By Tisaranee Gunasekara –
“Mendicants, what’s with that colossal racket?” ~ The Buddha (Cātumasutta)
Pope Julius II died in February 1513. Called the Warrior Pope, he waged a series of wars to unite the Papal States and evict the French from Italy. Like many of his predecessors, he had lovers and fathered children (three daughters). A noted patron of arts, he built up the Papal treasury and his own.
The satirical dialogue Julius Excluded from Heaven was published a year after the pope’s death. Attributed to the great Dutch humanist and theologian Desiderius Erasmus, it imagines the late pope arriving at the gate of Heaven in a state of inebriation followed by a cohort of holy warriors, the soldiers who died in his many military campaigns, trusting in his promise of heaven. St Peter refuses admission to the late Pope. “You have almost twenty thousand at your back and in this entire crowd I can’t find one single individual who has so much as the face of a Christian,” says the saint. “As for yourself, the more I look at you, the fewer traces do I see of any apostolic character.” Julius threatens St Peter with excommunication (banishment from the Church), calling it a thunderbolt “I used to terrify great kings on earth and their kingdoms too.” A confused Peter wants to know what he’s talking about “I never heard from Christ a single one of these words.”. Refused admission, Julius plans to create his own heaven and storm the real one.
The purpose of the dialogue was to draw attention to the parlous state of the Catholic church in the early 15th century, the vast gulf between its practices and the Christ’s teachings. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus tells Pontius Pilate during his trial (John 18:36). Yet, by the Middle Ages, popes had become kings in all but name. With power and wealth, corruption spread across the entire body of the Church. Clerics lived in open contravention of the Gospels. In The Canterbury Tales, Jeffrey Chaucer introduces clerical characters who practice every imaginable vice from stealing and selling fake relics to debauchery and drunkenness. Dante, in Inferno, consigns corrupt popes to the Eighth Circle of Hell.
Three years after Erasmus wrote his warning tract about ecclesiastical degeneration, Martin Luther’s seminal work Ninety-Five Theses came out. These one-to-two sentence propositions for debate focused on church practices which violated the teaching of the Christ. Had the church allowed a free debate, the history of Christianity might have turned out differently. Instead, the Church tried to silence Luther by excommunicating him. Luther couldn’t be silenced. The loss of the Catholic Church’s dominium over Europe had begun.
The state of Sinhala-Buddhism today is not dissimilar to the state of the Church in 15th Century. Clerical misconduct has become the norm rather than the exception as monks break Vinaya rules (including the four Pārājikas) shamelessly, in plain sight. This week’s ignominious spectacle at Anuradhapura is only a single expression of how far Sinhala-Buddhist sāsana has moved away from the Buddha’s core teaching.
In the aftermath of the 2019 Easter Sunday Massacre, the Mahanayake of the Asgiriya chapter Warakagoda Sri Gnanaratana said at a religious function, “Muslim people don’t love us… It is clear that they are a group who gave poison to our people, who tried to destroy our people… These traitors should not be allowed to live free. Some upasakammas said they must be stoned to death (gal gahala maranna ona). I don’t say that. But that is what should be done…” – Translation and emphasis mine).
The Buddha’s rejection of violence, in deed, word, and thought, was unequivocal and unconditional. It even encompasses violence in self-defence. In Kakacūpama Sutta, the Buddha tells monks, “Even if low-down bandits were to sever you from limb to limb with a two-handed saw, anyone who had a malevolent thought on that account would not be following my advice” . Yet in today’s Sri Lanka, a preeminent Mahanayake can make murderous statements against an entire community without a single eyebrow being raised. In a Sasana so far removed from the core teachings of the Buddha, monks like Galagoda-Atte Gnanasara, Balangoda Kassapa, and Rajangane Saddharatana are not anomalies.
Kekirawe Sudhassana and Pahalagama Somaratana: punishing heterodoxy while ignoring Pārājika.
The Buddha introduced the first Vinaya rule when monk Sudinna, at the earnest request of his parents, had consensual sexual relations with his former wife.
Pārājika means defeat, literally. There are four Pārājikas, having sexual relations with a female or even a female animal, theft, murder (including looking for an assassin and persuading someone to commit suicide), and pretending to have achieved a superior human state.
When the Pallegama Hemaratana story came to light, there was widespread outrage because the victim was a child and thus incapable of consenting. Monks having consensual relations with adult women is so commonplace today, this committing of the first Pārājika does not make the news unless it is connected to some secular crime. For example, in February 2012, Gomadiye Sarana, a 37-year-old monk, was sentenced to death for murdering his female lover’s brother.
The blasé attitude towards the first Pārājika has reached such an extreme, even perpetrators of child rape can resume their ordained life once they serve sentence. The best example is Pahalagama Somaratana who was found guilty of four counts of sexual assault in London’s Isleworth Crown Court. At the time of the assault, the victim was nine years old. He served his jail sentence, returned to Sri Lanka, and resumed his ordained life as Chief Sanghanayaka of the UK, Chief Incumbent of Thames Vihara and of Yatawatte Vidyaravindra Pirivena in Gampaha.
If the Mahanayakes take the Vinaya rules seriously, Pahalagama Somaratana would have been disrobed for committing the first Pārājika. If successive Lankan leaders (including the current NPP) were committed to the rule of law, the child-abusing monk would have been banned from working with children. Neither of these happened. The Mahanayakes don’t care about the Vinaya while the political rulers don’t care about the law.
