Features

Advice my mother gave me, founding Sujatha Vidyalaya and a national honour

Published

3 years ago

2023/07/23

Thilina Walpola

Mother receiving the Deshabandu Award from His Excellency, J. R. Jayewardene, President of Sri Lanka

(Excerpted from Chosen Ground: the saga of Clara Motwani by Goolbai Gunasekera)

Mother had frequent staff meetings so that she could guide us in teaching methods to her liking. I give below some of her rules, which I now pass on to my own younger teachers at Asian International. What she taught then, holds good even now. And what did she teach me?

1. Begin all your classes standing. Never sit as you enter a class. You must dominate and show you mean business.

2. Do not talk too loudly. A teacher with too strong a voice will irritate pupils and they will begin tuning out.

3. “Always be perfectly turned out. (By this mother meant all-round neatness, not high fashion. One morning Mother was electrified to find Indrani Mendis, a former Games Captain just recently turned teacher, wearing a hipster sari. Indrani had a lovely figure and the hipster looked stunning. Nonetheless, Indrani will never forget what followed. Mother made her drape the sari all over again in her office with the minimum of bare skin showing. Nowadays I should think that would be considered an infringement of one’s personal rights! No one thought such traitorous thoughts then. Indrani now teaches at Asian International, and still has her good figure.)

4. Give your class one written assignment a week under test conditions. They must do the work in front of you, otherwise much of the work done at home will be actually their parents’ doing.

5. Corrections must be done within two days, or else a child will lose interest in the result of the assignment.

6. If a child is doing really badly all the time, try giving her a slightly better grade than she deserves. She will then make that better grade on her own the following time.

7. A child’s energy curve soars when praised. Try to do this more often than giving her a scolding which will probably have no effect.

8. If a class is noisy never say, “Don’t talk, class.” Pick out one of the children and say, “Don’t talk, Nimi.” The whole class will stop talking just to hear what you are going to say to that one child. It is a ploy I have often used.

9. If you do not know the answer to a question, never bluff. Tell the child you do not know, but you will look it up at home and tell her the following day.

10. Never try to fool a child. It cannot be done.

11. Be perfectly prepared before you attempt to take a class.

12. Never read from the textbook. You should know what is in it.

13. Give unexpected one-word answer tests. Children will never know when one is coming and will therefore listen all the time.

And so on. The list was even longer, but these are some that I remember. Certainly the teachers at BLC (Buddhis Ladies College) and I were highly successful, as our excellent results proved. My English Literature results at the O-Level were only rated ‘Most commendable’ in Mother’s parlance, while the word ‘Superb’ sprang to my own mind.

Teachers under Mother practically memorized their textbooks, as she had a disconcerting habit of turning up in classrooms with a deceptively kind smile saying:

“Now you just continue with your lesson, while I sit here quietly at the back and learn something new.”

None of us was fooled. It was a tactful way of checking whether we knew our texts or not.

‘One morning I was teaching Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The White Company to the O-Level Literature class. It was the Government text for that year, and its plot is set in Europe, in the Middle Ages. Medieval History had been my forte at University, so while Mother sat calmly at the back of the room I wickedly switched the subject-matter of my lesson, and gave the students a little background history of the Middle Ages.

Most fascinating to girls of that age is the Droit de Seigneur, which literally meant that the nobility of Europe had the right to sleep with the wife of a tenant farmer on his wedding night. The all-girl class was somewhat shocked, very thrilled and full of questions.

Mother sat through it all and then left, saying, “An interesting lesson!” to me. A few minutes later her peon handed me a note which read: “See me when free.” I assumed I’d gone too far and resigned myself to a lecture. Obediently, I trotted off to her office to face the music. Mother was all smiles and for once, full of praise.

“That is one lesson the girls will never forget,” she told me. “Frankly, neither will I, but that is hardly relevant. What pleases me is that such a lesson may get them reading History on their own in search of equally strange facts. That was good teaching , darling.”

I walked on air the rest of the day.

My old schoolmate, Smith College-returned Susheela Paul, also a teacher with me at BLC, had her entire class gaining Distinctions and Credits at the O-Level in Botany one year. Mother’s paean of praise had Susheela quite overcome. Susheela married Chari de Silva (who eventually became Chairman of Aitken Spence) and stopped teaching to bring up her family. Strangely, Mother did not protest at losing her fine teacher. Mother always felt family life should come first. One morning Susheela came to school but asked for leave midway through the morning.

