Development of Buddhism
The 500 disciples who were present at the Buddha’s last moments agreed to record in their memory all the Master’s teachings. These were not written down in Pali until much later; and one collection of the Buddha’s sayings, the Theravada or Teachings of the Elders, became the basis of Sri Lankan Buddhism.
Down the centuries the new faith had its doctrinal writers, its councils and its heretics, and developed into a form of church. Buddhism attracted the allegiance of the aristocratic clans of northern India and became the state religion after the conversion of King Ashoka (273 232). Ashoka did a great deal to promote the spread of the Buddha’s teachings throughout his empire and in neighbouring states, and it was he who sent the first Buddhist missionaries to Sri Lanka. In India itself Buddhism lost ground as a result of Brahman and popular counter-offensive after the 6th century; and it was during this period that the Brahmans evolved the dogma, still current among the Hindus, that the Buddha was the ninth avatar of Vishnu, a baneful incarnation designed to bring perverse men to reject the Veddahs, deny the gods and abjure the divine order of the castes, and to lead them to damnation. Thus, Buddhism was rejected in the very area in which it had first developed, while Sri Lanka became and has remained a stronghold of Buddhist doctrine. Here lies a reason for the age-old antagonism between the two countries.
In the course of time various divergent trends emerged among the disciples of the Buddha. The two main schools, based on two collections of ancient writings, were the Hinayana or Lesser Vehicle (of salvation) and the Mahayana or Great Vehicle. The former was derived from the Theravada and held strictly to the agnostic doctrine of the Buddha. The texts expounding the Mahayana were later, and show a movement in the direction of theism. Worship is now addressed to a supreme God who is difficult to distinguish from his incarnations--the Buddha himself, the Buddhas who came before Siddhartha and the future Buddhas or Maitreyas. Theoretically the pure Hinayana doctrine is found only in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Sri Lanka
The Buddhists of Sri Lanka adopted the year 543 B. C. the presumed date of the Enlightenment as the starting point of the Buddhist era. Some historians date the Enlightenment to 529 B.C.
Buddhist architecture is austere, avoiding unnecessary ornament or elaboration its buildings were designed to serve the purposes of monastic life or the veneration of relics of the Buddha, and its most typical structure was the stupa (in Sri Lankan dagaba), a round or semi-ovoid mound raised over a casket containing relics. Round the stupa were the monk’s cells and buildings for common use. Buddhist buildings were decorated with carvings or paintings depicting the various incarnations of the Buddha, his earlier lives (the Jatakas), his life as a pampered young prince, his temptations, his struggles against evil, his Enlightenment, his death and his entrance into Nirvana.
Buddhism in present-day Sri Lanka
As the religion of the majority (70%) of Sri Lankans, Buddhism leaves its mark on the whole of the country s life. Its introduction can be dated with relative precision to about 250 B.C., when it was still in the full flush of youth as a spiritual movement, its founder having died only two centuries earlier. It was also the unifying ideology of Ashoka’s vast empire, of which the first Sinhalese dynasty were dependents. It was Buddhism that gave Sri Lanka its history, its legislation, its culture and its collective mentality, so that to be a Buddhist has become a form of nationalism. Since Independence, Buddhism has come to the fore as an essential ingredient of the national traditions, to an extent which sometimes irritates loyal citizens of Sri Lanka who are of a different faith.
The calendar which regulates the whole of the country’s life is a religious lunar calendar which has not corresponding to the Jewish and Christian week. Public holidays and festivals depend on the phases of the moon, the poyas, the most important of which are those of the full moon. The Buddhist and Christian eras are used concurrently (2008 = 2552 in Buddhist chronology).
All over Sri Lanka, in town streets and on country roads, at crossroads and in squares, are shrines and niches containing statues of the Buddha, to which worshippers bring offerings of flowers, rice or candles; and everywhere, too on the roads and in the streets, in trains, in crowded buses Buddhist monks are to be seen, a picturesque sight with their shaven head, saffron robes, bag and ritual umbrella. As a rule they are ascetics, who follow the thirteen monastic rules and profess a pure Hinayana doctrine. These bikkhus play a considerable part in the life of Sri Lankan apart from their mission as teachers. Some communities possess large estates and maintain important study centres. As happens also in the West, some of these men of religion, more Sinhalese than Buddhist, intervene actively in the country’s political life, sometimes stirring up passions which seem far removed from the sovereign detachment preached by the Buddha.