Then take the example of the monk who began his ordained life as Pitiduwe Siridhamma and now calls himself Sri Samanthabadra. He portrays himself as an arhat; his official website refers to him as Arhat. He presides over a multimillion rupee agro-industrial complex masquerading as a temple and some of his supporters seem to regard him as a new Buddha (an official video of the monk wreathed in luminous rays from the nil-katarolu flower did the rounds four years ago. With such pretensions he has committed the fourth Pārājika. Yet he continues to keep his robes.
This month, the Ramanna nikaya disrobed Kekirawe Sudhassana thero. Going by information in the public domain, the charge sheet against him does not accuse him of committing any of the four Pārājikas. His crime seems to be a crime which does not exist in the Buddha’s teaching, that of heresy. He was accused of contradicting the atuwa (commentaries which were written in Lanka many centuries after the passing of the Buddha and translated into Pali by monk Buddhaghosa), rejecting the existence of a heaven in the sky and a hell under the ground, re-examining concepts like karma and rebirth, and undermining the traditional faith.
The Mahanayakes who have no problem with monks committing Pārājikas seem to be greatly perturbed by a monk asking questions about traditions and practices. What do they think would undermine faith more – monks asking questions about the Buddha’s teachings and Buddhist practices or monks involving themselves in a public melee? What do they think would cause greater harm to the sāsana – a few monks casting doubt on long-held orthodoxies or many monks openly violating not just core Vinaya rules but also the Five Precepts?
Polwatte Buddhadatta thero (1887-1952) was renowned for his erudition and piety. In the preface to his book, Atuwakathawasthu, he mentions that when he wrote articles questioning atuwas, many ordained and lay leaders were incensed with him because “there was an opinion that Atuwas should not be questioned… The Dinamina carried an article by me titled Mara is a mythical god in 1935. This led to a long debate. Much was revealed due to that debate”. Today, instead of informed debates, we have invective and violence.
The Buddha encouraged questioning. The guardians of Sinhala-Buddhism cannot do so because this nationalistic faith is a perversion of the Buddha’s teachings. Sinhala-Buddhism was a Mahawamsa creation. One of its fundamental tenets is the myth of the sinless war, the supposed assurance given to King Dutugemunu by some monks when he was racked by misgivings about killing hosts of people in the war: “Only one and a half human beings have been killed by thee…. The one had come unto the (three) refuges and the other had taken on himself the five precepts. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts…” This is a total violation of the Buddha’s teachings which warn against the taking of any life for any purpose.
The Buddha never said that pristine Buddhism will survive only in Lanka. That was a Mahawamsa fabrication. There is no mention of Lanka in the Maha Parinibbhana sutta or anywhere in the Pali chronicles. That one truth can undermine the foundation of Sinhala-Buddhism. No wonder the Mahanayakes are more scared of questioning than of pārājikas.
The ACBC and Project 1956
The Revolt of the Temple was a Mahawamsa for the 20th century. It advocates a return to a Lanka that never was – a land where monks chose the king and the people approved that choice, where kings ruled according to clerical wishes. It also advocates regime-change and, in a bow towards current opinions, a kind of Sinhala-Buddhist socialism.
The author of the book was DC Wijewardena, a brother of DR Wijewardena, the husband of Vimala Wijewardena and the patron of Mapitigama Buddharakkitha. He was also a member of the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress (ACBC) and of its brainchild the Buddhist Commission which came up with the report, The Betrayal of Buddhism. Its key proposals included making Sinhala the sole official language.
Up to that point, all major political parties had supported language parity, including SWRD Bandaranaike’s SLFP. Driven by the need to defeat the UNP while outflanking a left strengthened by the successful Hartal, Mr Bandaranaike accepted the report on the same day it came out, 4 February 1956. A group of monks led by Mapitigama Buddharakkitha formed the Eksath Bhikku Peramuna on the same day. The new all-monk organisation played a key role in ensuring the victory of the Bandaranaike-led coalition, the MEP.
70 years later, the ACBC is dreaming of a repeat performance. Its new head is former head of the SIS and the TID and retired DIG Chandra Nimal Wakishta (he was appointed as a member of the Bribery Commission by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa 2021). The Committee of Inquiry into the (Welikada) Prison Massacre in the Recommendations section of its final report fingers Mr Wakishta as an enabler of that outrage. The riot happened as a result of armed STF members entering the prison premises to conduct search operations ignoring the objections of jailors and in violation of the Prison Ordnance. “The coordination, advanced preparation, and planning with the STF, Rehabilitation and Prison Reform Ministry, and the then Prisons Commissioner General and Prisons Intelligence Unit Jailor Indika Sampath was solely handled by Chandra Wakishta, then senior DIG of State Intelligence and TID, and, in doing so, he has failed to obtain a search warrant from a competent Court of Law for the conduct of this search”.
In a recent interview Mr Wakishta claimed that Mr Bandaranaike used the ACBC report to create a Buddhist renaissance.
That renaissance began by sundering Sinhala-Tamil relations and ended with the assassination of the prime minister by a Buddhist monk. Perhaps the ACBC’s involvement in this week’s Mihintale Protest is aimed at engineering another such ‘renaissance’ pitting Sinhala-Buddhists against some minority and using the resultant wave of intolerance to ensure the victory of a favoured politician?
As Prof. HL Seneviratne pointed out in The Work of Kings, since Lankan monks lack overarching and unifying social structures, “by its very nature the Sangha cannot be a power. It can only be a handmaid of power.” Whenever monks pursued political power, they became cat’s paws of politicians, knowingly or unknowingly. Neither the country nor the Sasana can afford a repeat performance.