“Is it urgent?” Mother asked.

“Fairly,” Susheela had replied and went on to explain why she wanted the rest of the day off. Apparently Ladies’ College follows the custom of not releasing prize lists until the very morning of the prize giving itself. Susheela had just been informed that her little daughter, Sharmini (aged six or seven) had won the Form Prize. She therefore had just a few hours to rush home to get Sharmini into a starched uniform, white shoes and a red ribbon to match.

“Run along then, my dear,” Mother is supposed to have said, and congratulated Susheela on a clever daughter. I snorted angrily when Susheela gleefully reported all this to me. I was recalling Mother’s refusal to grant me similar privileges for any reason at all.

“No one must think I favour you, darling,” Mother said soothingly to me, as if any one would be that demented, seeing that I was the hardest worked teacher on her staff.

Although Mother’s contracts with the schools she headed always had a furlough clause written into them, she rarely took advantage of it, preferring instead to have my grandmother come to Sri Lanka. The result was that both my grandmother and my aunt Arline visited the island several times and made many friends here. They needed to do so if they wanted to see my busy Mother.

But now Mother needed a holiday. After ten years or so, BLC was doing very well indeed. Leaving me in charge of the school for six months, she departed for the US, not without much misgiving. Right up to the time she went through the Customs gates she continued to hand out advice to me on just about everything.

“I’ll manage, Mother,” I eventually told her in exasperation.

“Oh, I have no doubt at all that you will,” said Mother, proceeding nonetheless to prove that she didn’t believe it for a minute.

Disastrously for me, my more lenient approach to the length of school uniforms and generally relaxed administrative manner (I preferred to use the phrase ‘modern manner’) resulted in one of the senior students eloping with the Geography master. I did not have any desire to read Mother’s outraged letter to me more than once, and so I tore it up instantly. It was quite some time before Mother gave me so much responsibility again in subsequent schools, as her days at BLC were at an end – though at the time she did not know it.

Mother was expected to return to Colombo after about six months, but before she could do so a blaze of adverse publicity left Mother initially more puzzled than hurt. Religion was at the bottom of it all.

As a Theosophist, Mother had no difficulty in running Buddhist schools in the manner Buddhists wanted. She followed the philosophy, and was good friends with the Bhikkus of Vajiraramaya – notably Bhikku Narada and Bhikku Piyadassi.

She did not go to Church and make a display of her Christian beliefs. Neither was she a temple-goer. The only places of worship we visited as a family were the religious sites to which Father took us in India. In Sri Lanka we visited and worshipped at the Dalada Maligawa, the Madhu Church, the Nallur Temple (when we were in Jaffna), and at Kataragama when Father decided our souls needed a little burnishing.

The fact that Mother rarely went to Church was just that she had very little time for it when she first came to the island. Hers had not been a very church-going family back home in the States, in any case. Now, as she entered her fifties, Mother decided to take up the study of her own religion again. She was studying Islam at the same time, but no one talked about that.

In one of her regular letters to the Chairman of BLC, Mr. de Mel, she mentioned the fact that she was enjoying the Church services in her mother’s parish. Reacting as if he had been stung, Mr. de Mel told Mother that on no account would he tolerate a practising Christian at the head of a Buddhist school.

Mother might have mentioned that at that very moment Visakha Vidyalaya, a premier Buddhist school, was getting along very nicely with a Christian Principal at its helm, and no one seemed to mind. She was more puzzled than hurt by her Chairman’s dictum, especially because Buddhism was not a subject that was ever discussed between them. But her bewilderment soon turned to anger when she was told of the manner in which the news that she would not be returning was broken to students and staff of BLC.

Mr de Mel summoned the entire school to an assembly in the Hall. He then had a priest from the Vajiraramaya speak to the captive audience who sat silently aghast, while Mother was literally vilified in front of her pupils and her teachers for no reason other than that of going to Church.

Unfortunately, Bhikku Narada was not in the island at the time, and the priest who came to deliver this bombshell was not someone who should have been entrusted with this delicate and tricky situation. Quite unsuspecting of what was going to be said, I was in the Hall myself and heard, to my complete fury, this Bhikku speak against my Mother in the most unacceptable language possible. He spoke in Sinhala and a literal translation would make his words border on vulgarity.

I got up, and walked out of the Hall. The priest was by now in full spate and did not connect my exit with my Mother. He carried on. That evening my husband accompanied me when I visited the Vajiraramaya to personally tell the Bhikku what I thought of him.

