Anomie of the Sinhala-Buddhists

"The king was truly a Defender of The Faith - not a populist poltroon who was ready to worship any God to secure public support. Consider, next, the Sangha. In the centuries past, these Buddhist Renunciants were the ‘Brains Trust’ of the nation on both spiritual and moral issues that agitated the common folk as well as their lay leaders. While ‘detached’ from the hurly-burly of life, the Sangha nevertheless served as the conscience of a people overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of day-to day living."

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by Leo Panthera

(February 08, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Systems left unattended tend to rot internally. Those familiar with the basic truisms of science will recognize here a manifestation of that great law of nature whose intimidatory title - The Second law of Thermodynamics - makes ordinary folk wary of a close examination of its meaning. Perhaps its significance is best grasped by considering the unassailable facts about living systems. A living thing - in its most elementary form, a living cell - has to struggle incessantly to be alive. The great French physiologist Claude Bernard defined life as the ‘constant adjustment of internal relations to external relations’. This formulation is somewhat cryptic but it can be translated into the vulgar fact that being alive involves a constant struggle to ‘stay put’ in an environment that is ceaselessly changing in ways that are unsupportive of the delicate system-organization of living things. Death stalks us everywhere and finally catches up. This sad denouement highlights the fact that the natural ‘grain’ of the universe is that of decay and decline - the increase of that which men of science call ‘entropy’. There is no need to point out here the close parallel to the Noble Truth of Suffering and Decay that our Compassionate Teacher pointed out many centuries ago.

What is true of the complex systems of nature - their inherent tendency to run downhill (unless propped up by a flow of energy from outside the system) - is also true of the great cultural artifacts that are the work of the human spirit. It may sound a little strange, but Sinhala-Buddhism affords us a clear instance of ‘system decay’ that has all the markings of that downward spiraling of system-organization that is a feature of the ordinary flux of nature. Let us flesh-out this thesis by glancing backward - to the period of glory of Sinhala-Buddhism (many centuries ago) when this magnificent cultural organism maintained its strength despite the disruptive forces that assailed it from all sides. We must note that systems beat off the inherent tendency to decay if they are ‘dissipative’ - that is expend energy that is available from reservoirs linked to the system that is threatened. What were the ‘reservoirs of strength’ that helped to maintain Sinhala Buddhism in a state if admirable resplendence in that great period of Lankan puissance which may never return again? The Sovereign’ the Sangha and the Society of Lay Buddhist Devotees formed a potent triune of forces that synergistically sustained that delicate social organization that we are accustomed to call Sinhala- Buddhism. The might of the King and his Acts of Public Devotion gave new life and dynamism to a system that otherwise would have become tainted by the weakness and irresolution of the ordinary people. The king was truly a Defender of The Faith - not a populist poltroon who was ready to worship any God to secure public support. Consider, next, the Sangha. In the centuries past, these Buddhist Renunciants were the ‘Brains Trust’ of the nation on both spiritual and moral issues that agitated the common folk as well as their lay leaders. While ‘detached’ from the hurly-burly of life, the Sangha nevertheless served as the conscience of a people overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of day-to day living. Those who like scientific metaphors can think of the Sangha as the DNA that guides the metabolic engine of Buddhist society. Needless to say, corruption of the Sangha-DNA can spell disaster for the organism that looks up to it for guidance and direction.

The lay population - the third factor in our analysis - may, at first glance, appear to play a lesser role in the consolidation of all that is vital for the flowering of Buddhist values in society. Such a position is erroneous - it is from the lay population that the Sangha is drawn and major imperfections in the former will be reflected in the character of the persons drawn to the holy life. The same feedback relationship exists between the lay population and the character of the person chosen to be the King. In times past, the devotional strength and religiosity of the ordinary people imbued the Sovereign with a spiritual force and strength of character that made the kind of political power-play seen today practically impossible. There were, no doubt, villains in the past but rarely did they betray the race and religion of the people they represented. (The heinous exception is, of course, Don Juan Dharmapala).

