Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, which has always had religious undertones, has deep historical roots. According to legendary accounts the island was conquered in the fifth century bce by a North Indian Āryan clan of Sinhalas (‘lion people’) speaking a Sanskrit-based language. To begin with, they had friendly relations with South Indian Dravidian kingdoms enhanced by intermarriage of their aristocracies. The situation changed somewhat when the Sinhalese king Devānampiya Tissa (247–207 bce) adopted Buddhism as the state religion following a mission sent by the Emperor Aśóka (p. Asóka). Early in the second century bce Tamil invasions started which resulted in the establishment of Hindu rule under King Eḷāra for 45 years. A descendant of the Sinhalese dynasty from the southern part of the island eventually reconquered it and as King Duṭṭhagāmaṇi Abhaya (c. 161–137 bce) strengthened the links between the throne and Buddhism. He is still regarded by the Sinhalese as their national hero.
The pattern of conquest and re-conquest was repeated more than once in subsequent centuries until in the thirteenth century a Hindu kingdom was established in the northern part of the island (with Jaffna as capital) which became for a time a vassal of Vijayanagara (1385–1448). When this last Hindu kingdom on the subcontinent was crushed in 1565 by Islamic forces, an influx of Tamil refugees poured into the kingdom of Jaffna. By then the Portugese had arrived on the scene (1505) followed by the Dutch (1658) and later the English (1796) who defeated the Kandyan kingdom, the last Sinhalese stronghold, in 1815 and unified the island, at the time known as Ceylon, under colonial administration. Buddhism thus lost the royal patronage with its financial support of monasteries and suffered also as a result of Christian missionary and educational activities. But it benefited morally; monks had to rely, from then on, on the support of the people and this cleansed their ranks of opportunists. Later in the century came a revival of Buddhist ideals, also with the help of western enthusiasts, among them the founders of Theosophy, Colonel H.S. Olcott and Madame H.P. Blavatsky, who arrived in Colombo in 1880 and publicly took refuge in the ‘Triple Gem’. Ordination of a number of western monks followed.
A substantial part of the educated population saw the advantage of segregation of state and religion, but a part of the monkhood resented the loss of privilege and a week after Ceylon's independence (4th February 1948) abbots of two leading monasteries asked the government to restore it. It did not happen, so politicised monks helped S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike's Freedom Party to win elections in 1956 for his promise to give state support to Buddhism and make Sinhala the only official state language. The first promise was implemented, but seeing Tamil concern, the Prime Minister agreed to make Tamil a ‘national language’ used in administration of main Tamil areas. Sinhala riots led by political monks followed and in 1959 Bandaranaike was assassinated by two Buddhist monks and a layman. Under his widow, who succeeded him, Ceylon was declared a republic (1972), renamed Sri Lanka, and the new constitution made Buddhism the foremost religion and Sinhala the state language, with Tamil allowed by statute. University admissions were geared to increased intake of Sinhala students previously outnumbered by Tamils. In response the separatist Tamil United Liberation Front was formed in 1976 with an armed wing of the so-called ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’ (LTTE) led by Velupilai Prabhakaran. Terrorist attacks followed and despite the government's offers of concessions in 1983 a full-scale civil war started during which the ‘Tigers’ won control over large swathes of the island in the north and northeast. The war was brought to an end by a massive offensive of the army at the time of writing this review (May 2009).
