By Rohana R. Wasala Continued from Monday, February 17, 2025 When I am formulated, sprawling on a pin” (from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’ first published 1915) In moments of self-reflection, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake probably feels the way Prufrock does, helplessly exposed to the probing, judgemental gaze of the […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Continued from  Friday, February 7, 2025 Since the JVP/NPP’s arbitrary decision to curtail former president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s security and have him relocated to less expensive accommodation is now being legally challenged through an FR petition lodged with the Supreme Court in Colombo, nothing  more needs to be said here about it. […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Vinasha kale vipareetha buddhi” is an ancient Sanskrit proverb. It means: When a person’s doom approaches, their intellectual power becomes reversed/disoriented or turns against them (causing their destruction)”. This pithy saying seems to be as much applicable to incumbent president Anura Kumara Dissanayake as it once was to former president Mahinda […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Reading the detailed news article under the title ‘First Sri Lankan Buddhist monk in 105 years joins Oxford for MPhil in Buddhist Studies’  (The Island/December 6, 2024) was a refreshing experience for me, as it should’ve been for others among the readers who feel concerned about the future of the young […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island  A feature article on the Business pages of The Island of February 16, 2023 served as a formal event announcement for the  inaugural function of a new NGO called the People’s Convention on Good Governance (PCGG) that was scheduled to be held nine days later (i.e., on February […]

Rohana R. Wasala This is for the kind attention of my dear readers. When skimming through the article published in Lankaweb, I found some inadvertent errors that had survived my normal pre-emailing revision of the text. Please bear with me. I take this opportunity to amend only the following very misleading sentence that appeared towards […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Please ensure that none of these monks, not a single one, get exploited by politicians in the fast approaching election time and ever again in the future. No monks should be allowed to offer themselves as candidates or to collect funds for that purpose from donors. No monks should be allowed […]

By Rohana R. Wasala A four-member delegation of seemingly frustrated Buddhist monk activists led by Ven. Itthekande Saddhatissa Thera, General Secretary of the Ravana Balaya Organization,  called on the two Most Venerable Mahanayake Theras of the Siyam Nikaya in Kandy in their respective viharas (monasteries), as reported on a Colombo Today YouTube video dated June […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Poson was celebrated throughout the island by Sri Lankan Buddhists on the full moon poya day of June 21, 2024. Sri Lanka’s mainstream media including state media available online offered me little information about islandwide Poson observances that were held. It looks like state sponsorship of devotional activities connected with Poson […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island Addressing a gathering as chief guest at the 100th anniversary celebration of the Sri Lanka Buddhist Society Moratuwa held at the Moratuwa Buddhist Society Hall on May 11, 2024, president Ranil Wickremasinghe pledged SLR 1 billion for research to ‘explore the connection between Buddha’s teachings and AI’ starting […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Praise to Kumar David (Quo vadis?/Sunday Island/June 2, 2024) for writing such an entertaining and informative essay. It is hoped that the ex-professor will forgive me for being so presumptuous as to comment on his writing.  He was grumpy on Vesak Day, he says, due to the rainy weather that prevailed […]

By Rohana R. Wasala It seems that persistent attacks directed in different forms at the historic Buddhist cultural establishment of Sri Lanka are based on the deliberate misconception or the distorted perception  that the Buddhist worldview is entirely pessimistic, life denying, backward, divisive, xenophobic, and that the demoralising defeatist attitudes supposedly adopted by the majority […]

By Rohana R. Wasala The following is a tribute to the late Hon. Lakshman Kadirgamar, the then foreign affairs minister of Sri Lanka, who won UN recognition for an international Vesak Day holiday twenty-four years ago. Buddhists annually celebrate the Vesak Full Moon Poya Day as the day that the Birth, the Enlightenment and the […]

by Rohana R. Wasala I was saddened by the unexpectedly rude sarcasm of the apparently perfunctory memorial feature The Jackson of all trades: A tribute to Jackson Anthony” (The Island/October 20, 2023) penned by Uditha Devapriya about the recently deceased celebrity. In my opinion, the article is hardly worthy of the dead icon, or of […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Aba – the mega Sinhala movie  Aba, the mega Sinhala movie directed by the versatile filmmaker Jackson Anthony, constitutes an impressive cinematic adventure for both its creators and its audiences. The film is a historical epic based on an independent and informed reconstruction of the Pandukabhaya story found in  The Great […]