To this day my respect for many priests remains low. The Bhikku concerned denied saying anything.

“I heard you myself,” I told him angrily.

“You must have misunderstood,” he replied blandly, not accepting any blame. “In any case, I was told to make sure nobody got upset that your mother was not returning.”

With the benefit of hindsight, I realized that Mr. de Mel had been trying to forestall a repetition of the Musaeus College walk-out. He need not have worried. Many years had passed since that time, and the situation was not the same. Mother was not in the island, and did not return until after my daughter Khulsum was born.

But what really made Mother wonder sometimes if her life’s work for the Buddhist girls of Sri Lanka had been worth the effort she put into it, was the behaviour of certain chauvinistic Buddhists who not only refused to speak to her, but also saw to it that the newspapers played up the story.

“Principal Sails Away,” ran one headline, while Letters to the Editor debated the issue endlessly. Close friends rallied to Mother’s defence. It deeply concerned Mother that I was left to face all this criticism alone. My sister would have done a far better job than I did of confronting those who chose to be judgemental. I was quite unable to think of suitable retorts to questions such as “Isn’t Buddhism good enough?” and other nasty little innuendos.

“Tell everyone Mother has returned to the religion of the Ancient Greeks,” Su said dismissively on the phone.

“The Olympian gods? That was hardly a religion.” “Exactly.”

“I can’t say that sort of thing,” I quavered.

“Try the Druids then,” she said unsympathetically, and rang off.

In the end, Mother herself took it all philosophically, in spite of pinpricks which were often more like stabs. It was a bad time for me in many ways. No one enjoys hearing things said about one’s parents, even when the matter was so trivial. My husband’s family rose nobly to Mother’s defence. They made the next few months bearable, for it was not pleasant to have one’s mother’s religious preferences debated by those who knew very little of the matter. The Gunasekara family are strong Buddhists. My sister-in-law, Lakshmini is a devout adherent, yet her sensivity in the handling of this entire episode, particularly of my wounded feelings, is something the Motwanis will never forget.

It was a matter of bad timing. Buddhists were becoming very protective of their faith, and Mother’s actions were taken as a kind of slur that they found hard to forgive. Yet there were those like Lakshmini who remained totally non-judgemental and accepted that religion is, after all, a private matter. Is it any wonder that she remains from then to now, my closest friend and confidant.

One hurtful incident involved a lady who had been one of Mother’s favourite pupils at Visakha. Lillian was a girl with no mother. Her father would, more often than not, delay to pay her hostel fees. Mother was very fond of Lillian and would often tell me what beautiful long hair she had. On Mother’s first furlough back to America (I was four years old at the time), Lillian was sitting for her Matriculation examination in Colombo.

Running true to form, Lillian’s father had not paid the fees and she was withdrawn from the exam. Hearing of this, Mother indignantly cabled the office and insisted that Lillian’s name be entered on the list of those being sent up. Lillian always remained a favourite with her, probably because she had no mother. When the Bandarawela evacuation began, Lillian was taken along in a student/teacher capacity, and Mother even arranged for her to be paid a small salary.

Yet Lillian did not repay Mother with loyalty … or even with sympathy. She was the first to be openly critical of her in public — and, of course, Mother was told of this, for there are always ‘friends’ who enjoy passing on hurtful gossip. That was one of the few times I have seen Mother weep. She smiled when she heard that well-known civil servants or other VIPs had not been at all kind, but Lillian (who was by worldly standards not a person of importance) … Lillian hurt her most of all. When Lillian died shortly afterwards of cancer, Mother wept again at her funeral. Less forgiving, I refused to accompany her to it.

When Mother’s old friend, Bhikku Narada of the Vajiraramaya, heard of the whole matter, he sent for me. I told him that I had vowed never to enter any temple again after my brush-up with the representative of his order, who had been so hurtfully libelous of my mother. But Mother visited him, and he was saddened that it could not have been he who had given that talk to the students of BLC.

Still, memories are very short. Within a year of returning to Sri Lanka, Mother was being asked to write a series of articles on education for the local papers. Everyone forgot about Mother’s religious preferences and she decided to return ‘home’ permanently and enjoy retirement with her newly born granddaughter, Khulsum, and us. She ignored my husband Bunchy’s sardonic smile at the word ‘retirement’. Surrounding herself with books, Scrabble boards and bridge-playing friends, she managed to get along nicely for two months.

