyesekere, “Buddhism, Ethnicity, and Identity: A Problem of Buddhist History,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 10 (2003): 46.
Dhammavihari, “Recording, Translating and Interpreting Sri Lankan Chronicle Data,” 10.
Obeyesekere, “Buddhism, Ethnicity, and Identity: A Problem of Buddhist History,” 54.
Dhammavihari, “Recording, Translating and Interpreting Sri Lankan Chronicle Data,” 21.
The Mahāvaṃa, chapter 6, 27–28.
Obeyesekere, “Buddhism, Ethnicity, and Identity: A Problem of Buddhist History,” 61, endnote 10.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 48.
See Obeyesekere, “Buddhism, Ethnicity, and Identity: A Problem of Buddhist History,” 18.
Walpola Rahula, The History of Buddhism in Ceylon: The Anuradhapura period, 3d century BC-10th century AD (Columbo: M. D. Gunasena & Co., 1966), 79.
Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed, 144–45.
See Obeyesekere, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Seneviratne praises Obeyesekere’s work “as particularly timely today when the extremists of both the Sinhala and Tamil ethnic groups are trying to separate the two groups. The Pattini rituals constitute one more demonstration of the cultural affinity between the Sinhala and Tamil peoples and of their synthesizing genius as opposed to the separating frenzies of demagogues of both groups” (The Work of Kings, 334fn.).
R. A. L. H. Gunawardena, “The People of the Lion,” quoted in Tambiah, 168.
John C. Holt, The Religious World of Kīrti Śrī: Buddhism, Art, and Politics in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), vi.
Ibid., 41, 46.
Obeyesekere, “Buddhism, Ethnicity, and Identity,” 48.
Ibid., 57.
Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed, 150.
Obeyesekere, “Buddhism, Ethnicity, and Identity,” 49.
Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed, 175. In a National Public Radio report (May 2005) about failed attempts by the Vietnamese government to stop the spread of bird flu, a commentator cited an ancient saying: “The rule of the king stops at the village gate.”
See Seneviratne, The Work of Kings, seventh plate between p. 188–89.
Ibid., 29; name changing reference on page 27.
Dharmapala, Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala, ed., Ananda Guruge (Colombo: Government Press, 1965), 512.
Dharmapala, “The Unknown Co-founders of Buddhism,” The Maha Bodhi 36 (1928), 70; cited in Schalk, “Relativising Sinhalatva and Semantic Transformations of The Dhammadipa,” 123.
Mahinda Palihawadana, “Theravada Perspective[s] on Causation and Resolution of Conflicts,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 10 (2003): 69.
Dharmapala, Return to Righteousness, 489.
Schalk, “Relativising Sinhalatva and Semantic Transformations of the Dhammadipa,” 124.
Dharmapala, History of Ancient Civilization, excerpted in Return to Righteousness, 658–59.
Seneviratne, The Work of Kings, 137fn.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 106fn.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 140.
Ibid., 131.
Quoted in Donald K. Swearer, “Fundamentalistic Movements in Theravada Buddhism” in Fundamentalisms Observed, 640.
Cited in Rathana, 96.
“Talduwe Somarama,” Wikipedia, accessed on April 25, 2014. No citation given.
Swearer, “Fundamentalistic Movements in Theravada Buddhism,” 643.
“Prabhakaran had Rajiv killed for being ‘anti-Tamil,’” Rediff on the Net (January 28, 1998), accessed at www.rediff.com/news/1998/jan/28rajiv3.htm on April 30, 2014.
Swearer, “Fundamentalistic Movements in Theravada Buddhism,” 647.