{"id":78289,"date":"2018-06-11T16:39:20","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T23:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=78289"},"modified":"2018-06-11T16:39:20","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T23:39:20","slug":"anti-buddhist-propaganda-with-an-academic-veneer-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/06\/11\/anti-buddhist-propaganda-with-an-academic-veneer-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Buddhist propaganda with an academic veneer \u2013 III"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

An intellectual hatred is the worst,<\/em><\/p>\n

So let her think opinions are accursed. –<\/em>B. Yeats\/ \u2018A Prayer for My Daughter\u2019<\/p>\n

In this concluding section of my article, I am making an attempt to suggest how anti-Buddhist propaganda has polluted even the academia, and how, as a potent factor, such misinformation has contributed to our country\u2019s present predicament.<\/p>\n

Johanson writes:<\/p>\n

The Buddhist Protestantism of the 19th century, the monks who invoked Buddhist texts to justify the Sri Lankan civil war, and the extremist movements surging today all have one thing in common: a belief that Sri Lanka is a Buddhist nation that must be protected from foreign elements, violently if necessary. The Sri Lankan case shows that nationalism and extremism can be filtered through anything\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is complete nonsense. There are no \u2018extremist movements surging today\u2019 among the Sinhalese as Johansson alleges. The various nonviolent nationalist Buddhist movements led by some young lay Buddhists and Buddhist monks have come into being mainly because successive governments have failed to fulfill their constitutional obligation of protecting Buddhism. Their protests are partly against entrenched governmental inaction that is due to the misapplication of political correctness in the presence of valid complaints about the threatened state of the Buddhist cultural heritage of the country caused by tangible evidence of increasing non-Buddhist religious fundamentalist activism, destruction of archaeological sites and racist Tamil politicians advocating ethnic cleansing targeting the Sinhalese of the North.\u00a0 Any government can put things right\u00a0 provided they are determined to do so. They can do it with the willing participation of the leaders of Hindu, Christian and Muslim religions. The misinformation that is so liberally dished out by half baked \u2018academics\u2019 of Andreas Johansson\u2019s type makes this task very difficult, because it undermines the already existing peace and harmony among the communities.<\/p>\n

Johansson uses the term \u2018nationalism\u2019 in a pejorative sense and equates it with extremism. Critics of his kind condemn today\u2019s powerful nationalist stream of politics in Sri Lanka as the direct malignant result of the national awakening movement and Buddhist renaissance (Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in short) that Dharmapala pioneered in the late 19th<\/sup> century. Dharmapala was a \u2018Sinhala zealot\u2019 and a \u2018Buddhist bigot\u2019 to the Western biased local anthropologists and sociologists who had apparently no natural empathy with their own people. They were a culturally deracinated lot, although they might deny that fact. However, it is doubtful whether even the proponents of the theory of Buddhist Protestantism any longer believe in it.<\/p>\n

What actually is Protestant Buddhism that Gananath Obeysekere et al propounded in the latter 1970s and 1980s? There is a succinct account of Protestant Buddhism and what they described as \u2018Buddhist modernism\u2019 in the Wikipedia, which I chose to quote here in full. I retrieved the following from the Wikipedia (June 7, 2018) for the purpose of this article as it gives the notion in a nutshell; it seems to have been inserted by a voluntary editor who is sympathetic to the scholars that Johansson relies on.<\/p>\n

The term ‘Protestant Buddhism,’ coined by scholar Gananath Obeyesekere,\u00a0is often applied to Dharmapala’s form of Buddhism. It is Protestant in two ways. First, it is influenced by Protestant ideals such as freedom from religious institutions, freedom of conscience, and focus on individual interior experience. Second, it is in itself a protest against claims of Christian superiority, colonialism, and Christian missionary work aimed at weakening Buddhism. “Its salient characteristic is the importance it assigns to the laity.”\u00a0It arose among the new, literate, middle class centered in Colombo.<\/p>\n

The term \u2018Buddhist modernism\u2019 is used to describe forms of Buddhism that suited the modern world, usually influenced by European enlightenment thinking, and often adapted by Asian Buddhists as a counter to claims of European or Christian superiority. Buddhist modernists emphasize certain aspects of traditional Buddhism, while de-emphasizing others.\u00a0Some of the characteristics of Buddhist modernism are: importance of the laity as against the sangha; rationality and de-emphasis of supernatural and mythological aspects; consistency with (and anticipation of) modern science; emphasis on spontaneity, creativity, and intuition; democratic, anti-institutional character; emphasis on meditation over devotional and ceremonial actions.<\/p>\n

