{"id":76217,"date":"2018-04-05T22:38:49","date_gmt":"2018-04-06T04:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=76217"},"modified":"2018-04-04T16:32:59","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T23:32:59","slug":"in-defense-of-sinhalese-buddhist-identity-from-sri-lankan-pseudo-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/04\/05\/in-defense-of-sinhalese-buddhist-identity-from-sri-lankan-pseudo-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"In defense of Sinhalese Buddhist identity from Sri Lankan pseudo academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Punsara Amarasinghe PhD Candidate Faculty of Law National Research University Moscow.<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

In the 37th<\/sup> session of UN human rights council, Sri Lankan Sinhalese delegates Dr. Nalaka Godahewa, Sarath Weerasekere and others were confronted by the members of Global Tamil forum and this act demonstrates the fervent interest of Tamil diaspora to defend their mythical concept on Illam in international platform and furthermore this proves the strength of Tamil separatism albeit we have militarily defeated them in 2009. In fact the contribution made by global Tamil intelligentsia has played a pivotal role in carving the Sinhalese as the oppressor and Tamils as the oppressed from the outset of the Tamil separatist movement.\u00a0 Tamil academics migrated to Western states after 83 riots began to depict the whole Sinhalese nation and Buddhist monks as generators of the communal violence on Tamils even though 83 riots was an offshoot of JR Jayawardane\u2019s despicable political chicanery. Sri Lankan born anthropologist Stanly Tambiah published a book named Buddhism Betrayed?\u201d in 1992 which has given a set of questions that how a peaceful religion turned into a violent form in Sri Lanka and he reiterates the Sinhalese Buddhist monks as the agitators of the Sinhalese extremism. Unfortunately the so called Sinhalese intelligentsia in the country did not have a backbone to counter the false arguments brought by Tambiah in his book and instead of his writing Buddhism Betrayed ?\u201d was added to the reading lists of Sociology departments in Sri Lankan universities.\u00a0 It is a deplorable fact that many Sri Lankan born Sinhalese academics have become distorted in their ideology to criticize Sinhalese nationalism and its unique Buddhist heritage in international forums and in their publications. In truth attacking\u00a0 own religion and national heritage has become a common tendency\u00a0 for South Asian born academics to obtain well off academic posts and fellowships in Oxbridge or Ivey League universities in the USA\u00a0 and in order to make their lives better they seem to have opted for the dirty way of defaming their own identity.<\/p>\n

Ironically most of the them have emerged from the free education of Sri Lanka and some of them have taught in Sri Lankan university system for years too. The crucial thing that we should\u00a0 understand is that Sinhalese Buddhism or the historical legacy of Sinhalese nations have become the most targets to strike among this academics\u00a0 and more or less they get number of opportunities\u00a0 internationally to raise their opinions.\u00a0 As an example the article written by Gananth Obeyaskere under the title of Dutugamunu\u2019s conscience made him a pious man as who unveils the truth being a Sinhalese. But in reading the article written by Obeyaskere it becomes a salient factor that how poorly he had grounded his arguments against Sinhalese Buddhist monks. In an article written by him to an international journal named Journal of Buddhist Ethics\u201d, Obeyasekere comments Though a so-called Buddhist nation Sri Lanka has over the last twenty years produced an extremely high murder rate and perhaps one of the largest rates of suicide for the whole world. Sri Lankan Buddhists are all familiar with the five precepts; yet Buddhists in Sri Lanka, over the same period of time, have become massive consumers of alcohol and my guess is that per capita Sri Lankan Buddhists are one of the largest consumers of alcohol in the world\u201d\u00a0 It is a pity that this learned anthropologist puts a shameless attempt to portray that Buddhism has failed in its mission as non-violent philosophy to prevent people from murders, alcoholism and suicide, but he has forgotten that even Christians do commit suicide and they too have killed people even though their ten commandment in Bible has proscribed such acts. Secondly the name of Anagarika Dharmapala has become the mantra of those Sri Lankan bogus anthropologists and social scientists to develop their imaginative theories on Sinhalese nationalism and Dharmapala as the culprit who planted the seeds of antagonism toward Tamils among Sinhalese. The book written by Sri Lankan born American academic H.L Senevirathne named Buddhism of Sri Lanka: Work of Kings\u201d is purely a hypocritical project intended to attack the Sinhalese Buddhist renaissance of early 20th<\/sup> century led by Dharmapala and it has further critiqued the involvement of erudite Buddhist monks like Walpola Rahula in the nationalist movement in post independent Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n

9th<\/sup> article in the Sri Lankan constitution is another notable factor which has been the moot point for many academics and frequently they despise providing prominence to Buddhism as something detrimentally hindering the interests of the minorities. For an example in legal academia many Sri Lankan academics have dealt with changing the constitution as a prime task to create the national harmony and to appease Tamils globally. The sheer truth is none of these pundits who eagerly condemn the Sri Lankan Buddhist identity in our constitution try to ascertain how secularism has worked out in the West.\u00a0 Christianity still plays a crucial role in carving the political trajectory in Western world despite they pretend to be secular in political governance. As an example though the constitution of the USA does not explicitly\u00a0 mention anything in specific about the religion the preamble of the constitution has stated In the name of most holy and undivided Trinity\u201d and each Dollar currency carries the phase In God We Trust . Most of the Western states that have become ideal safe havens for this set of pseudo academics refer to God and Christianity in the preamble to the constitution.<\/p>\n

The need for\u00a0 patriotic scholars in defense of nationalism has become indispensible in the present context of Sri Lanka with the existing bunch debilitated the University academics who keep their heads off before national interests. I can recall an incident happened at South Asian University in New Delhi when I was studying there for my Masters in 2016. A Sri Lankan academic , painter called Jagath Goonwardane came for an invited lecture organized by Sociology Department and started to scorn Sri Lankan Buddhist monks as villains who spread the violence in the country and in point this learned professor used the vulgar term in English language F\u2026ING to call Buddhist monks.\u00a0 The event was moderated by Dr. Sasasnka Perera another Sri Lankan academic worked at South Asian University, but for my biggest surprise he allowed Goonawardane to continue his insult or rather abusive comments on Sri Lankan Buddhist monks in front of foreign students.\u00a0 This is the pathetic reflection of the Sri Lankan academia, especially in humanities and social sciences and the lack of English education has become another obstacle for the existing nationalist scholars to face and counter the false propagandas of Tamil global intelligentsia.<\/p>\n

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Punsara Amarasinghe PhD Candidate Faculty of Law National Research University Moscow. In the 37th session of UN human rights council, Sri Lankan Sinhalese delegates Dr. Nalaka Godahewa, Sarath Weerasekere and others were confronted by the members of Global Tamil forum and this act demonstrates the fervent interest of Tamil diaspora to defend their mythical concept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}