Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka

Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135038342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka offers a new perspective on contemporary debates about Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. In this book de Silva Wijeyeratne argues forcefully that 'Sinhalese Buddhism' in the period prior to its engagement with the British colonial State signified a relatively unbounded (although at times boundary forming) set of practices that facilitated both the inclusion and exclusion of non-'Buddhist' concepts and people within a particular cosmological frame. Juxtaposing the premodern against the backdrop of colonial modernity, de Silva Wijeyeratne tells us that in contrast modern 'Sinhalese Buddhism/nationalism' is a much more reified and bounded concept, one imagined through a 19th century epistemology whose purpose was not so much inclusion, but a much more radical exclusion of non-'Buddhist' ideas and people.

In this insightful analysis modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, then, emerges through the conjunction of discourse, power and knowledge at a distinct moment in the trajectory of the colonial State. An intrinsic feature of this modernist moment is that premodern categories (such as the cosmic order) were subject to a bureaucratic re-valuation that generated profound consequences for State-society relations and the wider constitutional/legal imaginary. This book goes onto explore how key constitutional and nation-building moments were framed within the cultural milieu of modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism – a nationalism that reveals the power of a re-valued Buddhist cosmic order to still inform the present.

Given the intensification of the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist project following the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, this book is of interest to scholars of nationalism, South Asian studies, the anthropology of ritual, and comparative legal history.

1 The Mahāvamsa as history and the pre-history of state formation

Introduction

In this chapter, I introduce the reader to the significance of the early Pāli chronicles and to the textual communities that generated them. We should not look to the chronicles (early, medieval or middle period texts) for an accurate representation of the past. The overall significance of the diverse Sri Lankan vamsa literature lies in its utilization of ‘historical narratives to transform the present lives and future destinies of Buddhist devotees’ (Berkwitz 2004: 7) – be they kings or laity. Nor should we focus on authorial intention. Of greater importance is the manner in which these ‘texts arose and circulated in the world [which] served to determine the various ways they were understood and used by people living in premodern Sri Lanka’ (2004: 28). The task of interpreting the vamsas depends not so much on the understanding of the past that they present, but rather an understanding of the concerns and priorities of the authors and historical period that gave birth to such texts (2004: 41; de Certeau 1988). This is as true for the court chronicles – the focus here, as well as in Chapter 2 – as it is for the devotional texts on which I elaborate in Chapter 3.

My approach is consistent with that of Berkwitz (2004), locating the vamsa literature ‘within broad historical settings’ and also ‘recognizing their capacities as texts to impact and reshape the contexts in which they were produced and disseminated’ (2004: 19). The court chronicles principally were an account of the relationship between the Asokan origins of Buddhist kingship, its Sinhalese articulation and the triumph of orthodox Theravāda Buddhism in the form of the Mahāvihāra in the first of the Sinhalese polities in Ānuradhapura. The court chronicles, however, are not devoid of potentially ethical considerations – or at least questions that impinge on the ‘ethical dilemma involved in Buddhist kingship’ (2004: 78), and its relation to time and impermanence in the Buddhist tradition.

In the course of addressing these concerns, the court chronicles also happen to provide an account of the peopling of the island, and specifically the origin of the Sinhalese – an account intimately linked to the Asokan origins of Sinhalese Buddhism and the pre-European history of state formation.¹ This court-oriented history was actively appropriated by the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist movement from the late nineteenth century CE. While nationalists interpret the chronicles as providing evidence of a timeless, centralized state, much archaeological and inscriptural evidence suggests that sovereignty was far from centralized, with local rulers usually acting as a counter to the over-arching claims of power made by the early Sinhalese Buddhist polities of Ānuradhapura and later Polonnaruva (Obeyesekere 2006: 137). This chapter’s introduction to the chronicles foreshadows what will be a significant theme in the latter part of this book: the importance of the way this history, as it is presented in the chronicles, has been actively appropriated in the contemporary Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist imaginary. I begin this chapter by suggesting how the vamsa literature in general, and the Pāli chronicles in particular, should be read.

The Pāli chronicles as history

Sri Lanka was a highly literate culture, which spawned a writing tradition that was chronicle cum historical in nature. Intrinsic to this tradition was also the significance of memory and orality as a means of transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. This combination of the written and the oral was a mode of transmission that was steeped in the literary forms of the Hindu-Buddhist tradition (Kemper 1991: 37). Berkwitz suggests that the chronicles should be referred to as histories on the grounds that the majority of the Pāli and Sinhala texts do not ‘conform to the model of open-ended chronicles written by multiple authors’ (Berkwitz 2004: 25). Of all the Sri Lankan texts, only the Mahāvamsa exhibits the features ‘of an on-going chronicle of events that was periodically extended by multiple authors down through the centuries’ (2004: 25). Although acknowledging this distinction, I continue to refer to these texts as ‘chronicles’, distinguishing them from texts that bear the word āvaliya.² A second aspect of Berkwitz’s approach is more central to my own analysis. Specifically, he draws on Hayden White’s seminal critique of historical method by arguing that, like many historical narratives, the ‘vamsas present approximations and interpretations of the past within the sphere of contemporary concerns and conceptions of what history does’ (2004: 26; see also Foucault 1972: 18–19; White 1973).