Dharmapala is an excellent example of an Asian Buddhist modernist, and perhaps the paradigmatic example of Protestant Buddhism. He was particularly concerned with presenting Buddhism as consistent with science, especially the theory of evolution\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dr Susantha Goonatilake devotes\u00a0 Chapter Seven (p.131-168) of his book \u2018Recolonisation \u2013 Foreign Funded NGOs in Sri Lanka\u2019 (Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 2006) to a discussion of \u2018Colonising Studies on Sri Lanka\u2019 as its title indicates. He is, among other things, Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and president of Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka (2009 to date) and a prolific writer and speaker on sociology, information and knowledge systems, and science topics. In Chapter Seven Dr Goonatilake refers to an earlier work of his entitled \u2018Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: a Civilizational Misadventure\u2019 published in 2001, which examines how four most productive and often quoted anthropologists, namely, Gananath Obeysekere and (the late)S.J. Tambiah (both of Sri Lankan origin, but mostly worked in Europe and USA), and Richard Gombrich and Bruce Kapferer (both British, and worked in Britain and Australia)analyzed the recent (as viewed from 2006) changes that have taken place in the Sinhalese Buddhist society. The conclusion that Goonatilake arrives at in \u2018Anthropologizing Sri Lanka\u2019 is that the works of these anthropologists are seriously flawed in terms of not only the basic facts on the ground, but also in terms of the methodology they use and the conclusions they draw. More damagingly, their post-colonial anthropology seems worse than even the nineteenth- and early twentieth- century colonial anthropological writings on Sri Lanka\u00a0 in terms of the negative attitude with which they view their subject, i.e., the Sinhalese Buddhists.\u201d (p.132, Recolonization). The four confirmed each other\u2019s\u00a0 interpretation of the Sri Lankan reality, and ensured that their common view became the definitive version of that reality. The distortions in their writings were fed by a set of persons associated with foreign funded NGOs, which collectively provide a social framework that helps filter their own version of Sri Lankan reality to authors living outside the country. This set of institutions and individuals, working largely outside the university structure and public domain, acts as a social cognitive matrix that filters the local reality for visiting anthropologists. The re-emergence of a virulent colonial anthropology in Sri Lanka is due partly to their efforts.\u201d (ibid)<\/p>\n

The so-called Buddhist Protestantism is an eminently untenable academic thesis that is little known among the ordinary Sinhalese Buddhists (though it is their interests that are harmed by such threadbare theories). Protestant Buddhism is the first of the two transformations that, according to these Eurocentric anthropologists, took place in Sinhalese Buddhism (by which is meant, I assume, the brand of\u00a0 Buddhism they supposed was being\u00a0 practiced among the Sinhalese the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century) both in terms of its theory and practice. The second alleged transformation took place in the 1970s according to these theorists, who dubbed it \u2018post-protestant Buddhism\u2019.\u00a0 But before giving a brief idea about this so-called \u2018post-protestant Buddhism\u2019 (as I understand it as a layman), let me say something about what the aforementioned anthropologists call \u2018protestant Buddhism\u2019 that Andreas Johansson invokes in his article.<\/p>\n

The Sinhalese have an unbroken recorded history of two thousand five hundred years. Nearly all of it (for two thousand three hundred years according to the Mahavamsa\/The Great Chronicle) is as a Buddhist civilization, which even today forms the unshakable cultural foundation of the multilingual, multi-religious, multiethnic Sri Lankan society. How many other nations in the world can boast of such a long history with a single religious tradition?\u00a0 There is nothing wrong in identifying Sri Lanka as a Buddhist nation, given that 70% of its population comprises Buddhists, and that Buddhism is not confined to one race. The former prime minister of Britain David Cameron once proudly claimed in a Christmas message that the British were a Christian nation and explained what his government had done to help the church, while describing how the institution served the nation. But Britain also prides itself on its multiculturalism. Cameron implied in the same message that the accommodativeness of the British society flowed from its dominant Christian culture. Did sociologists of Johansson\u2019s type level any criticism at his words? Lutheranism, professed by 71.5% of its population is the state religion of Norway and dominates its culture (whereas Sri Lanka does not claim Buddhism to be its state religion). America is a Christian nation. All these reputedly secular democracies have a shorter history than the Buddhist Sri Lanka. Besides, there is no other religion that is so compatible as Buddhism with the notions of secularism and multiculturalism that are basic to democracy. So, what is so objectionable about the \u2018belief that Sri Lanka is a Buddhist nation that must be protected from foreign elements\u2026\u2019.\u00a0 It is mainly due to the characteristic Buddhist tolerance that prevails in our culture that minority communities professing other faiths follow their religions in absolute freedom from interference and subversion.<\/p>\n

