Forum: Peace Web Topic: The Killing of Buddha

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Message to Edit: *HTML is OFF *UBB Code is OFF	Originally posted by Ranjan_Reborn on 06-20-100 09:10 AM The Killing of Buddha By Jairam Ramesh Why Sri Lankan Buddhism is different from the image of Buddhism that we have Other Columns Fifth Column Cyber Chatter The agony of Sri Lanka continues. What appears paradoxical is the role played by Buddhism in fuelling what has been essentially a linguistic conflict. Paradoxical simply because we have all been taught how the Buddha was the apostle of peace, compassion, harmony and non-violence. The powerfully positive role of Buddhism in creating a highly educated and egalitarian society in Sri Lanka as compared to other South Asian countries like India and Pakistan has been recognised by economists like Amartya Sen. But how and when did Buddhism acquire a destructively negative dimension? H.L. Seneviratne, an anthropologist at the University of Virginia in the US, has just published a stunningly brilliant book The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka in which he discusses Buddhist social and political ideology that has given Buddhism a distinct flavour in the island country. Seneviratne builds on two other all-time classics -- Buddhism Betrayed? by Harvard anthropologist Stanley Tambiah that came out in 1992 and Buddhism Transformed by the Princeton anthropologists Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere that came out in 1988. Historian K.M. De Silva's Reaping the Whirlwind published in 1998 is essential reading to understand how Sri Lanka got to where it has and to appreciate Buddhism in its larger setting. Seneviratne argues that neither in the Ashokan nor the Ambedkarite versions is Buddhism an "establishment". But in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, Buddhism became an establishment in religious and economic terms. It is this that explains the difference between Buddhism as we Indians think of it and Theravada Buddhism as it has evolved in other settings -- a case of an Indian export being adapted to local circumstances! Of course, what complicates matters in Sri Lanka is the interplay of religion and language in a social environment of multiple diversities and adversarial parliamentary politics. Buddhist revivalism goes back to the last decades of the 19th century. 1879 saw the publication of Edwin Arnold's tribute to the Buddha, Light of Asia, one of history's most influential books, that incidentally also had a profound impact on Jawaharlal Nehru. It was in the very next year that Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Olcott, founders of the Theosophical Society that was to be headquartered later at Adyar in Chennai, began a campaign to educate the Sri Lankans about their precious heritage. But the first really great local champion who saw in Buddhism the only way to take on British imperialism and Christian proselytisation was Anagarika Dharmapala, born in 1864. Although he was the father of Buddhist revivalism, he was no obscurantist xenophobe. He believed in westernisation but on a strong foundation of Buddhist values and traditions. Dharmapala viewed Buddhism as the only route to a cultural renaissance as also to economic regeneration in a land that had been under colonial domination for almost five centuries. Dharmapala is almost forgotten in India although he spent many years here and derived inspiration from Indian sources. It was in this country that he started the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891. This society spearheaded the struggle to regain for the Buddhists control of the historic Bodhi tree and Bodh Gaya Temple in Bihar. He died in April 1933 at Sarnath, where the Sakyamuni had preached his first sermon. Next only to Dharmapala is Walpola Rahula whose Bhiksuvage Urumaya (The Heritage of the Bhikku) is considered as having the greatest influence on recent Sri Lankan Buddhism. Rahula's manifesto published in 1946 draws on many sources including Indian nationalism and the philosophy of the Ramakrishna Mission. Tambiah writes that Calcutta, where Rahula spent two years in the mid-1940s, had the same kind of stimulating effect on him as it did on Dharmapala earlier. Both Dharmapala and Rahula saw in Buddhism an instrument for social emancipation and political change. They envisaged an aggressively active role for the monks. It is no wonder that an Indian monk who was influenced most by them and who had studied for a while in Sri Lanka, Rahula Sankrityayan, was among the most relentless crusaders for peasant rights in Bihar in the 1930s. But while Dharmapala and Walpola remain charismatically noble figures, it is the use of an activist brotherhood by successive generations of politicians starting with S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and the brotherhood's succumbing to the lure of wealth, power and status that has led to a subversion of the duo's ideals. Seneviratne terms this "from regeneration to degeneration". What has happened is that economic Buddhism, cultural Buddhism and social Buddhism as originally conceived by Dharmapala and Walpola to modernise Sri Lanka has become a political Buddhism with horrific consequences for managing a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-linguistic society. Surely, there is a lesson in this for us also. The propaganda of Hinduism in Peril is really no different from the cry of Betrayal of Buddhism, the title of the 1956 official inquiry report that set Sri Lanka on the path to chaos. The author is secretary of the AICC's Economic Affairs Department. The views expressed here are his own.

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