The new presidency: The civilisational challenge
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s swearing-in at Ruwanveliseya marked a civilisational direction. Ruwanveliseya is the symbolic centre of Theravada (original) Buddhism, and the city is celebrated in South East Asia. Original Buddhism, in the words of both the Buddha and Emperor Asoka who gave it to us, allowed for dissent and coexistence with other beliefs. Ruwanveliseya was built by Dutugemunu after the defeat of the invader Elara, celebrated in Buddhist texts as a just king. Dutugemunu had a stupa built for Elara. Despite these positive connotations, the Gotabaya victory was reported in the outside world negatively with much fiction.
Al Jazeera was a major purveyor but not the only one. British parliamentarian Lord Naseby who had accessed secret British records of the LTTE war had found out that only about 5,000 civilians were killed in “crossfire”. This was far less than the 60,000 people killed in the anti- India JVP- led uprising of the late 1980s. But both the BBC and Al Jazeera were now reporting from the last stronghold of the LTTE incorporating the LTTE sympathisers’ propaganda. Muslim extremists following a jihadist ideology had attacked Christian churches but somehow in the Western media, the Sinhala Buddhists were to be blamed.
While all this anti- Sinhala Buddhist rhetoric was going on, there was one who read the signs correctly -- Shekar Gupta of NDTV. He said that Gotabaya’s was not a pro-Chinese victory as some Indian and Western media said, but a pro-Sri Lanka victory in that Sri Lanka is the oldest surviving Buddhist majority country - from the 3rd century BCE. This non- pro Chinese slant was reinforced when President Gotabaya, on another Indian channel, said that he would renegotiate the Hambantota Port deal. Another member of the Sangha -the oldest civil society in the country – t he Ve n e r abl e K i r i b a t h g o d a Gnanananda, while blessing Gotabaya, pointed out that fiction is also created by uninformed Buddhists such as their belief in Ravana and that the Buddha was born in Sri Lanka.
Civilisation has become important today. The rapid rise of China is attributed to its common civilisation. For around 2000 years, its cultural core consisted of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism -- referred to by the Chinese as the “three teachings”. The collapse of overarching Eurocentric theories -- say Karl Marx and Max Weber -- that tried to explain Western Europe’s rise, has led to civilisation as a category getting prominence.
Thus, the European Union with its Christian roots excludes entry by Turkey even though the latter had gone through a process of westernisation. Although formally mouthing multiculturalism, the Christian hold still rules. The UK and Norway require the formal ruler to be a Christian. And Christianity-affiliated political parties abound in Western and Eastern Europe.
The hold of Christianity is mostly felt in its once atheist, once Soviet dominated East. Russia, for example, has fully re- embraced the Orthodox Eastern Church as its main ideology. The self-declared guardian of equality and freedom, the United States, has a strong Christian bias. Its presidents tout Bibles and chant “in God we trust”, the slogan in their dollar bill. Today, the region between the United States’ two coasts has a fundamentalist church every few hundred metres. A good example of this fundamentalism is the current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who after Gotabaya’s election victory lectured to us on “human rights”.
Pompeo believes in the “Rapture” that claims Christians will soon assemble in Jerusalem to be taken to their “heaven” leaving behind nonbelievers. Pompeo says human rights come from Jesus Christ. Yet he has cosied up to barbarous regimes and he approves unaccountable secret prisons and mass surveillance of the entire world’s telephones. When he was the director of the CIA, he admitted that his spies “lied … cheated … stole." He also backed the US withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council. It is in that rogue organisation, our very pat r i o t i c M a n g a l a Samaraweera co-sponsored with the US, a resolution against his own country. As their own publications reveal, in their recent wars, the US and its Western allies have killed millions of innocents and are only using human rights discourse as a soft power weapon.
Soft power as culture and civilisation is a way of exerting influence without military force. Both India and China are using Buddhism as a soft power tool. India since Modi is pushing a Hindu line but has difficulties because Hinduism is replete with belief in myths like the Ramayana and Mahabharatha and is unlike Buddhism whose search for mental peace can be followed minus any myths.
