Sovereignty, Port City & The Dalai Lama

By Gananath Obeysekere –May 3, 2015

Prof. Gananath Obeysekere

Several weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a conference organized by colleagues in the University of Delhi and presided by His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. The conference itself was on how children’s secular education could be transformed in order to bring in values of compassion and caring sorely lacking in contemporary models of education. In my introductory talk I dealt with the significance of Jataka tales in molding the conscience of ordinary Buddhists right through the ages while other colleagues actually dealt with successful models of education using the centrality of compassion in selected places in British Columbia, Bhutan, Mongolia and Vietnam; while yet others dealt with experimental studies of the brain and the positive effects of insight meditation. Right through the proceedings the Dalai Lama commented on the papers and fielded questions from the audience with his rich insight into Buddhist compassion and its relevance to our times. I will add that no one among the speakers or the large audience of students and devotees ever brought in politics into the picture. Further, those who have met him, myself included, were impressed by the sincerity and depth of his understanding of Buddhism and his sense of humility and the personal charisma that he seemed to emanate, not to mention the breath of his knowledge and writing and his textual erudition of Buddhist philosophy. They appear in his popular writing for ordinary Buddhists as well as his more academic writing in, for example,The Universe in a Single Atom: the convergence of science and spirituality that contains among other things a lucid discussion on Paticca Samuppada or “conditioned genesis” first formulated by the Buddha himself. I write this because of my dismay that the Chinese are dogmatically hostile to his visiting Sri Lanka and my fear that like earlier governments the present Sirisena regime that prides itself in wanting to create a more open society might make a similar decision. I have talked to the Dalai Lama just as many educated lay-folk and monks also have done. All he wants is to visit Sri Lanka as a pilgrim and above all worship the Buddha represented in his Tooth Relic in the Maligava. Buddhist pilgrims right through the ages have come and gone without let or hindrance. If so, it seems to me that in denying not just the Dalai Lama but any Buddhist pilgrim to visit the land believed by most Sri Lankan Buddhists to have been hallowed by the presence of the Buddha is to admit that we have lost our autonomy as a nation and have succumbed to political pressure.Read More