MILITANT BUDDHISM

Dhiren Bhagat explains why

the Buddhists of Sri Lanka are opposed to the recent attempts at peace

Fifty years after Independence we have been reduced to an economically dependent neo- colonial satellite. We are no longer an independent nation. Our national, cultural and economic destiny is not in our hands. Our foreign policy is only an expression of our neo-colonial subservience. When Britain attacks Argentina we must come forward to the defence of our former master...

Now we are known for other achieve- ments, as a country where male prostitutes are readily available, and where babies can be bought at the cheapest price. . . .

A challenge has been hurled at us by the imperialist powers who have realised the strength of the Sinhala masses who comprise 70 per cent of the population. . . I am referring to the so-called ethnic problem — a term which I am loathe to use. I see it as the last strategy of the neo-colonial powers.

If I were to put it in a rather simplistic manner I would describe this as a conspiracy by the neo-colonial powers. . . . If the pre- sent crisis does not provide this insight we may as well resign ourselves to our fate and face annihilation Gunadasa Amarasekara `A National Ideology for our Liberation' THE Dharmaraj a Centenary Lecture was delivered earlier this year, well before India and Sri Lanka signed the accord designed to bring an end to the Tamil troubles; I have quoted chunks of it in the hope they might convey something of the despair and paranoia that afflict the Sinhalese Buddhist majority. Signing the accord has not improved matters. Though this brave attempt at a settlement has won praise the world over it is now becoming increasingly clear that within Sri Lanka it is a vastly unpopular move. Buddhism may be keen on peace but these Buddhists are rejecting this peace.

In attacking 'cultural imperialism' it is no accident that Mr Amarasekara chose crick- et, when there was a whole range of symbols to go for from Dallas to Honda cars to bubblegum. Cricket in Sri Lanka has imperial origins but it is also a `reason- able' game; it is an advertisement of the `civilisation' the English-speaking elite of the island are proud of; it is a symbol of the fairness of the English way of doing things. This is a way the militant Buddhists of Sri Lanka explicity reject.

For them, as for Mr Amarasekara, the transfer of power was a nasty joke.

A member of the Royal family handed over this Independence to us. . . . Our leaders, dressed in tail coat and top hat, were there to receive it. It was not an independence we wanted. We preferred a more restricted form under the white man. But the white man was

not interested in continuing here for our sake.

Ivor Jennings set up a constitution on British lines and to this day many in Sri Lanka are convinced he was so pleased b) the success of this experiment in imitation he wished to name the island Jenningsland.

But for the Buddhist nationalists this woggery was a sell-out. Cricket was a part of the sell-out. Interestingly, the leading dove in the Sri Lankan cabinet today, the man who engineered the Indo-Lanka accord behind the scenes, Gamini Dis- sanayake, is the President of the Board of Control for Cricket. At the risk of stretch-

ing a point I would say it was his cricketing links that helped him work towards a compromise. The accord that was finally signed on 29 July was — in its essential features — ready as early as 9 February, when President Jayewardene sat and ham- mered out the details with Dissanayake and two of his cricketing contacts: C.T.A. Schafter, a Colombo businessman and former captain of the All Ceylon Universi- ties team, and N. Ram, associate editor of The Hindu (Madras), a one-time wicket- keeper. N.K.P. Salve — Dissanayake's cricketing counterpart in India — helped keep contact with Rajiv Gandhi's office while Ram kept up the communication with the Tamil Tigers.

Rejection of the West first expressed itself most forcefully in the general elec- tions of April 1956 when an outburst of

Sinhalese nationalism catapulted S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to power. The following month year-long celebrations marking 2,500 years of Buddhism began. To appease his new constituency Bandar- anaike pushed through Parliament by 15 June the Official Language Bill declaring Sinhalese to be the sole official language. The Tamils protested as this left them in the cold; in retaliation there were ten days of anti-Tamil rioting all over the island in which an estimated 150 people (most of them Tamils), died. It was the first of the riots, the beginning of the Ethnic Problem.

The fashionably knowledgeable in Col- ombo like to locate the birth of Sinhalese nationalism towards the end of the Trinity Term in 1924: it was at Frewin Court, they say, that the baby was born on the day Bandaranaike lost the presidential election at the Oxford Union to Wedderburn on account of a large contingent of voters who turned up just to keep the black man out. It is a trite view which seriously misunder- stands the forces at work in Sinhalese society. In 1959, just three years after he assumed office, Bandaranaike was assas- sinated by a bhikku — a Buddhist priest. The conspiracy had been hatched by one of the leading bhikkus of the day, the very man who had engineered Bandaranaike's landslide victory in 1956. The powerful expression of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in 1956 baffled many. Amarasekara considers the blinkers worn by both Marxist and imperialist historians eccentric but hardly surprising.