The literary sources of texts like the Mahāvamsa, and the even earlier Dīpavamsa, dated to the fourth century CE, lie in both the Pāli Canon and the subsequent ‘commentarial material in Sinhala, Pāli and some Dravidian languages’ (Berkwitz 2004: 67), as well as oral traditions (2004: 67–8).³ A significant example of this second group of texts is the atthakathā commentaries, Sinhala prose dated to the third century BCE and based on earlier oral traditions memorized by specialist monks.⁴

Like Kemper, I offer a reading that suggests such texts did serve an epistemo-logical function for their authors, but not that of the creation of an ethno-territorially bounded Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist historiography (Berkwitz 2004: 29–37). The early Pāli chronicles such as the Dīpavamsa and the Mahāvamsa present a sacred history of Sri Lanka, ‘written around the evolution of two intertwined institutions – the rājaparamparavā (line of kingly descent) on one side and the theraparamparavā (line of monastic descent) on the other – that reach back to North India’ (Kemper 1991: 33). The Mahāvamsa was a court chronicle with an intrinsically political character. It stands apart from texts of the medieval era such as the Sinhala Thūpavamsa, where affairs of state are barely referenced.

The historico-political context within which the Mahāvamsa was produced was one in which the centricity of the Theravāda tradition in Ānuradhapura, the first Sinhalese Buddhist polity, had been restored.⁵ Its author, the monk Māhānama, concludes the chronicle by pointing to the threat that King Mahāsena (274–301 CE) had become to the Mahāvihāra. Perceived as heretical movements, Mahāyāna and Jain had come to exercise growing influence under King Vattagāmani Abhaya (c. 103 BCE), who was to give his name to the Abhayāgirivihara.⁶ The Mahāvamsa suggests that the presence of Mahāyāna and Jain cults was a cause of political dissention directed against King Vattagāmani Abhaya. Against this background, Māhānama constructs a ‘vision of the past [up to the rule of King Mahāsena that] emphasises the sovereignty of only one king, the one who sits, or should sit, in Ānuradhapura’ (Kemper 1991: 50).

Although composed up to two centuries after the Dīpavamsa, the Mahāvamsa provides greater detail to much of the storyline of the Dīpavamsa (Kemper 1991: 39–40). Both texts draw on canonical and non-canonical sources in order to establish a genealogy between the arrival of the dhamma on the island, the birth of Sinhalese Buddhist kingship and the north Indian origins of Buddhist kingship in the Asokan period of the Mauryan Empire as well as the schisms in the early Buddhist Sangha. The Dīpavamsa, as well as subsequent Sinhalese chronicles, while stating nothing of the doctrinal causes of it, dates the first schism to the party that was defeated at the Second Buddhist Council at Vesālī in the middle of the fourth century BCE. Buddhaghosa, however, gives no ‘account of the origins of the eighteen schools [of the Northern School] in the Samantapāsādikā’(Cousins 2005: 55).⁷ But, the Kathavātthu (Points of Controversy), a component part of the Abidhamma Pitaka, does give such an account (2005: 55–7).⁸ Herein resides a significant problem in Buddhist historiography regarding the councils. Herman Oldenberg (cited by Hallisey 2005: 175) argues that the councils never took place, suggesting that they were ‘pure fiction’. Jean Pryzyluski argues that:

One [could] explain the diversity of the accounts of the [first] council [by saying that] there are [as] many different recitations [sangiīti] as there are sects having a distinct canon. Each school tries to prove that its canon dates back to the origins of the Church and that it was codified by the assembly of Rājagrha.

(Hallisey 2005: 175)

It is thus possible to draw a distinction between the Buddhist Councils as event and idea, with the former focusing on the historical circumstances of the production and circulation of texts and the latter on the ‘persisting patterns of meanings and norms which mark the Theravāda’ (Hallisey 2005: 174). One can discuss ‘Buddhist ideas about the councils independently of any judgement about the historical incidents themselves’ (2005: 175). This is an important distinction, given that there is no ‘archaeological or epigraphical evidence … from the First Council’ (2005: 176). Hallisey notes that Heinz Bechert has done more than any other Pāli scholar to reveal how knowledge of the Third Council was ‘subsequently transformed in the Pāli commentaries and chronicles [such as the Dīpavamsa and the Mahāvamsa]’ (2005: 177).

Bechert concludes that ‘ideas about Asoka and the Third Council were used in the medieval Theravāda’ in a manner that transformed ‘the historical Asoka into a Theravādin sectarian’ (in Hallisey 2005: 177), so that some Theravāda texts provide a normative ‘foundation for state–Sangha relations in Theravāda countries’ (Bechert 1977b: 764). What we do know about the historical Asoka is itself limited to the Pillar Edicts, but Hallisey inverts Bechert’s point and asserts that ‘Theravādins preferred to convert unique events into phenomena of general meaning and import by historicist transformati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Sri Lankan nationalism and the presence of the past: towards a hermeneutic perspective
• 1. The Mahāvamsa as history and the pre-history of state formation
• 2. The cosmology of Buddhism, the Pāli chronicles and the ontology of evil
• 3. Textual practices, Sinhalese Buddhist consciousness and dissonance
• 4. Galactic polities, cosmography and Buddhist sovereignty
• 5. The transformation of Sinhalese Buddhist consciousness in its colonial and postcolonial relation
• 6. Independence, land, citizenship and the cosmic order
• 7. Sinhalese revolutionaries, linguistic nationalism and Buddhism reimagined
• 8. Cosmology, constitutionalism and the Tamil other
• 9. Centralization, decentralization and the cosmology of Buddhism
• 10. Conclusion: rethinking community in Sri Lanka
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index