Random thoughts:

Anglicisation of the East

S. PATHIRAVITANA

The 19th century was both fortunate and unfortunate for Buddhism. Fortunate because it caught the serious attention of intellectuals and academics across the Western world from America (H.C. Warren) to England (Rhys Davids, Childers) to France (Burnouf) to Germany (Dahlke) and to Russia (Stcherbatsky).

The unfortunate side of this event, however, was that the West at first took the wrong message from Buddhism. In a way this was inevitable. 19th century Europe saw the fulfillment of the promise that the so-called Age of Enlightenment held when it finally pushed rationalism to its zenith in the middle of the 19th C.

As the scholars mentioned above saw the event, there now on their doorstep was the final proof that God could be easily dethroned and rationalism installed in its place. What did happen, however, was that soon rationalism found itself giving way instead to the enthronement of Mammon with all its values; that being, of course, the logical or the rational thing to do!

My intention right now is not to discuss the right and wrong messages of Buddhism. That I may leave for another occasion. My purpose now is to ask what happened to Buddhism in Ceylon which was with us throughout over two millennia and why its defenders did not raise their voices in protest against what the rationalist and materialistic culture introduced by the British was doing to the country and its religion.

What about the Panadura debate, you may ask and what about the temperence movement, and what about the emergence of Anagarika Dharmapala? True, that was only a message that was coming through at that time. But it was too weak as a message and besides, ‘it did not disturb the universe’ of the overlord of the country who was pretty confident after the events of 1818 that he had things well in hand. Moreover, the cultural tide from the West invading the country was of such force that no spiritual resistance against it could even be dreamed of for many, many years to come.

Whatever resistance the country may have had was now all exhausted. The rebellion of 1818 wiped out the hereditary leadership of the land. And those who tried to revive some of it in 1848, though it did create somewhat of a scare, were summarily executed. The land was now opened to the conqueror for the sowing of a seed more to his liking. Let us see what results these seeds produced and how they were faring under British benevolence.

A little over a half century after the failure of the Matale uprising the British government appointed a young Ceylonese, who had been brought up in England from his infancy by his widowed English mother.

He passed out from the University of London as a Doctor of Science in Geology, and headed the geological survey of his motherland. He travelled widely in the then Ceylon in the course of surveying the land and was deeply perturbed by what he saw was happening to the people and the country.

At a meeting of the Social Reform Society in 1906 and making his presidential address to the Social Reform Society, the young man, Ananda Coomaraswamy, made the following observations: “The people of India and Ceylon are not like the Anglo Saxons, a brisk and assertive race.

Accordingly, impressed by the foreigner’s wealth, control of natural forces, and political ascendancy, they have been not unwilling to take him at his own valuation; and feeling a desire for similar wealth and power have set themselves to imitate the external characteristics which they think must be their mysterious source.

“The pressure from the one side to adopt the western point of view, coupled with the readiness of imitation of the other, are two aspects of the Anglicisation of the East, that are working incalculable evil. We have to deal, not with the due influence of one civilisation upon another, but with the obliteration of one and its replacement by another, a process which does not conduce to the encouragement of what is best in either.”

Take note of two phrases in this observation. We can see how the “incalculable evil,” has overtaken the country once the British left us having given us their training up to 1948.

We dressed up in top hat and tails to receive our freedom from the British and were proud to use the language they trained us to speak and boast that we spoke and wrote it better than our immediate neighbour across the sea. In short, we have become more British than what the British wanted to do to this country.

To this day our leaders do not know that the “western point of view” we have adopted prevents us from seeing things as they are in our motherland. How can they, when their background and education was totally English? Coomaraswamy in his address drew pointed attention to this lacuna by revealing that the curricula for our students were as laid down in Britain for British students preparing for the Cambridge Local and London Matriculation examinations.

There was no provision made, he said, “for the native languages of Ceylon nor a knowledge of the literature of the East, and though some official representations have been made (unfortunately quite unsuccessfully) asking for the inclusion of Sinhalese and Tamil as optional languages in the Cambridge Locals, the primary importance of this question is not realised.”