By Rohana R. Wasala To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. This is an expanded and updated version of an article that I wrote in 2020 under the above title, which nevertheless has remained unpublished […]

By Rohana R. Wasala It would be obvious to the correctly informed impartial observer that Sri Lanka’s age-old Buddhist religious cultural establishment is under unprovoked attack both within the country and outside of it. The current controversy about Channel 4’s latest film on Sri Lanka concerning the Easter Sunday suicide bombings carried out by Islamic […]

By Rohana R. Wasala  At the conclusion of a thoughtful feature article under the title ‘A new identity for Sri Lanka’ in the Sunday Island of June 25, 2023, Uditha Devapriya, a young journalist that I admire for the quality of his writing, refers to what he calls a minority view that he shares about […]

By Rohana R. Wasala The article under the title ‘Timely action must be taken to preserve Buddhism in Sri Lanka’ by a virtually anonymous writer, signing as R.W.W., published in the Sunday Island/June 11, 2023 provided the cue for the following. I sincerely thank him or her for expressing those factually unsupported ideas about the issue […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island  Edwin Arnold’s purpose in composing the epic The Light of Asia, then, was to give readers an unbiased idea about  the exalted personality of prince Siddhartha and the general substance of his teaching. But he was not addressing this task in a religious cultural vacuum. He had to take […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island  Here endeth what I write Who love the Master for his love of us. A little knowing, little have I told Touching the Teacher and the Ways of Peace Forty-five rains thereafter showed he those In many lands and many tongues, and gave Our Asia Light, that still […]

Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island The following is a public proposal respectfully offered, for what it is worth, by a senior Sri Lankan to the Most Venerable Mahanayake Theras of all Nikayas on behalf of all Sri Lankans of like mind:  I believe that the Mahanayake Theras have been alive to the events of […]

By Rohana R. Wasala  Courtesy The Island Some well meaning, erudite, but very naive and innocent,  young bhikkhus are challenging the pastor to a debate over his deprecatory remarks about Buddhism, which I think is ridiculously ingenuous and unnecessary, because that is giving this mocker of the sacred a measure of dignity that he doesn’t […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island The Jerome Fernando escapade, if rightly handled, will provide a golden opportunity to neutralise external threats to the prevailing peaceful religious coexistence in the Sinhalese Buddhist majority Sri Lanka. I hope that the fair minded reader will not immediately condemn me as a Sinhalese racist and a Buddhist […]

by Rohana R. Wasala His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, based in Dharamsala in the state of Himachal Pradesh in India, flew to New Delhi to attend the two-day Global Buddhist Summit held in Hotel Ashok there on April 20 and 21, 2023.  The event was the first of its kind. This inaugural Global Buddhist […]

By Rohana R. Wasala I concluded a previous article published in Lankaweb on January 28, 2023 (Is recolonisation the final solution II) touching on the deplorable situation that innocent Sri Lankans have been plunged into not only by the current economic crisis but also by the so-called Tamil ethnic problem, both aggravated by unjust direct […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Is former prime minister and president, Mahinda Rajapaksa still bluffing? The Most Venerable Mahanayake theras of the Three Nikayas (Siyam, Amarapura and Ramanna) wrote to president Ranil Wickremasinghe admonishing him not to fully implement the 13th Amendment to the Constitution two weeks ago, on February 2, as reported in The Island […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Two stalwarts of the JVP-led National People’s Power (NPP) alliance, Dr Harini Amarasuriya MP and Mr Tilvin Silva, JVP General Secretary, as reported in the media early February 2023, have made more or less clear the alliance’s stand on the full implementation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (suggested by […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Tamil National Alliance (TNA) spokesman and Jaffna District MP M.A. Sumanthiran says that his party has decided to boycott the independence day celebrations this year, as reported in The Island of January 31, 2023. Instead, they will declare it a Black Day and commence a movement towards achieving what they call […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Continued from January 26, 2023 To assert, as Mr Sirimanne does, that From ancient times the Northern region in the island was a kingdom occupied by Tamils due to its closeness to South India…….. during the reign of King Elara, a Tamil, there was a war between the Sinhalese and Tamil […]