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 […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island First of all, let me express my sincere respects to Mr D.L. Sirimanne, the writer of the interesting article entitled ‘Celebrating 75th Anniversary of Independence’ (The Island/Opinion/January 18, 2023). He struck me as a venerable old man, who, at 103 years of age, still thinks about the welfare […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Whatever it is, equipped with his education, native intelligence and acquired political wisdom, he will be able to hold the country whole until it passes lawfully into the hands of the uncorrupt patriotic young generation that is  waiting in the wings in patient silence (not into those of the ignorant noisy […]

By Rohana R. Wasala A Youtube video (uploaded December 27, 2022) with the alarmist caption බුදුන් ඉපදුණු මේ ලංකාවට සිදු වු අපරාදෙ අපිත් දැන ගනිමුද  (Let’s be aware of the enormity of the injustice perpetrated on Sri Lanka where the Buddha was born) captured my attention this morning (January 1, 2023), both because of the […]

By Rohana R. Wasala Consequent to Siridhamma Thera’s insulting comments on the Dalada and his critical outbursts against the (in his opinion) foolish relic worshiping lay Buddhists, and  against the Ven. Mahanayakes, the Karaka Sangha Sabha of the Malwatte Chapter to which he belongs wrote to him ordering him to tender a formal apology for […]

By Rohana R. Wasala In almost all the videos I watched on the internet, Ven. Samanthabhadra refers to Buddhists he judges to lack the level of intellect that he thinks a rational thinking Buddhist should have, using  very derogatory terms such as fools, donkeys, animals, etc. He has no empathy  for people with perceived weaknesses. […]