No account of Buddhism would be complete without some reference to the cult of relics. Every dagaba must contain some relic, either of the Buddha or one of his early disciples. Strictly speaking it is not correct to talk of a cult of relics, since the sacred relic is no more than a point on which the worshipper focuses as a stimulus to meditation. There may occasionally be some room for doubt about the genuineness of some of these relics. The most famous of all relics is undoubtedly the Tooth which is preserved in the Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth, in Kandy. The relic is said to be a genuine tooth of the Buddha, piously preserved for over 2000 years. Each of Sri Lanka’s ancient capitals had its Temple of the Tooth, and the whole history of the country revolves round the veneration, the safe preservation and the recovery of this sacred relic, which was carried off by the Tamils, the Portuguese and the British in turn. It was the palladium of the Sinhalese kings, and its removal by a British officer in 1815 coincided with the end of the native Sinhalese dynasties. In 1850 the British Governor restored it to the monks of Kandy, and since then it has been preserved in the Dalada Maligawa, which has thus become the chief shrine of Sinhalese Buddhism.
Other relics of the Buddha, at one remove, are the various bo-trees. Ashoka’s daughter Sanghamitta brought King Mahatissa a slip of the pipal tree under which Siddartha Gautama attained Enlightenment. According to a very old tradition, the bo-tree at Anuradhapura grew from this slip. Down the centuries other slips were taken from the sacred tree, so that there are a number of other temples in Sri Lanka where the guides show visitors bo-trees or Bodhgayas, all equally venerated.
The pious tales of the Buddha’s life record that some months after his Enlightenment he made three miraculous journeys to Sri Lanka, having foreseen that the people of the island would be converted. In the course of these journeys he visited Mahiyangana and Nagadipa (or Nayinativu), where the Nagas and the Yakshas worshipped snakes, and Kelaniya, where the Yakshas venerated the gods Vishnu and Vibushana.
Buddhism is a doctrine of compassion and universal benevolence, notable for its profound tolerance. In spite of the purity of the doctrine as taught by Buddhist monks many of the simpler people of Sri Lanka, though professing their acceptance of the Law, combine veneration of the Buddha with the cult of divinities which are very far from orthodox. These cults, usually of fairly marginal importance, may derive from pre-Buddhist traditions or from infiltrations of Hindu influence: it is sometimes difficult to say which. But whatever the origin of these cults there is never any question of excommunicating their adherents.
The new constitution of May 1972 gives Buddhism the leading place among religions, and declares that it is the duty of the State to protect it and promote it, while guaranteeing other religions all the rights and the freedom they require in relation to their worship and practices and to education.
Brahmanism (Hinduism)
In order to obviate any confusion between Indian (a term expressing nationality) and Hindu (a religious denomination) it is preferable to use the term Brahmanism in Sri Lanka.
Although Buddhism is the religion of the majority of Sri Lankan, Brahmanism or Hinduism occupies an important place in the religious life of the island, on several counts:
(a) It is the religion of more than 3 million Sri Lankan (15% of the total).
(b) It is the majority religion along the whole of the north coast, from Puttalam to the Jaffna peninsula, and down the east coast from Jaffna to Batticaloa.
(c) Even in those parts of the country where Buddhism is predominant traces of Brahmanism can be found in the dewalas and their primitive cults.
(d) Buddhism came into being in a Brahmanist world, and although it rejected certain teachings of Hinduism it retained some essential elements of the older religion, as well as a whole vocabulary of special terms.
In the West this religion is associated with India, four-fifths of whose population professes Hinduism; and it was indeed in the Indian peninsula that Hinduism or Brahmanism developed. Although it is described as a religion, this word cannot be applied in the same sense as it is, for example, to Christianity or Islam, which have a clearly understood system of beliefs expressed in a well defined creed. For a Brahmanist there are no canonical articles of faith: his religion is a wide concept covering a whole range of different beliefs and practices and subdivided into a multitude of sects. It would be more appropriate to talk of religions in the plural rather than of a single religion. Within Brahmanism we can identify a mingling of many diverse traditions. On the surface it appears to be a polytheist system and it is apparently seen as such by most Hindus; but the sages and the gurus, as well as educated Brahmans and Western scholars, agree that this polytheism is only apparent and that all these gods and goddesses are no more than personifications of the multiple aspects of Life, of a divine, unique and universal Reality known as Brahma. As regards morality, there are no absolute rules, but a complex of social traditions maintained by the pressures of the various human communities, without any hierarchical constraints but essentially based on the caste principle.
