By Rohana R. Wasala

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake participated in the inauguration ceremony of the 74th Upasampada Vinaya Karmaya (Rite of Higher Ordination) of the Sri Lanka Ramanna Nikaya held at the Mahaweli Grounds in Galnewa, not far from his native village of Tambuttegama, on the afternoon of June 30, 2025. The  main Upasampada rite was to be conducted at a different venue, namely, the Sri Vidyadhara Maha Pirivena in Kalawewa, Kalakarambewa from June 30 to July 8, organised by the provincial Sangha Sabhas of the North Central Province and the Upasampada Maha Utsava Committee. During his short guest speech of about twenty minutes, the president tried to explain to the distinguished gathering of the clergy and laity invited to attend the important event two principal concerns that occupied his mind: 1) his determination to overcome ‘nationalism’ (interpreted as jaativaadaya/racism) in order to create national unity among the various ethnic and religious communities, and 2) his government’s supportive role in connection with the problem of maintaining discipline within the Sangha Order as well as the issue of amending Sections 42 and 43 of the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance as requested by the Mahanayake Theras.

According to the official President’s Office website (accessed July 7, 2025):

President Disanayake pointed out that certain political groups had exploited nationalism as a tool to regain power. However, he stressed that the true victims of such actions were not the politicians themselves, but the innocent children of parents from both the North and the South. He emphasized the need to reject nationalism and work diligently toward fostering national unity. While affirming that everyone has the right to act freely and democratically, The President emphasized that his administration would not permit nationalism to resurface again. If existing laws are insufficient to suppress it, he stated, they would be strengthened to defeat divisive forces. He reiterated that the goal of his government is to build a society where Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim communities can live together in peace and harmony.

Addressing the matter of disciplinary discussions within the Sangha, President Disanayake expressed the government’s willingness to facilitate any dialogue, provided that the Mahanayaka Theras can reach a consensus on the matter. Until then, he said, the request to amend Sections 42 and 43 of the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance has been submitted to the Minister of Buddhasasana and is already under review by the Legal Draftsman’s Department…..”.

The president was speaking in Sinhala. The two paragraphs quoted above from  the English version issued by the President’s Office express what I think is the gist of his speech at that inaugural ceremony. I listened to the president’s live address in Sinhala as available on the internet and I am in a position to comment on what he actually meant to say regarding the ideas covered in the above two paragraphs from his speech.

First, let’s look at the second paragraph. It contains the incoherent phrase: …..the matter of disciplinary discussions within the Sangha….”, etc. What the president was referring to, using similarly vague vocabulary himself, was actually a ‘Sangha katikawata’. It looks like the English translator in the President’s Office (probably the same person who served during Ranil Wickremasinghe’s successor presidency) does not seem to possess any familiarity with Buddhism or any empathetic understanding of Buddhist monks that would enable him/her  to supply a clear enough translation of the president’s speech in this instance. Both (the president and the translator) didn’t try to make it clear that the higher ordination rite and the Sangha katikawata are two separate things, though they, especially the president, should have known the difference between the two issues.  

A Sangha katikawata is something mooted several times in the not very distant past by some members of the Sangha, but opposed by others including particularly the Mahanayake Theras (of the Malwatte and Asgiriya Chapters of Siyam Nikaya?) as Wijedasa Rajapaksa, a former Justice Minister during the Yahapalanaya years 2015-20, was heard saying in an interview some years ago. The wisdom of this opposition should be clear to anyone with some idea of what could happen to the Sangha Sasana (the Bhikkhu Order) if secular courts were to pass judgement on bhikkhu disciplinary matters that occur within the order, that could have implications outside the confines of that space. In the civil society, outside the monastic order, Buddhist monks are subject to the Roman Dutch law that operates in Sri Lanka, which is normal.

Having said that, introducing or establishing a Sangha katikawata is a complicated subject that will likely require the contribution of civil legal experts as well as specialist elderly monk preceptors. Those who call for a government sponsored katikawata expect it to give enforceability under the normal civil law to punishments like expulsion from the order imposed on monks adjudged guilty of violating vinaya rules by the Mahanayake Theras. An allegation frequently heard is that certain monk offenders (found guilty by the hierarchy of the Sangha Order) are known to continue with their faulty behaviours with impunity, claiming protection in the name of freedom of religion and belief that is guaranteed by the Sri Lankan Constitution.  