In Western Europe and increasingly among the youth in the US, belief in
Christianity is collapsing and the churches are empty. Yoga and meditation are increasingly taking hold. Mindful meditation was originally exported from Sri Lanka, but today, we are being attacked internationally by the very social strata that should be supporting us.
The modern European world emerged by eliminating the ignorance of the 1000- year Christian Dark Ages. And during the later Enlightenment which led to democracy, David Hume in Scotland and Diderot and Voltaire in France used as desirable, views of Buddhist Sri Lanka. ( Better not ask our historians and social scientists on this, they would not know).
In the US today, and generally in the West, there is huge concern about foreign interference in their politics. But unfortunately, not in Sri Lanka because its formal thinking apparatus including the universities have been either stilled or bought over by NGO money. This applies also to core disciplines for the civilisation: archaeology, history, and foreign relations. Over ten years ago, foreign-funded NGOs had prepared plans to partly govern the country (unbelievable, but true). One of these creatures, the Berghof, had while the war was on, trained our armed forces to “downsize” and had explicitly developed a government role for NGOs. Countries like India have disarmed and stopped these indirect spy agencies. Just prior to our independence, the Soulbury Commission described minorities’ demands as "an attempt by artificial means to convert the majority to a minority”. Many NGOs are drawn from that very social strata displaced by the growth of democracy allowing for an anti-majority pro-Western rule to occur.
The humanities and social science practitioners in the universities do not have much chance for foreign travel or extra income except through NGOs and the latter’s sponsorship of one- sided “peace studies” and “reconciliation”. The government should close these down and, instead, set up departments of strategic studies and international relations. It should also give scholarships to the West, especially for those doing history and Buddhist studies. After their inauguration in the nineteenth century through Sri Lanka, Western Buddhist studies had later divided into studies of Buddhist theory and practice in the classical sense and to study Buddhist countries as a problem. The first is the one studied in Western medical and psychological faculties and which show the psychological efficacy of Buddhist practice. The other sort is Gombrich, one of the authors of the anthropology perversion that Olcott who was running away from Christianity brought Protestantism to Sri Lanka. It is in the latter area of Buddhism as a problem, that our governor of the North Dr. Raghavan had done his work on both federalism and our monks. Perhaps it is because of these tendencies that Raghavan had not been sympathetic to a Buddhist monk being cremated near an ancient Buddhist site in the North, and, in Geneva, the UNHRC had not put out the findings of Lord Naseby.
The fiction of traditional homelands is easily demolished through the large amount of Sinhalese Buddhist ruins in both the North and the East, many known during the period of British rule. But these have more recently being disfigured and built over. The Jaffna museum's 100-year-old collection of Buddhist artefacts with Sinhala inscriptions had been vandalised. Unfortunately, the archaeology authorities today are mostly headed by architects without formal reading in history and are not particularly interested in the actual record. These ancient Sinhala Buddhist remains, including those in Wilpattu, should be opened up for visits and travel. There is a court ruling arising from the Deeghavapi case where ancient ruins were being vandalised, stating that ancient Buddhist sites must have associated villages.
Even Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa are being ignored by our tourist authorities who advertise Sri Lanka as "so wild" unlike say Cambodia's Angkor Wat, Indonesia's Borobudur and Myanmar's Bagan which ancient cities are advertised heavily. All the latter had strong connections with Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa as had, for example, Thailand. Recently our tourist authorities were in Thailand unbelievably advertising only our cuisine, not the strong Buddhist connections. Earlier the same tourist authorities had invented and advertised non-existent Ramayana sites. If the goal of ten million tourists a year – a goal set by the new president -- is to be reached, the obvious target must be Asian Buddhist countries.
The civilisational turn has much to undo as well as to create afresh.
Pompeo says human rights come from Jesus Christ. Yet he has cosied up to barbarous regimes and he approves unaccountable secret prisons and mass surveillance of the entire world’s telephones. When he was the director of the CIA, he admitted that his spies “lied … cheated … stole." He also backed the US withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council. It is in that rogue organisation, our very patriotic Mangala Samaraweera co-sponsored with the US, a resolution against his own country. As their own publications reveal, in their recent wars, the US and its Western allies have killed millions of innocents and are only using human rights discourse as a soft power weapon.