She enjoyed all this, but it was not in Mother’s nature to ‘retire’ and not be actively engaged in more strenuous educational work. When she was approached by Mr. Linton Kuruppu, the owner of a small school in the suburbs, who asked,her to transform it into a bigger and better Colombo school, she accepted the challenge. Thus, Sujatha Vidyalaya opened its doors in the fashionable Queen’s Road area in Colombo 3, and has been very successful.

Becoming wealthy through education was something that never entered Mother’s head. If she had been business-minded, she might have had a clause written into her contracts which gave her a percentage of the profits of the new schools she started, because there were profits. Mother never knew what they were, because she left finances to the Board.

I always told her that she had no head for business at all, for the owners of the Buddhist Ladies College and Sujatha Vidyalaya certainly did not make any losses while she headed them. Mother’s reputation, her genuine love for her students, her care and concern for all aspects of education, made her a legend in her time. Her name was a magnet that drew pupils to any school she headed, and the many thousands of children who passed through her hands were proud to say: “Mrs. Motwani was our Principal.”

While she was at Sujatha, the President of Sri Lanka at the time was J.R. Jayewardene. He instituted a system of National Honours which gave national recognition to citizens who had ‘done the state some service’. Mother was on that first list of recipients, and was the first person to be honoured in the field of Education. I was standing by her when the call came from President’s House, asking if she would be willing to accept the Deshabandu Award for her services in the education of Buddhist girls in the island.

It took some time for the President’s secretary to make Mother understand she was the chosen one. Mother was essentially a very humble person. It never occurred to her that she was considered important enough for a National Honour. I was always so proud to be known as her daughter and often told her so.

“It’s nice you feel that way, darling,” she would say, not really understanding that she had an awesome reputation. My husband and I were invited to watch her receive her award from the President’s hands. It was the first and last time I had a meal at the President’s House and it was a memorable occasion. Making the day all that much nicer for Mother, was the fact that Dr. P.R. Anthonis was also a recipient of a national honour in the field of Medicine.

Just before I married, Mother had needed to have very serious stomach surgery due to strangulated intestines. Before she went into surgery, she made my father-in-law-to-be promise that if she died he

would ensure my marriage went ahead (if not the reception). He promised, and it was perhaps a premonition of a mishap that made Mother extract that promise, for in the course of surgery, Dr. Anthonis told me later, he almost lost her.

Dr Anthonis was the foremost surgeon of the time in Sri Lanka. He still is! His gentle manner and almost aesthetically sensitive looks had endeared him to Mother at once. They became good friends. When the time came for Mother to settle her hospital bill she noticed there was no surgery charge. She queried it, and was told by the office that Dr. Anthonis had said he could never charge someone who had been nothing but a boon to his country.

It was a tribute he would pay her on two more occasions when she needed his services again. And so it was with much pleasure that these two people who had done so much in their respective careers for the people of Sri Lanka sat down to lunch together at the President’s House at the Inauguration of the National Honours List. Mother’s Deshabandu Medal and the Certificate of Honour she received at the hands of the President of her adopted country, are now treasured family heirlooms.

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Features

Revolt in the Temple: Poverty as Structural Control

Published

12 hours ago

2026/05/31

Thilina Walpola

The underlying issue in Anuradhapura is a struggle between a few families who, for years, have waged a quiet cold war over control of the Udamaluwa. Similar situations exist in Mihintale as well. These places, among others, are treated as treasures of Buddhism but, in practice, function as tightly controlled economic centres. The same pattern repeats in Kandy around the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic and in Kataragama at the shrine of God Kataragama. Variations of it exist across religious spaces of Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism too, where institutional authority becomes indistinguishable from localised power networks. What is presented as sacred order often operates as inherited control.

It is indeed devastating to see situations where parents have no alternative but to expose their children to predators in robes for survival. This has nothing to do with religion itself, but with human pathology in the context of survival. These are the questions that demand answers, not superficial responses that treat symptoms while ignoring the conditions that produce them. What is more shocking and disturbing is not the tragedy itself, but the reactions to it. Social media has overwhelmed us, not towards understanding, but towards a fragmented cognitive state with no exit route.

A friend of mine in Nairobi used to keep all his electronic devices at home and go into the forest once a month, spending days there before returning. He called it “detoxification”, but in reality it was an escape from a system that no longer allows uninterrupted thought. Daily life is now saturated with unnecessary content, and attention itself has become a commodity extracted, processed, and sold back to us. This is where we have become unable to understand what really drives certain tragedies we endlessly react to, while remaining blind to the systems that quietly manufacture them.