The katikawata proposed was presumably to be based on the lines of certain historical ‘katikawatas’. The best known among them (according to the author about to be mentioned) is the katikawata proclaimed by king Parakramabahu I (1153-1186). The late anthropology professor Gananath Obeysekere (in his 2017 book ‘The Doomed King’, p.159) translates the term ‘katikawatas’ as ‘royal promulgations’, which, he writes ‘were mostly devoted to the punishment of dussila (impious) monks by expulsion from the order and other kinds of punishment….’. These punishments, however, never included executions, according to him. Obeysekere, apparently, didn’t care to take an unbiased look at Buddhism or Buddhist history and culture as a native Buddhist could or should have done. I don’t know whether he was a Buddhist or not, but his interpretation of ‘dussila’ as ‘impious’ betrays the conscious or unconscious Christian perspective that he inappropriately adopts in the context mentioned above. The Pali/Sinhala adjective ‘dussila’  in the given situation means morally and ethically wrong (because indisciplined, guilty of breaking ‘sila’, violating rules of moral conduct) in terms of  tenets of bhikkhu discipline. 

Though I had never been impressed by what I thought was his generally eurocentric anthropological take on Theravada Buddhism practiced in Sri Lanka as a conventional religion, that did not diminish my great respect for professor Gananath Obeysekere as a researcher and scholar of utmost intellectual probity in his chosen fields. I sincerely admire his scholarly attempt in the aforementioned book to justly exonerate the last Kandyan King, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, from the false allegations of ‘cruelty and violence….plunder and destruction’ that the colonial British made against him while being themselves diabolically guilty of those very crimes. It must have occurred to him, or probably he had it at the back of his mind, when he was writing the book, that this criminal act of scapegoating king Sri Vikrama Rajasinha by the British colonial intruders around the beginning of the 19th century for their own villainies and depredations against their victims, is an early instance of what the Western powers are doing today to Sri Lanka that managed, at a stupendous price, to put an end to three decades of mindless armed Tamil separatist terrorist violence. Ironically, Obeysekere also mentions Anagarika Dharmapala (of whom he was not very fond) as ‘the most passionate defender of Sri Vikrama in colonial times..’. Dharmapala is nowadays demonised as the progenitor of the alleged nationalism (wrongly interpreted as jativadaya/racism) that is held to be the root cause of independent Sri Lanka’s inevitable decline to date. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake vowed to ‘suppress’ this alleged evil soon. (I will deal with this in the second part of this article.)

The president, in his speech at the inaugural ceremony, correctly said that dealing with disciplinary issues among the Sangha had better be left to the monks themselves. The other Buddha Sasana related issue that he touched on was the matter of amending Sections 42 and 43 of the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance (1931), which all four Mahanayake Theras had requested of him in writing, as he mentioned. He said that this task was entrusted to Buddha Sasana Minister Hiniduma Sunil Senevi and that the matter had already been referred to the Legal Draftsman’s Department. The president’s intentions could be genuine, but it’s like asking a donkey to do a dog’s homework, for Hiniduma Sunil Senevi cannot be thought to be suitably knowledgeable about Buddhism or sensitive enough to Buddhist sentiments. The reason is that he is a non-Buddhist, a Catholic in fact (to prove which there is pictorial evidence on social media; he himself boasted that his father or grandfather built the Hiniduma church). That is the truth, though according to the official website of the Sri Lanka Parliament his religion is marked as Buddhism. Some senior positions of his administrative staff are also allegedly held by Catholics. He cannot be specifically called ‘Buddhasasana minister’ either. Officially, he is the Minister of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs. In a recent ‘Rathu Ira’ programme on Swarnavahini TV, Colombo, Sri Lanka (July 17, 2025) Hiniduma Sunil Senevi apparently admitted that there was actually no separate ministry for Buddha Sasana, but only a department. What does it mean to appoint a person like this who doesn’t seem to understand the importance of Article 9 that the late Dr Colvin R. de Silva, legendary legal luminary, historian and Marxist politician, included in the original republican constitution of 1972 that he drafted, to look after Buddha Sasana affairs? Article 9, retained in the currently operative second republican constitution of 1978, gives the foremost place to Buddhism.

To be continued