The Island That Cultivated Philosophy: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 4

The History of Sri Lanka

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 4.

The Island That Cultivated Philosophy

Sri Lanka & The Making of Nirvana

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. “Lewis Carroll. 1865.

The Dynasty That Was Textbook Perfect

Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch was to found a dynasty that would last over 600 years.

Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off the start of recorded Singhala history despite its first 100 years being anything but plain sailing.

Occasional bouts of regicide, lassitude, rebellion and navel gazing aside, the dynasty was as textbook perfect as it could reasonably be expected to be and Prince Vijaya’s thirty-six successors did all that was necessary to embed, improve, and make dominant the tiny state they had first instituted in the northwest of the land.

Not one to sit upon their laurels, and with a flair for marketing well ahead of their time, the Vijayans relaunched their realm barely a quarter of the way through their term, branding it as the kingdom of Anduraupura. They ruled it, according to the later Stone Book or Galpota Inscription, as human divinities, their almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned by virtue of their unusual and holistically philosophical approach to life and governance.

Their capital city would become one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities, enriched by cutting edge industry, resources, structures, administrators, soldiers and all the other many disciplines critical to a successful ancient kingdom. Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most if not all the island.

To the east and south lay Ruhunurata, or Ruhana, a linked but junior principality founded around 200 BCE by Prince Mahanaga, brother to Devanampiya Tissa, the 7th or 8th monarch of the dynasty, and great-great-great-great-great nephew of Prince Vijaya himself.

To the west lay the third, much smaller principality of Mayarata, another linked family fiefdom, said to have been founded in the fourth century BCE by Prince Vijaya’s nephew, Panduwasdev, the dynasty’s third monarch. Like light bulbs experiencing the almost reassuringly familiar power cuts and surges of the current Ceylon Electricity Board, a state company forever preoccupied by internal disputes, both principalities rose, fell and rose again, depending on quite how strong the Anduraupuran king was at any one time.

All this was, of course, good wholesome leadership – but it was hardly groundbreaking. Seen from the perspective of the Shang, Hittites Achaemenids, Ptolemaics, and Thutmosides; the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas or other numerous successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations of sound hegemonic hereditary rule.

Changing Everything Forever

It was only halfway through the span of the Vijayan rule that, in welcoming to the island, Mahinda, the Buddhist son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, they did something that changed everything.

In this, their simple act of hospitality, they were to remodel their kingdom to be so profoundly different to any other, anywhere, as to endow it with an authority and energy so inimitable, that, even today, it is protected and characterised by that misty encounter of 247 BCE.

Not only did the Vijayans welcome the young royal missionary; they took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with it, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism.

Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and despite the later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more suitably described as a philosophy. In welcoming Mahinda, the Vijayans crossed the line from standard overlords to philosopher monarchs governed by a formidable moral code and a preoccupation to achieve a state of transcendent bliss and well-being.

If being an island was the first and foremost explanation for why Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, Buddhism is of course, its second explanation. And a much more impressive one too, for it was a deliberate act – one that no less comprehensively than geography was to profoundly colour the country as if it had been dyed in Tyrian purple itself, that ancient and legendary dye, reserved by threat of death, for the clothes of the Roman emperors or the sails of Queen Cleopatra’s royal barge.

Of course, not every king or subsequent island ruler made the moral imperatives of Buddhism his or her magnetic north; but most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings. As they are still today by ordinary citizens in towns and villages across the land. For however ordinary are ordinary Sri Lankans, they are also unexpectedly religiously minded too. Religion today, to the astonishment of many observers, is holding its own.

Right across the world, experts, and pollsters have had to rethink their view of what would befall religion as countries modernised. Atheists, agnostics and all who are religiously unaffiliated account for a shrinking 16% of the global population, even if the balance of believers has a whiff of the secular in their spiritualism.

But as the west has become more secular, the rest has become less so - with God ever more likely to be best seen by Muslims or Hindus, but not Christians. Nor Buddhists, for Lord Buddha’s followers make up a shrinking 7% percentage of their share of the world’s peoples. But not in Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is estimated to hold its own at around 70% of the island’s population.

Hardly surprising then that in repeated world polls, Sri Lanka is almost always to be found amongst the top five most religiously minded countries.

Suffer Not The Suffering

Once, most of Asia was Buddhist - but such countries are now a rarity as alternative religions, politics, and secularism have shrunk their reach.

Yet in Sri Lanka, Buddhism remains an indisputable force, supported by over six thousand monasteries, thirty thousand monks, and its own government ministry. Other gods retain a modest purchase.

Christianity probably arrived sometime after Thomas the Apostle's visit to Kerala in 52 CE, though it took the arrival of the Portuguese in 1505 for things to really get going. Even so, just 7% of today’s population is Christian, less than the near 10% who practise Islam following the arrival of Arab traders in the seventh century CE; or the 13% practicing Hinduism - here since even before the Chola invasion of the tenth century CE.

Buddhism and Sri Lanka are almost synonymous. It is impossible to understand one without comprehending the other.

The Buddhist mindset – that life is one of suffering, only alleviated by enlightenment through meditation, spiritual and work and doing good – is stitched invisibly into eve...