3 Responses to “අනගාරික ධර්මපාලතුමා සමරිසියෙක්වීද ?”

1. Hiranthe Says:
   June 27th, 2018 at 7:52 pm

   Who is this Nandana Weerarathna?

   What service he as done to Mother Lanka before spreading such affairs of great human beings who pioneered giving protection to Buddhism and its historical value?

   If he had already qualified to do so, he may do it. Otherwise what right he has? He must be executing a project of the West and Yamapalanaya.

2. Vaisrawana Says:
   June 28th, 2018 at 12:36 am

   This must be a canard, Dr Jayathunga. The article that you are referring to may be of the same type as the recent Daily Mirror article (June 15, 2018) ‘Anagarika Dharmapala: Shedding away the Invective’ by one Uditha Devapriya, that Senaka Weeraratne drew our attention to in Lankweb. According to Uditha Dedvapriya, Anagarika Dharmapala was an ethno-religious racist; but he doesn’t show any familiarity with the Anagarika’s self-appointed life’s mission – that of replanting Theravada Buddhism in the country of its birth India, and of propagating it throughout the world. Devapriya talks as if Dharmapala was a crafty businessman, which was not the case. He expended his considerable inherited wealth on his missionary work; his father made further donations towards the same. Dharmapala also received financial assistance from rich foreign sponsors like Lady Foster Robinson. Udith Devapriya seems to have only heard about Dr Sarath Amunugama’s book Lion’s Roar (2016); if he had read it Udith Devapriya won’t have written the muck that he has written about the Anagarika in his column. This actually is a digression. The point I want to make here is that Dharmapala’s alleged homosexuality must be a malicious fabrication.

   In Dr Amunugama’s book, pages 589 to 597 are devoted to an account of his attempts to train some young boys from the villages to take over and perpetuate his work abroad. He advertised this in the local papers he published. One applicant was a very young samanera named Udakendawala Saranankara. The Anagarika was in India. So he had the little monk brought to his (Anagarika’s) mother’s house at Aloe Avenue in Colombo, where he wanted the little Samanera to live a few years until he became old enough to proceed to India for the training. But the little monk did not agree to this, so he was taken to India immediately. There, of course, Saranankara took to anti-imperialist politics and was consigned to jail. Saranankara was in prison when his benefactor died (in 1933).The Anagarika’s model pupil was Devapriya Walisinghe. He also took the anagarika vow, but refused to wear the yellow robes that Dharmapala had adopted as his uniform,; he chose instead a white costume. It is clear that, as a missionary, the Anagarika resorted to some marketing tactics too. He wrote to Devapriya Walisinghe from London in 1926 that, without the yellow robes that he himself wore, Devapriya was useless among the Europeans. So Devapriya did not go there. But the Anagarika called Devapriya “my beloved son”, because he fulfilled the Anagarika’s ideal of a Buddhist missionary. The Anagarika was a harsh disciplinarian, but obviously, he was soft on young ones. He probably mollycoddled Tennakoon Vimalananda a bit because he was just a child then. This was only a few years before his death in April 1933 in India, at the age of 69, a severely sick man. He had received higher ordination as a bhikkhu in January the same year. It is hard to believe that the Anagarika had any sexual relations with his young protégés.

   There appears to a revival of the classic vilification movements against the great name of Anagarika Dharmapala.

3. samurai Says:
   June 28th, 2018 at 8:51 am

   I fully agree with Vaisrawana.

   There is indeed a vilification campaign against Anagarika Dharmapala. One example is the recent article in the Daily Mirror calling him a racist and a trouble-maker. It was a second such piece in the DM within a space of one or two years. Eighty five years after his death he is still being vilified with various accusations. He was hounded even when he was alive so much that he left Sri Lanka for good, never to return.

   About the Anagarika supposedly being homosexual (gay) my question is this: SO WHAT? There have been many famous personalities with such alleged tendencies, including Arthur Clarke, Upali Wijewardene etc but do we have to focus on such weaknesses or their many positive contributions to society?

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