H. L. Seneviratne. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999, xvi+358 pp., $49 (hardback) ISBN 0 226 74865 0, $22 (paperback) ISBN 0 226 74866 9.
✍ Scribed by Knut A Jacobsen
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 44 KB
- Volume
- 33
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0048-721X
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✦ Synopsis
This book is a critical study of Buddhism as a religio-nationalist ideology. H. L. Seneviratne, an anthropologist from the University of Virginia, using the historical-sociological method associated with Max Weber, analyses the birth, development and impact of the ideology of 'Sinhala Only' within the Buddhist Sangha of Sri Lanka. The book examines the function of the Buddhist Sangha in having laid the ideological foundation of an ethnic chauvinistic Buddhism that claims Sri Lanka as a Buddhist country and that neglects religious, linguistic and cultural pluralism. The Tamil minority was seen as something external and alien to the Sinhalese nation. The politics of this nationalism made life intolerable for many among the Tamil minority and led in 1983 to the disastrous civil war of Sri Lanka, only recently ended by a fragile cease fire, that has killed more than 50,000 people, devastated Northern Sri Lanka and created a huge Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. The author argues that the rise of the new nation-states after the eclipse of the British Empire gave rise to a new nationalism which developed hegemonies over ethnic and other minorities no less oppressive than the colonial hegemony. As a consequence, he maintains, anthropology needs to be redefined as liberation anthropology and needs to promote universal human values. The book is, in other words, highly critical of the interpretation of Buddhism in post-colonial Sri Lanka-an interpretation which the author blames for instigating Sinhala chauvinism and for oppressing the minorities of Sri Lanka.
The culprits in Seneviratne's book are the well-known Angarika Dharmapala, Walpola Rahula and the monks associated with the Vidyalankara pirivena in Columbo. Seneviratne argues that Dharmapala's modernist reform of Buddhism and redefinition of the traditional role of the monk in society had two agendas, economic and nationalist. Both agendas were inherited by the two seats of monastic learning in Columbo, the Vidyodaya pirivena and the Vidyalankara pirivena. The interpretation of Dharmapala's message by the Vidyodaya pirivena was 'a pragmatic economic one' (p. 57), whereas Vidyalankara gave an 'ideological and uncompromisingly cultural' interpretation 'which by definition was nationalist' (p. 57). Both were failures, according to Seneviratne. The economic agenda failed because even if Dharmapala's idea of seva implied rural development such as building roads, bridges and wells, his vision was based on a romantic vision of the village. It was anti-industrial and anti-capitalistic. The Vidyodaya monks nevertheless receive the approval of the author since they accepted the fact of ethnic and cultural diversity of