Bringing some observations made earlier by Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam to support what he was saying, “Our children,” Sir Arunachalam had said, “can tell us all about the Norman conquest, the Peloponnesian war, the capitals of English and Scottish counties, the capes and rivers of South America, the manufactories of Chicago. But of the elements of Ceylon Geography and History they are in blissful ignorance...

“Kotte and Sitawaka in comparatively recent times witnessed the heroic resistance of our people and kings to foreign invaders, from generation to generation. The names of these places waken no emotion in our hearts.

We think of Kotte mainly as the suburb which supplies the children of Colombo with their nurses. Sitawaka, rich not only in the memories of this struggle but in the romance of queen Sita’s captivity and rescue in a bygone millennium, is lost in the unromantic tea district of Avissawella...It is scarcely creditable for us to remain in such profound ignorance in the history of our motherland and to be so indifferent to our past and surroundings.

It is a great loss, for not only is the history of Ceylon among the oldest, most interesting and most fascinating in the world, but no people can break with its past as we are trying to do.”

Even the voice of Anagarika Dharmapala that was raised to upbraid the Buddhists, both monks and the laity for being neglectful of the counseling given by the Buddha on what Right Living should be, went unheeded by the English educated class.

Living at a time as he did when the industrial revolution was delivering its goods and the still unheard of phrases like ‘acid rain’ and ‘environmental pollution,’ Dharmapala could hardly pull an entire society’s attention towards him. He was a wee bit before his time. So were the efforts of Ananda Coomaraswamy.

Although Coomaraswamy styled his presidential address, The Anglicisation of the East, it was Ceylon that seems to have got the worst of it in the British colonies. It was, for instance, possible for Burma, a former British colony, when it got its independence to, unabashedly, include the following thoughts in a government publication called [The New Burma, (Economic and Social Board, Government of the union of Burma, 1954)].

“The New Burma sees no conflict between religious values and economic progress. Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies.”

And again, “We can blend successfully the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the benefits of modern technology.” And yet again, “We Burmans have a sacred duty to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever do.”

‘Spiritual health’ is not a term that the IMF and World Bank are inordinately fond of. We too could have put across the same concept had we honestly implemented the same idea when we spoke of it in our own poetic way of the keynote of our country as being the ‘tank and the dagoba.’

Today the tank and the dagoba are in decay, and the farmers face the option of either taking Follidol or being reduced to the level of an industrial proletariat as urged by our foreign investors and our moneylenders.

One of the fortunate things that happened to Buddhism that I mentioned earlier was the serious interest taken by some of the open minded scholars in the West. One of them was E.F.Schumacher who said that, “No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics...” With that he goes on to discover that the Buddhist way of life is not a blind submission to economic laws but a just ordering of relations between man and the material world.

The teaching of the Buddha, says Schumacher, “enjoins a reverence and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also...trees” and the Buddha asked his followers to plant a tree every now and then and watch over it until it was well established. Schumarcher, who was an economist and a consultant to Britain’s Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, had no hesitation in asserting that “the universal observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic development independent of any foreign aid.”

He attributed the decay in South Asia as well as in other parts of the world due to a “heedless and shameful neglect of trees.”

I would have been happy to learn that the term ‘Buddhist Economics’ was coined by Anagarika Dharmapala who in his own way encouraged the work of craftsmen and deplored the investment by the Ceylonese of his time on cruet stands, jam pots and such other baubles made in London as wedding presents.

Had he discovered the term even prematurely he would gladly have written as Schumacher has done the following words:

“As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - are extremely unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever increasing rate of violence against nature must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.

“This fact might alone give food for thought even to those people in Buddhist countries who care nothing for the religious and spiritual values of their heritage and ardently desire to embrace the materialism of modern economics at the fastest possible speed.

“...It is in the light of both immediate experience and long-term prospects that the study of Buddhist economics could be recommended to those who believe that economic growth is more important than any religious or spiritual values.

For it is not just a question of choosing between ‘modern growth’ and ‘traditionsl stagnation.’ It is a question of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, in short, of finding ‘Right Livelihood.’”

It is such a pity we have no leaders with the necessary backbone to shake off the theories of the moneylenders now riding us to ruin.