| by Vishnuguptha
Courtesy: Ceylon Today, Colombo
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's possible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” – Niccolo Machiavelli
( April 19, 2013, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The fringe elements causing needless furore might think they enjoy the monopoly of the Sinhalese Buddhists’ range and scope of thinking. They might have been lured into the illusion that a great majority of our Sinhalese Buddhists are as warped and deranged in their assessment and reading of the average psyche of the average man, woman and child.
Given the centuries-old conditioning, the average person has been subjected to through mass education on the myths, legends and miracles of the Great Chronicle – Mahawansa – it is not all that imprudent to surmise that way either. However, time and time again, the average Sinhalese Buddhist has been a reasonable man, capable of differentiating between the absurd and the real, dangerous and safe and sacred and cruel.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent and pious women who observe sil on each poya day, observe their monthly religious ritual with the purest of pure hearts and minds; they might be indulging in a tiny bit of illusion and fantasy, yet they mean no harm even to an ant that crawls to sting them in their sleep. Their piousness might be misunderstood for rational analysis of things of the mind, but it is closer to holiness than self-glorifying slogans and empty religious rhetoric.
Unforgiving patience
The unforgiving patience that they display at the hands of the cruellest thug in the neighbourhood should not be read as weakness of heart for in real terms it is the very largeness of heart that renders such tolerance and forgiveness and qualifies it to be more universal than what these narrow-minded charlatans could ever aspire to preach. The deranged soldiers of the Senas and Balakayas cannot match the serene and sublime meditation of a devout old woman, who chooses to spend her afternoon on a worn-out mat on a cow-dung floor; they cannot come anywhere near comprehending the patience and tolerance of the Great Teacher, who taught wandering in the woods and cities and villages of North India two and a half millennia ago.
Centuries of use and abuse of this great religion may have rendered it to be a little too old-fashioned and intrinsically pessimistic, yet the devotion and commitment to its universal truths and insights have not been compromised by the millions of followers and devotees. The saddest chapter of this great saga is that a select few self-proclaimed saviours now claim ownership of a religious thought and finding that shine upon mankind like a beacon in the dark and thus desecrate the very essence of that glorious religion and leave in its wake, in all likelihood at the end of the day, a heap of decapitated corpses and a wandering bunch of orphaned children. This should not happen.
We Sri Lankans did not fight one long war – almost 30 years in real terms – against a demented enemy to gain victory and hopefully peace, only to enter into another mind-warping, energy-sapping and racially-polarized warfare of another sort. The deafening silence observed by the so-called clergy-leadership of the highest in the High Priesthood is most disturbing and distressing, of course for the reasonable man and reasonable woman. However, the peripheral elements in the larger community, well-entrenched in the governing circles and protected by the covert sustenance that they receive from quarters close to the ruling clan, seem to have launched themselves into a full-scale offensive on the minorities in Sri Lanka. Declaring that Sri Lanka is exclusively a Sinhalese Buddhist country, leaving no room for equal co-habitation of all ethnic groups, they are making the most provocative and irrational utterances, and if not checked by some responsible leaders of their own, would eventually lead to catastrophic culminations.
War-mongering
Those who profit from such ridiculous war-mongering would be Sri Lanka’s defence industry, which the former United States President, General Eisenhower called, “the great military industrial complex.” The enormous financial gains one could make by promoting naked aggression against an unarmed civilian population could take care of successive generations yet to be born to these merchants of weaponry and arms. The uninformed admirers of the Senas and Balakayas would readily follow the ill-willed leaders, some garbed in yellow robes and others masked in national and Western attire.
In the Buddha Charitha (Life of Buddha) we have learnt how the Enlightened One eventually overcame the venom and anger of both a demonic Devadattha (Buddha’s first cousin) and an annoyed Angulimala (who kept a count of his killings by keeping a finger of each one he had slain). We have learnt about the way the Buddha treated all mankind with an equal sense of dignity and balance by ordaining into his order those who were supposed to have belonged to the ‘untouchables’ castes. Nowhere in Buddhism or in the exalted life of the Great One, the Buddha Charitha, have we heard, read or learnt about any discriminatory action that he meted out to his fellow beings, disciple or not.
The soldiers of the Senas and the Balakayas are the modern day Devadatthas and Angulimalas, personifying every fibre of evil and cruelty, every thread of inhumanity and sadism. And the following that they receive is even more appalling in the context of the very contradictory manner in which the teachings are followed.
We Sri Lankans or for that matter, all mundane human beings look for one single reason for all this chaos and madness. We are too busy or too naïve to think that a sea-change in a culture or the character of a nation or for that matter, its history could be attributed to one single event, episode or reason. The long flow of history does not change its course just like that. Historians have taught us that Rome did not fall for one single reason or in one single year or decade.
Teachings defiled
Nevertheless, the combination of events, episodes, leaders, followers and reasons have all combined to produce the ultimate product or the flow of product which eventually becomes another beginning of another chain of events and episodes. This eternal flow is more often than not misread and misunderstood by the amateur and that is precisely what has happened to these so-called warriors of the ‘Dharma’, parading on the streets of Sri Lanka today, pillaging the Muslim-owned businesses and other places. The fundamental teachings of Siddhartha Gautama have been defiled and soiled, they have been exploited and desecrated to such an extent, the average pious devotee is held hostage to this maligned and perverted mindset and the devotee himself or herself is finding it extremely uneasy and uncomfortable in the face of beautifully-sounding slogans and calls to arms.
Yet, there is a way out. The average Buddhist is a reasonable person, whether he or she comes from the rich or poor. The average Buddhist whose character and demeanour have been shaped by the rich heritage of Buddhist values needs to re-evaluate his or her thinking and the mundane path to material goals. In that relentless pursuit, they must ultimately listen to their own conscience and their inner voice. Then they must balance it out within themselves and if the need be, seek educated guidance from those who are reasonable and wise, who are fair and balanced and who are more tolerant and kind.
The average Buddhist must think more boldly and more innovatively. He must apply the fundamental principles of his ‘Master’s’ teachings to his everyday life. And if and when he does it, those fake warriors of the Senas and Balakayas would not have any room to run. They may run but there won’t be any place left in the Universe for them to hide.