Friends, we must move forward in time and ask if all is well with Sinhala-Buddhism in Sri Lanka - in this dangerous age when zealots of the Mosaic Tradition find our ancient faith a heathenish outcrop that has resisted for too long the forces of domineering monotheism. Our task is made easy because we have already identified a ‘supportive triad’ that bespeaks - through their strengths and weaknesses - the condition of our authentic religion. First, the King - do we have the functional equivalent of a Buddhist King? A leader who not merely professes in private his (or her) proclivities towards the religion of the majority but serves as its elan vital and defensive shield in moments of crisis - such as we encounter right now. One has only to look around to find in these sad and degenerate times a paradoxical reversal of roles - our leaders glory in defending the claims of other faiths against what is perceived as majoritarian hubris. This anti-Buddhist stance is reflected in the hectoring attitude of scribes employed by the State in its organs of publicity. Sri Lanka alone within the comity of nations finds the assertion of the faith and culture of the majority a threat to good governance. We are tirelessly reminded of this danger by servants of the state who draw their shekels from the very group they love to portray as the villain. The allergic reaction to Sinhala- Buddhism appears to be a fastspreading contagion: so much so that even in the talkative House by the Oya it is not considered good form to defend the rights of the majority. It is held to be sublimely meritorious to whittle, abnegate and ridicule the ‘pretensions’ of those supposedly afflicted with the ‘madness’ of Sinhala-Buddhist Nationalism. It would not be too fanciful to say that our ancient faith-based culture suffers from ‘acephaly’ or ‘anencepaly’ - the loss of ‘head’ or ‘brain’. Is survival possible in such straitened circumstances?

To dally on the weaknesses of the Sangha - the second member of the triadic structure mentioned above - is an excursion that is, in many ways, painful to the dutiful Buddhist. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that the Sangha as it is constituted in these distressful times has yielded to the lay leadership its primacy in matters intellectual, moral and spiritual. We are confronted with the sad paradox of the Sangha being taught and, metaphorically speaking, put on its toes by its would-be pupils in the lay world. Rote-learning, impassive acceptance of an outmoded canonical interpretation, the lack of debate within the learned among the Sangha and, above all its insularity vis-a-vis the ferment in the great intellectual world outside makes the Sangha far less effective than it ought to be. This calamitous weakness has been seized upon by our numerous enemies to make good the claim that the spiritual elite within the Buddhist fold are mere eremites that have little to contribute to that reworking - political, spiritual and moral - which our society urgently needs.

Let there be no misunderstanding on this score - our plea is that the Sangha should reassert that dominance that was its prerogative in the days of past greatness. There is no doubt that this involves a reform of the Sangha within a supportive milieu of lay devotion and participation.

Let us wind up by speaking of the lay Buddhists of Lanka and its collective mind. The word ‘anomie’ is derived from the Latin that combines ‘norm’ with the negation ‘a’ - in brief, a condition where there is a loss of rule-governed behaviour. It is not the ordinary law that is under question: it is the law of the spirit that impels us to do what is right and dutiful as our contribution to the society of which we are part. In this special sense, the Sinhala-Buddhists of Lanka suffer from ‘anomie’ - a wilting of the spirit, a listlessness that has allowed the detractors of Sinhala-Buddhism to steal a march on the true indigenes of this historic land. Indeed, the history of Lanka since the epochal change of government in 1977 is a history of a Revolution Surreptitiously Reversed - the steady growth of forces that were vanquished (so it seemed at the time) in the post-colonial reordering of affairs. While the minorities have dealt hammer-blows to Sinhala predominance - going so far as to ridicule the claims of the majority race on the issue of endemicity — the recipients of this outrageous slur have taken things lying down. So pathetic is their loss of spirit (their anomie) that some of their own have publicly joined the opposition to debunk Sinhala claims. More ominous is the fact that among these betrayers are the highest in the land that, through a strange perversion of the spirit, find the claims of the Sinhala autochthons a mighty political embarrassment. There are other disasters that one can add to this litany - the indifference (and cowardice) of Buddhist professionals, the greed and selfishness of Buddhist ‘money-bags’, the lack of spine of those who hold high positions in the Buddhist Establishment and the remarkable propensity of geriatric rogues to commandeer positions of authority in our ill-fated Buddhist Society.

Fellow-Buddhists, can we summon the synergistic resources that would ensure the harmonious working of that fragile organism we identify as Sinhala-Buddhism if its three key constituents are irremediably flawed? How can we crawl out of this self-imposed quagmire except by a kind of bootstrapping that revivifies authentic leadership, installs a renascent Sangha in its due position of privilege and makes of lay society that vigilant and proud collective that serves as the root-stock of the Buddhist faith? Formidably difficult - but, do we have an alternative?