Buddhist monks feel compelled to respond to what they perceive as aggressive acts by non-Buddhist religious extremists that adversely affect the rights of the exceptionally tolerant, accommodative Buddhists. Under normal circumstances they would gladly keep out of mundane affairs. But they have no other option when the Nayake monks and relevant government authorities fail to address these issues according to the existing laws. Despite this, Johansson tries to prove that Buddhist monks justify their alleged violence by invoking Buddhist texts. He quotes what are purported to be some examples from religious studies professor Tessa J. Bartholomeuz\u2019s book \u2018In the Defence of Dharma and Just War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka\u2019. (It seems that Johansson hasn\u2019t got even the name of the book right. It is \u2018In Defense of Dharma\u201d. (The book was published posthumously in 2002 by RoutledgeCurzon, London, for the author died in 2001.) One example is a verse from a song said to have been composed by a Buddhist monk. The verse is paraphrased in English translation thus:<\/p>\n

Linked by the love of (Buddhist) religion and protected by the Motherland, brave soldiers you should go hand in hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given its nonsensical I doubt its authenticity. Soldiers are there to protect the Motherland, not the other way around! In what sense is this a Buddhist text? The other example given is also a verse where the metaphorical nuances of the original Sinhalese are totally lost sight of:<\/p>\n

That Buddhism is a religion of ardent aspiration for the higher good of men is not surprising. It springs out of the mind of the Buddha, a man of martial spirit and high aims\u2026\u2026Buddhism is made by a warrior spirit for warriors.<\/p>\n

Use of military imagery is common in religious literature. So we have Soldiers of God in Christianity. Hindu gods are always armed. Comparing Buddha to a warrior does not mean that he was a war monger. He advocated a peaceful attitude, compassion and generosity towards all beings. Cultivation of inner virtue demands qualities such as courage, endurance, selflessness, and determination, qualities expected to be found in good soldiers at the mundane level. So, the second verse cannot be interpreted as a Buddhist religious text that could invoked to justify war against any community.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But then, Johansson could be alluding to the Mahavamsa tradition, frequently cited in support of the nationalist cause, that king Dutugemunu (who ruled from 161-137 BCE), as a strategy to create awareness about, and woo public support for, his campaign on the way,\u00a0 had a group of monks in the vanguard of his army when marching against the Damila (Dravida) invader Elara (205-161 BCE) in Anuradhapura. It is a historical fact that\u00a0 monks have always been in the forefront of national struggles to protect the country, the nation, and the Buddhist dispensation from internal and external enemies. But the important thing to remember is that the Mahavamsa (The Great Chronicle) is not Buddhist scripture, though some biased non-Buddhist fake scholars misrepresent it as such. The Mahavamsa is a poem of great sophistication composed in the Pali language while also being the history of\u00a0 Sinhaladweepa (the Island of the Sinhalese) as a Buddhist kingdom. (However, latest research has revealed that the history of the Sinhalese on the island extends to the hoary past much before the advent of Buddhism.) The answer to Johansson on his point, then, is that just as there is nothing in Buddhism that advocates fighting to settle disputes (though the Buddha himself was born to the Kshatriya or Warrior caste in a Hindu society, and was formally trained as a warrior in his youth before he set off on his spiritual quest), so is there nothing in Buddhism that prevents its adherents from fighting lawless terrorists in self defence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Any Sinhalese Buddhist with an average knowledge of Buddhism would reject the idea of \u2018Protestant Buddhism\u2019 offhand without giving much thought to it. They would rely on their culturally determined understanding of the Buddhist teaching. However, the four scholars mentioned above in this article did not probably realize this. The mostly village dwelling Sinhalese Buddhists of that era (late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century), though a very high percentage of them were illiterate and uneducated, knew enough of the essence of Buddhism to know that Buddhism was not a \u2018religion\u2019 unlike Christianity.\u00a0 So, even in the mid-twentieth century, in the village areas, the term \u2018agamkarayo\u2019\u00a0 or \u2018agame minissu\u2019 (lit. people pursuing religion or people of religion) was reserved for Christians; \u2018eya agamata gihilla\u2019 meant \u2018he has embraced Christianity\u2019. So, the unspoken assumption was that Buddhism was not a religion. Of course, this was implicit in their understanding of Buddhism and in their practice as taught by the monks; neither the monks nor the lay Buddhists would have gone so far as to explicitly say that Buddhism indeed was not a religion. Supplicating to Hindu gods for help in mundane affairs is something most Buddhists do, for which there are historical reasons. But they know that it is not a part of Buddhism.\u00a0 (Here I am using the term \u2018religion\u2019 to refer to the concept of belief, without the support of empirical or experiential evidence, in and worship of a supreme being or an ultimate truth, for the purpose of escaping the unsatisfactoriness of human\/worldly existence. Of course, most ordinary people who profess a religion, hardly ever worry about what exactly \u2018religion\u2019 means.) Even at that time, Buddhists \u2018worshipped\u2019 \u2013 Buddhists perform certain set devotional practices like offering flowers, incense,\u00a0 and food and drinks, chanting verses in praise of the trinity of the Buddha, Dhamma and the Sangha (The Triple Gem. But their \u2018worship\u2019 does not involve any form of praying to a higher power.<\/p>\n

