Nemsiri Mutukumara - third month remembrance today

The third month remembrance Pinkama of Nemsiri Muthukumara falls today (14). A Dhamma Desana will be held this evening at his residence at No. 7, P.B. Alwis Perera Mawatha, Moratuwa, by Ven. Dodamgoda Assaji, the Honorary Head of Amarapura Maha Sangha Sabha. On Unduwap Pasalosvaka Poya there will be Sangeeka Dana for Maha Sangha at the same venue.

Nemsiri Muthukumara who retired as Associate Editor at the Daily News was also a Buddhist activist who contributed his services in propagating Buddha Dhamma. After his retirement he wrote a series of articles especially on Buddhism to Daily News.

by Professor Dhammavihari Thera

I know Nemsiri lived and died a man with a deeply ingrained sense of Buddhist religiousness within him. We are quite sad that it was a little too early, at seventy one. I do not need to count the number of decades over which I had known him.

I have known him closely and been with him for quite a while, and sat together at Conferences. We once travelled together to New Delhi to felicitate His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his 60th birthday and jointly interviewed His Holiness.

It was in the company of great stalwarts of Buddhist activities in Sri Lanka like my guru, the late Professor Gunapala Malalasekera that I got to know Nemsiri, possibly more than forty years ago. By 1962, Nemsiri was already a member of the Buddhist Congress, getting apprenticed under Dr. Malalasekera. Nemsiri and I were both younger in years then, with a difference of about fifteen years in between.

But to begin with, our joint enthusiasm to make Buddhism successfully known to a wider world, outside our native Sri Lanka, was vibrantly forceful. I was myself a layman at the time.

In the trail-blazed by persons like Dr. Malalasekera, it was not easy for one to walk slow. My Professor had a strange mind-set. His was universal commitment. At some stage, we know how he fathered the idea of the World Fellowship of Buddhists. With his feet firm here, the Professor stretched his hands across the world.

It is with this end in view that as far back as the year 1949, Dr. Malalasekera made me undertake the study of the languages as well as the cultures of China and Japan to firmly establish the historical position of Buddhism in the Far East, to know its how and why. Following in the footsteps of Dr. Malalasekera, Nemsiri himself widened out the activities of the WFB at international level. As a tribute to Nemsiri, here I quote my good friend and one time pupil, Dr. Ananda Guruge.

"I have experienced many occasions when I was proud of him as a valued compatriot when national leaders of several Asian countries referred to his contributions to youth activities of their countries."

Dr. Malalasekera who started his career at the University as the single teacher of Pali, Sanskrit and Sinhalese, soon turned out to be the Professor of Pali and an ingenious champion of Buddhism, in theory and practice. Being a born Theravada Buddhist, he wished to place the subsequent traditions of Mahayana and Vajrayana in their proper historical perspective, in relation to the original teachings of the Indian Buddha Gotama or Sakyamuni.

This noble example of Dr. Malalasekera guided both the life and writings of Nemsiri. It is Nemsiri who persuaded me to write in English on Buddhism to the local newspapers. And he saw to their prompt publication.

I am ever thankful to him. I owe him a debt of gratitude for that. We shed a tear Nemsiri, in your departure, that we have lost a friend irreplaceably.