For both these groups the grcat social upheaval of 1956 has no deeper significance. They do not see in it the natural culmination of a series of events that go back a century or more in the annals of history. How can G.C. Mendis' view of history provide such a view? How can a history that fails to mention even once the greatest architect of the present Sinhala consciousness — Anagarika Dhar- mapala — provide such a historical view? How can a servile mind think in terms of a national liberation struggle?

Amarasekara has a point. Unlike Gan- dhi's Congress the nationalist movement Dharmapala led may not have actually helped push the British out of Ceylon, but Dharmapala's importance as the leader of Buddhist revivalism is crucial and he has served as a model for many Buddhist activists. Born David Hewavitarane in the middle of the 19th century, Dharmapala was a Buddhist monk who founded the Mahabodhi Society in 1891 and ordered the Buddhist revival movement along the lines of Protestant Christianity. Like his contemporary in India, the Hindu revival- ist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Dharmapala went beyond religion and connected his move- ment to the struggle for national independ- ence.

Like Tilak and the other Hindu revival- ists of the period who were responsible for the split in Congress in 1907 and the birth of modern communalism in India, Dhar- mapala did his bit to promote intolerance in Sri Lanka: it was not uncommon to hear him asserting that 'the Sinhalese . . . in whose veins no savage blood is found . . . stand as the representatives of Aryan civilisation' (History of an Ancient Civilisa- tion, 1902) Similarly his famous slogan `Sinhalese! Awake!' was less concerned with the state of their souls, more with job opportunities for sons of the soil. 'Look at the Administration Report of the General Manager of Railways,' the Buddhist monk exhorted the young of Ceylon in 1922, . . Tamils, Cochins and Hambankarayas are employed in large numbers to the prejudice of the people of the island sons of the soil who contribute the largest share.' Ten years before that his xenopho- bia had been even blunter: in 1912 he described Tamils, Muslims and Europeans as 'infidels of degraded race'.

It is no coincidence that the minister who felt he had to resign from the cabinet as he could not accept the 29 July accord, Gamini Jayasuriya, is a nephew of Dhar- mapala. His hardline position clearly de- rived from the prolific advice his uncle would proffer to the youth of Ceylon: `Enter into the realm of our king Dutugemunu in spirit and try to identity yourself with the thoughts of that great king who rescued Buddhism and our nationalism from oblivion.' Dharmapala is, of course, central to the Sinhalese Buddhist consciousness, but going by the debates on the Sinhalese identity that have cropped up with incredi- ble regularity in the Sinhala newspaper Divaina these past few years if there is a historical figure who commands even more respect it is King Dutugemunu, who in 101 BC, after 15 years of battle defeated the Tamil Chola King Elara and founded the kingdom of Anuradhapura. With the rise of the Ethnic Problem Dutugemunu's stock has risen even higher: not only did he slay an important Tamil king and unite the Sinhalese nations, he is also seen as the defender of the Buddhist religion.

Dutugemunu did not always enjoy such a good reputation. The earliest of the Sri Lankan chronicles, the Dipavamsa (c. 4th century AD) contains but a brief reference to the young king and his exploits. This has been explained by the fact that Sri Lanka had been free from South Indian Tamil invasions for at least two centuries prior to the writing of the Dipavamsa.

By the time the next chronicle, the Mahavamsa was written in the late 5th! early 6th centuries at least six Tamil kings had recently ruled in Sri Lanka. Conse- quently Dutugemunu's unification of Sri Lanka — if the Mahavamsa is to be believed he killed 32 Tamil kings to achieve that — makes him the hero of the epic. Left-wing historians in recent years have tried hard to show that there were several Sinhalese in Elara's army and that the battle was not therefore a prototypical Tamil-Sinhalese conflict. They may be right but what matters is that most people in Sri Lanka think it was. To this day the Tamil and Sinhala sets in the lower forms at Royal College, a public school in Col- ombo, conduct serious gang wars while pretending to form Elara and Dutugemu- nu's armies. (Most textbooks — in Sinhala and in English — follow the Mahavamsa version.) Two recently published popular novels tell the the story of Dutugemunu. Colin Da Silva's The Winds of Sinhala is a Shogun- like blockbuster meant for sale at interna- tional airports; the other, Golu Muhuda, is a shorter Sinhalese novel written, interes- tingly enough, by the militant Prime Minis- ter of Sri Lanka, R. Premadasa. A fairly unreadable English translation of this work, The Silent Sea, has recently appeared in Colombo bookshops; despite the proliferation of journalists from all corners of the globe in Sri Lanka these days it is amazing that this revealing book has provoked hardly any comment.