The author, now Professor Emeritus of English at Victoria University, British Columbia, became interested in ethno-religious-nationalistic conflicts when studying in the 1960s in Belfast. There he encountered Gamini Salvado from Ceylon (as it then was), a lecturer in English, who later moved to Sussex University where the author took his D.Phil. Conversations with him about Sri Lanka and Buddhism were a sideshow. When later writing books about ethnic conflicts, the author was struck by similarities between the Irish and Sri Lankan conflicts. To explain them he developed a theory of “regressive inversion” which describes “what happens when a universally liberating religious vision is re-deployed to supercharge the passion associated with loyalty to a group”. He subscribes also to the notion of Axial Age (coined by Karl Jaspers) when the idea was discovered that an individual can be spiritually liberated “regardless of kin, cult or status”, Buddhism providing an especially good example of such universalism. Thus the Buddha of the Pāli Canon skilfully led his interlocutors away from their passionate, “conjunctive” involvements with features and tenets of the Vedic (Hindu) tradition, to enable them to reach the initial understanding of his “disjunctive” liberating vision of nibbāna. This means, I suppose, that Hindus would have seen, for example, the caste system as “conjunctively” belonging to the universal vision of Vedic transcendence since castes are described in the Veda as stemming from the primeval cosmic puruśa (RV 10,90) and they certainly needed to be led away from this confusion to grasp the Buddha's message. In modern ethnic conflicts involving religion the danger is even greater with the added element of nationalism. In them “passionately felt loyalties may become infused with an absolute, religious significance”. The author regards Sri Lanka as a compelling and disturbing example of such a process.
In Part I of this book, ‘Reading Buddhism’, the author provides for himself and the readers unacquainted with Indian religions a survey of Vedic and Buddhist tenets in two chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Vedic tradition and the Buddha’, shows that, in the author's terminology, ‘disjunctive’ liberation in the Vedic tradition was feasible, but was obliterated by the ‘conjunctive’ sacrificial ritual. The Buddha, on the other hand, insisted on ‘disjunctive’ detachment even while using ‘conjunctive’ engagement to implant his message into others. Chapter 2, ‘Buddhism: The Art of the Detached Agonist’, surveying the teaching wrestles with some difficult topics such as anatta and rebirth, but on the whole fulfils its purpose and stresses again the danger of misreading the Buddha's transcendent message by slipping into traditional observance or group morality.
Part II, ‘Reading Sri Lanka’, which has three chapters and a Conclusion, explains the shift in Sinhala Buddhism from the Buddha's liberating vision to a perceived legitimacy of Sinhalese rulers over the island for the sake of preserving the Buddhist tradition against any intruders. This legitimacy is seen as sanctioned by visits of the Buddha himself (which are, of course, only legendary). In Chapter 3, ‘Sri Lanka: Buddhist Self-Representation and the Genesis of the Modern Conflict’, the author explains the beginnings of this trend by scanning Sri Lankan chronicles, particularly the Mahāvaṃsa, and continues with describing the colonisers, missionary activities, the Buddhist revival and political events leading to the conflict. To illustrate his thesis on ‘regressive inversion’ which led to the interpretation of the Pāli Canon in support for Sinhalese national identity the author singles out the following three influential figures.
In Chapter 4, ‘Anagarika Dharmapala: Buddhism, Science and the Crisis of Historical Imagination’, he argues that Anagarika Dharmapala, born Don David Hewavitharne (1864–1933), an ardent opponent of colonialism and Buddhist revivalist, suffered from an illusionist element in his thinking which prevented him from promoting the tolerance, compassion and universalism which he admired in the Buddha's teaching. The source of his illusion was an idealised picture of a Golden Age of pure Buddhism in ancient Sri Lanka realised by the superior Āryan race of which the Sinhalese were true representatives. He derived this picture from blinkered reading of the Pāli chronicles and contrasted it with the futile set of ritual practices within the Buddhism of his time and the demoralised state of the Sinhalese brought about by colonialism. But he expected restoration of self-esteem to the Sinhalese, who were to him an exceptional race, and of pure Buddhism with the help of modern science as an agent of progress with its evolutionism and the discovery of the law of cause and effect which is in tune with Buddhist ideas. However, there was no room in his scheme for the Tamil Hinduism and for Christianity – the “bastard offshoot” of Judaism – with its foolish phantom Creator, nor for Muslims who are alien to the Sinhalese by religion, race and language. Despite such radical tirades the author thinks that Dharmapala remained unaware of the dangers implicit in his brand of modernist Buddhism and its subsequent dire effects.