The lines from W.B. Yeats\u2019 \u2018A Prayer for My Daughter\u2019 (in the epigraph) apply very meaningfully to Johansson and the social anthropologists who proposed the theory of Buddhist\u00a0 Protestantism that he embraces as gospel truth. May Johansson understand that a hate filled intellectual, when opinionated, is much more harmful to the society than an ordinary person (That\u2019s what the poet Yeats tells his infant daughter to remember when she grows up). Look at the chaotic situation that the country has been plunged into mainly due to the West\u2019s misconception that the majority (Sinhalese Buddhist) community want to lord it over the minorities by denying them equality out of their alleged ethno-religious chauvinism, fanaticism, xenophobia, and what have you. It is the Tamil separatist extremists and religious fundamentalists, themselves minorities within, respectively, the Tamil and Muslim minorities, who (i.e. those extremist elements) actually display these deplorable attributes that the Sinhalese Buddhists are wrongly accused of. Since internationally the Sinhalese are a small minority their protests are easily drowned in the deafening hue and cry raised by their false accusers that far outnumber them. The West\u2019s anti-Sinhalese, anti-Buddhist misconceptions are reinforced by the sort of powerful misinformation fed to them in various forms including fake academic theories.<\/p>\n

Let me conclude with an extract from Dr Sarath Amunugama\u2019s book aforementioned \u2018THE LION\u2019S ROAR\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u2026..the writings of these social scientists \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.. contributed significantly to the work of propagandists portraying Sinhala Budddhists as an intolerant community which opposed the \u2018legitimate rights\u2019 of minorities, as they were captives of the Anagarika\u2019s ideology. Some writers have referred to this alleged phenomenon as Dharmapalian nationalism\u201d. Even the writings of many scholars examining Sinhalese folk religion, the credibility of Sinhalese and Pali narratives, particularly the Mahavamsa, <\/em>and episodes in Sri Lankan history such as the career of King Dutugemunu were all neatly dovetailed into a propagandist attack on modern Sinhala Buddhism. As if to mirror this ideological approach of the social scientists, the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) targeted Buddhist places of worship and Buddhist monks in their military operations.\u201d(p.534)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. –B. Yeats\/ \u2018A Prayer for My Daughter\u2019 In this concluding section of my article, I am making an attempt to suggest how anti-Buddhist propaganda has polluted even the academia, and how, as a potent factor, such misinformation has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rohana-r-wasala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78289","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=78289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}