The Silent Sea is dedicated, as one might well expect, to THE PATRIOTIC YOUTH OF SRI LANKA WHO HAVE PLEDGED THEMSELVES TO DEFEND TO THE END OF THEIR LIVES THE TERRITO- RIAL INTEGRITY OF THEIR MOTHERLAND. The novel is actually about the recollec- tion of previous lives; Dutugemunu and his father Kavantissa merely form the back- drop for this psychic play. Even so the twelfth chapter of the book, which contains a long conversation between hawklike Dutugemunu and his moderate father, is essential reading if one is to understand the debates that rack the Sinhalese leadership today.

Kavantissa has come to an agreerhent with the Tamil King Siva whereby certain paddy fields, irrigation canals and a thousand houses built by the Sinhalese in the north are to be made over to Siva's subjects. As soon as the 16-year-old Dutugemunu learns of it he barges into his father's palace unmindful of the lateness of the hour. 'Tell me, are all these for us Helas or are they for Elara's migrant nationals?' he demands.

Kavantissa grows angry. 'The Head of Rohana can come to any agreement with the Head of Seru."To any agreement?' Dutugemunu asks insolently.

Kavantissa explains why the pact was essential. The army was weary, defeat was certain and anyway under the terms of the pact Siva has agreed to be a provincial ruler paying allegiance to Kavantissa, not Elara. Dutugemunu is not impressed. 'This is a Buddhist country,' he says, 'Migrant foreigners have no claim to it.' Then he storms out of his father's palace threaten- ing war with the foreigner. There are no prizes for guessing who Premadasa fancies himself as.

All this militant Buddhism boils down to a central paradox that has been nagging the Lankans for at least 2,000 years: a Buddh- ist state is a difficult proposition because Buddhism is peaceful and states can only be maintained by the use of force.

Perhaps as a resolution of this problem the myth of the Buddha's visits to Sri Lanka developed. Though none of the Indian sources — or the Palicanon in Lanka — corroborates these 'visits' both the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa con- tain accounts of the Buddha visiting Sri Lanka on three occasion. Of these, it is the first visit that is the most interesting.

In both accounts the Buddha becomes a conqueror, acquiring a personality at variance with that presented in the rest of Buddhist literature. In the Dipavamsa, the Lord Buddha appears in the sky over the assembled yakkhas (aborigines — though the chronicles do not accord them human status) and afflicts them with rain and cold winds. Then in return for a place to sit he offers to relieve their distress. As the yakkhas agree he sits on a rug and scorches them with intense heat. When they flee he brings another island, Giridipa, near Lanka so that the escaping yakkhas may jump onto it. As they do so he restores Giridipa to its original location. Substan- tially the same story is told in the Maha- vamsa except that here the yakkhas offer the Buddha their whole island if he gets rid of the cold. Burning flames surround the Buddha's rug and force the yakkhas off the island.

For those who fail to see the point the chronicles spell it out: the yakkhas in their Ignorance opposed the seisana, the moral rule, of the Buddha and therefore had to be eased out just as a king must resort to weapons to preserve the Buddhist scisana. After all the Buddha himself intended Lanka to be dhammadipai, the island of righteousness where Buddhism was to be preserved.

The account of Dutugemunu in the Mahavamsa provides another instance of the amended Buddhist ethical rule. Having slaughtered Elara and several million others, Dutugemunu can find no joy. He sits on the terrace of the palace surrounded by 'nymphs in the guise of dancing girls' but thinks of his sin. A group of arhats monks — read his mind and come to console him.

From this deed arises no hindrance in thy way to heaven. Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee, 0 lord of men. The one had come unto the (three) refuges, the other had taken unto himself the five precepts. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts. But as for thee, thou wilt bring glory to the doctrine of the Buddha in manifold ways . . (Mahavamsa XXV 109- 11, trans. Wilhelm Geiger, 1912).

It is a mad arithmetic but one that has parallels in our time. You have to do violence to the doctrine of the Buddha if you wish to sling a machine-gun around his shoulders.