Chapter 5, ‘Walpola Rahula and Gamini Salgado: Buddhism, Dialogue and the Political Imaginary’, first analyses the contradictions in the writings and activities of Walpola Rahula (1907–1997), the first monk to enrol in the Ceylon University College in 1936. His doctoral thesis, published in Sinhalese in 1946 and later (1974) in English as The Heritage of the Bhikkhu (dedicated “To the memory of those thousands, bhikkhus and others, who sacrificed their lives in the political struggle in Ceylon in 1971”), advocates social and political engagement of monks on the basis of his reading of the Mahāvaṃsa chronicle, which for him justifies even monks disrobing and fighting in wars to preserve the Sinhalese rule of the island which belongs to the Buddha himself and on which there is no room for non-Buddhists. He further deplores traditional practices of popular Buddhism in villages. In all this Rahula was even more radical then Dharmapala. Yet while pursuing a distinguished academic career in the West, he preached the highest ideals of early Buddhism with its tolerance, freedom of thought and enquiry and universal love and compassion for all living beings, which he described in his widely read book, What the Buddha taught (1959). How did he reconcile the two stances? Simply by his conviction, hardly provable from the Pāli Canon, that the Buddha intended his teachings to be adapted to fit changing historical circumstances. In fact, what the Buddha really taught as his main message valid at all times, at least according to the Pāli Canon, was detachment from worldly affairs and individual liberation from temporary forms of life into the unfathomable dimension of nibbāna.
In the second part of the chapter the author discusses Salgado's memoir, entitled The True Paradise, describing his growing up in a Buddhist village community near Colombo which was contemporary with Rahula's condemnation of the very life style Salgado was experiencing in his young days. The memoir offers, in the author's words, “a compelling, heart-warming account of how sustaining, complex and salutary a non-modernist Buddhism might be”. The author says that Rahula and Salgado need one another if integration of religion into political and cultural discourse is to be achieved; it should, further, be supplemented by adequate understanding of Buddha's own warnings against misapplications of his teaching. No doubt a sound view which, sadly, did not prevail in Sri Lankan reality.
Chapter 6, ‘J.R. Jayewardene: Playing with Fire’, shows the dilemmas of a politician labouring against impossible odds. Raised as an Anglican, he embraced Buddhism with nationalistic inclinations when a law student in the 1930s and supported the movement for the revival of the Sinhalese Buddhist cultural traditions which had been diminished under colonial rule, but he envisaged a righteous society based on the Buddha's principles. When he joined the political arena, he campaigned in favour of free enterprise (in opposition to the ruinous socialist command economy under both Bandaranaikes), accommodation with Tamils and against the involvement of monks in politics. He became Prime Minister in 1977, extended his mandate by a referendum in 1982 which gave him presidential powers and resigned in 1988 (aged 82). Thus he faced the escalation of violence which he desperately wanted to avoid but had not done or could not do enough to succeed. This period is too complicated to summarise and I do not think that the author himself manages to give a clear enough picture of it. It requires distance in time. But leaving the author's peculiar terminology (‘regressive inversion’ etc.) aside, he certainly demonstrates his point that “the liberating vision of a great religion can be re-deployed to confirm prejudices that the religion itself offers to transcend”. He also shows the mistakes and wrong decisions for which the political monks, the prevailing opinion of the Sinhalese nation and governmental policies have been responsible, thus fuelling the resentment of the Tamil minority and providing terrorists with motivation and excuses. Would the conflict have been avoided had the justified Tamil demands been met? Nobody can know for certain, but the fact that with the emergence of the Tamil demand for a separate state in 1976, unacceptable to the Sinhalese, the ruthless LTTE immediately appeared on the scene suggests that it was already formed or fully prepared in secret with its militant agenda and waiting for its opportunity to spring into action.
The civil war in Sri Lanka was still in full swing at the time the author was writing, with no solution in sight. Even when the book was published about two months before the defeat of the LTTE the outcome of the conflict was not quite certain. But is it now definitely over? Few commentators think so despite the death of its monstrous leader, even if the government takes a conciliatory course in dealing with the Tamil question. Secret cells and splinter groups may be waiting in the wings and regrouping for some form of further action.
