Dr. P G Punchihewa On Sinhala Buddhagama

By Gamini Seneviratne –JUNE 11, 2019

Gamini Seneviratne

Dr. Punchihewa’s essay on Sinhala Buddhagama comes at the end of his account of Arahant Mahinda’s legacy to the people of this country, – an island named Sinhale or Lanka. It was from here that the buddha dhamma as explained by the Arahant and his associate bhikkus, Ishtiya, Uttiya, Shamkhala and Bhadrashaala spread eastward to Myanmar, Lao, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Dr. Punchihewa records too the role played by the Arahanth’s sister, the theri Sanghamitta in ‘empowering’ women – to use a term in frequent use today especially in the western media that determine who should rule the world as they see it and how that should be done.

What instruction we children received on the pathways of life included the weekly daham paaselaat or close by the village temple. Besides guidance at home, generally from their mother, the daham paasela provided pointers towards a life marked by compassion towards all living beings. One of the ‘texts’ used there was the lo vaeda sangarava the 15th century AC instructional poem by the Vidagama Mahathera. (Incidentally, a fresh annotation of the poem together with a translation into English by Jinasoma Weerasuriya, the whole edited by Dr. Punchihewa, has been published recently and would serve as a companion to the book under review here, “Anubudu Mihindu Mahimi”).

In our childhood we had other ‘teachers’ as well, depending. I do not know how it was with Punchi but I was taught Pali at our village temple in Mattumagala before I was four years old. Things did not proceed as hoped, the oldest of us cousins thought to be fit for the sangha taking to medicine, the next to the civil law and I – well, to public administration, coming round through those excursions to the humanities and the social sciences that, together and with much else, seem to straddle ‘religion’.

How close or far those disciplines were/are to Sinhala Buddhism I leave it to you to judge. Reference to matters somewhat close to me are made here also as demonstration that in its history Buddhism has not been treated by the Sinhalese as some exotic kind of worship.

At the daham paasela, usually on the temple premises, occasionally at the village school nearby, we learnt compassion and quietude. At Royal College, a “secular” school (to adopt the much misused current parlance that is value-loaded to obfuscate superstitions put about by the ‘western world’}, we had a reading from a text (the dhammapada, bhagavat gita, bible, koran) twice a week at senior assembly and, at General Assembly each Friday, a talk on one of them by an old boy who could relate those beliefs / injunctions in clear language and hold the attention of 10 to 18 year olds for little short of an hour. Such was the “religious instruction” we received at Royal and it served us well. (The school prize for Comparative Religion – which btw I won – was named after its donor, S H Mackeen: there was a question on each of the religions mentioned above with three out of four requiring an essay – I wrote on Christianity, Islam and on the Upanishads).

In later years, in the Third Form at Royal, I returned to Pali to escape from “Pol-Thel” Baptist and his lessons in the Geography of Ceylon. And I continued with Pali, taught by a later, senior colleague in the CCS, D M P B Dassanayake, in a failed attempt to dodge K C (Penguin) Fernando who taught Sinhala Literature – though he was the compiler of an English-Pali Dictionary then in use in schools and pirivenas. (Mr. Fernando had been a classmate of my father at Ananda and felt obliged to be extra-stern in assessing such work as I managed to do: ‘corporal punishment’ was not unusual at that time and, at a rough guess, I received five times the share that, maybe, was due to me).

Such were some of the circumstances under which Sinhala buddhagama came to be lodged in our consciousness.

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