A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, May 12, 2017
By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –May 11, 2017
“Whatever good thing I have done since my youth is due to the benefits I
have received from my knowledge of English” (Dharmapala, cited on
p.312)
This
book is outside my specialisation; beyond my knowledge and competence,
so what follows is not a review. I merely draw attention to the work,
and to points which I found interesting. Kemper, a Professor of
Anthropology, has carried out painstaking and thorough research, and
quotes from the Anagarika’s own words and writings in substantiation of what he (Kemper) says.
The
Anagarika (the homeless one) spent much of his life outside Lanka,
mostly in India and in England. His main goal was to gain control of “Bodh Gaya”
for Buddhism. He neither wished to die in Lanka nor to have his ashes
returned to the Island (p. 37). His last will expressed the desire to be
“born again in India in some noble Brahman family” (p. 421); become a
Bhikku and preach the Dhamma to India’s millions. Vegetarianism
seems to have meant abstaining from beef because he occasionally ate
chicken, eggs, fish and mutton (footnote 127, p. 102). Some of the above
about Dharmapala (1864-1933) may surprise – perhaps, disappoint – some readers.
He
was for long a protégé of Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) who,
together with Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), founded the Theosophical
Society which built several Buddhist schools in Lanka, among them Ananda
College, Colombo; Mahinda College, Galle; Dharmaraja in Kandy and
Maliyadeva in Kurunegala. The Buddhist flag, designed with the
assistance of Olcott, was adopted as a universal Buddhist symbol. In
1884, Colonel Olcott succeeded in persuading the (British) government of
Ceylon to declare the Buddha’s birthday a holiday. Several streets in
Sri Lanka are named after Olcott and there are statues of him. Buddhists
light candles to his memory on the anniversary of his death, and monks
offer flowers to his statue. His image has appeared on Sri Lankan
postage-stamps. Olcott’s A Buddhist Catechism,
still in print and consulted, sees a link between the Buddha and
science in that the Buddha thought about cause and effect. One could say
the Buddha worked back from result to cause, that is, from the effect
of suffering to its causes: false thought and values; false desires and
conduct.
But Henry Olcott was not a Buddhist in the popular, Sri Lankan, sense of the term. As he wrote in his Catechism (the
edition I read is dated 1886), “The word ‘religion’ is most
inappropriate to apply to Buddhism; which is not a religion but a moral
philosophy”. The Buddha was not a god, and Buddhist teaching is against
idolatry, astrology and the consulting of omens: the monk Hikkaduve
reacted strongly to Olcott describing most Buddhists as being “bigoted
and ignorant” (p. 82). Olcott describes himself as “a philosophical
Buddhist” – not as a religious Buddhist. There are several reasons why
the alliance between Olcott and Dharmapala, two champions of Buddhism;
between erstwhile “guru” and protégé, separated by about thirty years in
age, broke up. Among the reasons is their very different attitude to
relics. Dharmapala believed in, and venerated, relics while Olcott
didn’t. The latter “dismissed the notion that the relic of the Buddha’s
tooth, venerated at the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy” was the tooth of a
human being: to Olcott, it looked more like an animal’s incisor.
However, Helena Blavatsky explained it was, of course, the Buddha’s
tooth because in one of his previous lives the Buddha was incarnated as a
tiger: see footnote 70, p. 82.