Within Brahmanism elite of disinterested philosophers and men of religion pursue a mystical quest through renunciation and meditation, and some of them attain a high degree of spiritual excellence. These refinements, however, do not appear to hold any great appeal for the majority of Brahmanists, whose diffuse religious beliefs are expressed in curious practices which often reflect ideas inherited from primitive religions and display a considerable element of sensuality. In describing Brahmanism an astronomical metaphor may be appropriate: it is like a nebula, with a dense nucleus of great heat and purity, throwing off emanations in every direction which lose themselves in ever widening spirals, dissolving into legends and superstitions, sometimes of considerable crudity.
Development of Brahmanism
Little is known of the origins of Brahmanism. In its earliest form it incorporated a variety of beliefs brought into India by the Aryan invaders of the 2nd millennium B.C., mingled with the religious traditions of the earliest inhabitants of India, the Dravidians or Proto-Dravidians. The Dravidians suffered the fate of all conquered peoples, colonised and in varying degree assimilated by their conquerors, but here as elsewhere, in Horace’s words, the conquered people conquered their conquerors and communicated their own culture to them.
In Brahmanism we can identify elements common to all the primitive cultures described by ethnologists and to the cultures of hunting peoples and the first Neolithic farmers cults centred on the mysteries of fruitfulness and fertility. Many authorities see these prehistoric elements as forming the essence of the Brahmanist system, covered by a thin Aryan veneer. Indigenous and Aryan traditions mingled and fused over two millennia and finally crystallised in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. under the influence of a number of great philosophers for whom the old myths were merely a stimulus to meditation on the relationship between the Created and the Uncreated, between mortal creatures on the one hand and the Cosmos and the eternal Absolute on the other. Most of these sages like Shankaracharya (788- 838) and Ramanuja (1050- 1137) published their works in Sanskrit, a learned language developed in the early centuries of the Christian era, and their ideas still provide matter for meditation by many people in the modern world, far beyond the confines of India.
In many respects, however, the fusion of the many different traditions of Brahmanism is still not complete. Many who profess Brahmanism have not progressed beyond beliefs and rites of very primitive type, and there are numerous contemporary religious groups representing one or other of the many different phases through which Brahmanism has passed in the course of a development which has lasted perhaps four thousand years. It was only at the end of the 1st millennium that there first emerged the idea of a superior Being permeating the whole of the Cosmos gods and men and all living things who was known to the priests as Brahma. From this period date the works the Brahmans and the Vedanta which established and explained the forms of sacrifice and laid down the duties of the priests, who were known as Brahnians or Brahmins. At this time, too, were written the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which have embodied the aspirations and the beliefs of a whole people down to the present time; and the commentaries to which they gave rise have been an important instrument of religious education in the Hindu world.
The political and social reflection of early Brahmanism appears in the Laws of Manu (4th c. A.D.), a collection attributed to a mythical king who was believed to have promulgated his code of laws under the influence of the Brahmans: a social, moral and ritual code based on the distinction of castes which was marked on the whole of Indian history. There are three social groups or Chatur Varna in the society of India: the Brahmans, consisting of the priestly families have the superior status; the Kshatryas, members of the warrior caste, from which many princely families were descended; and the Vaisyas, a large group which included peasants, craftsmen and traders.
These three varnas or caste is of Portuguese origin originally consisted of members of the conquering tribes, a colonial aristocracy which alone could take part in certain tribal religious ceremonies. The members of these castes are distinguished by a sacred cotton thread which is renewed annually during a ritual festival. The ancient laws distinguished a fourth varna with darker skins, the Sudras. This group consisted of members of the indigenous tribes whom the higher castes accepted into their society on condition that they kept their place. They were the manual workers who were indispensable to the life of the new society established by the conquerors. The rest of the native tribesmen, who had refused to submit to the invaders and had fled to the forests and the mountains the hunters and fishermen, the forest dwellers, the monkeys, the nose less ones and the demons were excluded from the Hindu communities, being regarded as impure and untouchable .
Each varna forms an endogamous group, its members being hereditarily tied to certain trades; and each one has formed sub-castes, until any Tamil village in Sri Lanka may contain members of dozens of different castes and sub-castes.