Multi-dimensional poverty

Poverty is structural, poverty is political, and poverty is functional; it is a tool and a manoeuvring force of power. The question is no longer whether poverty exists, but who benefits from its persistence, and who is forced to survive within it. From education to medicine to basic food supply chains, countries like Sri Lanka are not simply mismanaged; they are structurally captured by a small number of actors who remain stable regardless of who is formally in power. Small-scale enterprises and NGO circuits that circulate foreign funding to “solve structural issues” often operate as hollow administrative performances, producing reports rather than transformation.

Poverty is not merely the absence of money. It is the absence of bandwidth, absence of protection, absence of time, and absence of cognitive stability. As Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir state, “Scarcity captures the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it.” This is a description of how human cognition is structurally reorganized under constraint. Scarcity does not sit outside the person; it occupies them.

They also state, “Scarcity leads us to borrow and pushes us deeper into scarcity.” That is the mechanism that must be confronted without euphemism. Poverty is not only deprivation; it is a self-reinforcing trap in which survival decisions generate the next layer of crisis. Once a society crosses a certain threshold of scarcity, it stops producing long-term reasoning as a default condition. It produces short-term survival logic, often mistaken by outsiders for irrationality.

It is precisely here that public discourse becomes intellectually dishonest. Everything is translated into moral language because moral language is easier than structural analysis. But morality without structure becomes theatre. It produces outrage, not understanding, and repetition, not reform.

It is indeed brutal when an individual wearing religious insignia—whether robe, symbol, or institutional identity—is accused of acts that fundamentally contradict the moral authority attached to that position. It is equally brutal when institutions that depend entirely on trust begin to function as shields rather than safeguards. But the deeper question is not shock. The deeper question is what kind of social condition produces families who see placement within such institutions not only as devotion, but as a survival strategy under constraint.

Ethical decision-making

That is where the argument collapses into its most uncomfortable form. Poverty does not produce ethical decision-making environments. It produces constrained optimization under pressure. When food insecurity, debt, and social instability converge, institutional spaces that appear stable become transactional destinations for survival rather than moral choices. To interpret this as purely cultural failure is to deliberately ignore the structural compression of options.

Mullainathan and Shafir describe this clearly: “Instead of saying that scarcity ‘focuses,’ we could just as easily say that scarcity causes us to tunnel: to focus single-mindedly on managing the scarcity at hand.” That tunnelling effect is not abstract. It is visible wherever long-term planning collapses under immediate pressure. Systems then misread this as irresponsibility, when it is in fact cognitive overload produced by structure.

What is rarely acknowledged is how deeply this extends into governance itself. Institutions increasingly operate as if they are managing rational, unconstrained individuals. In reality, they are interacting with populations whose cognitive bandwidth is already structurally taxed. The result is policy failure interpreted as public non-compliance, enforcement interpreted as moral correction, and reform interpreted as communication failure rather than design failure.

Social media has intensified this distortion. It does not merely spread information; it destroys sequencing. Structural problems require temporal depth. Social media removes that depth and replaces it with instantaneous judgment. Every event becomes a surface object, detached from causality. The outcome is a society permanently reacting and never diagnosing.

Poverty, in this environment, becomes invisible in its real form. It is not seen as a continuous structural condition but as episodic failure. A scandal appears, is consumed, and disappears. Another replaces it. Nothing accumulates into understanding because attention itself is exhausted before synthesis can occur.

Modern Condition

The modern condition reflects a reversal of earlier social organization, where human relationships are embedded within abstract systems of finance, law, and administration that often fail to recognize the lived constraints of those they govern. In this disembedded state, institutions increasingly misinterpret human behaviour as their capacity for structural understanding weakens. At the same time, attempts to resolve systemic failures through expanding administrative complexity produce diminishing returns: more regulation, oversight, and reporting generate less coherence. Over time, institutions shift from functional effectiveness to symbolic performance, maintaining the appearance of control rather than achieving it.

This is why public outrage repeatedly fails to translate into structural change. Outrage is not a tool of reconstruction. It is a signal of system fatigue. It circulates, intensifies, and dissipates without altering the underlying architecture. Meanwhile, the conditions that produce repetition remain intact.

The most persistent illusion is that these are separate problems: poverty here, institutional misuse there, media distortion elsewhere. They are not separate. They are expressions of a single condition in which scarcity, complexity, symbolic authority, and fragmented enforcement interact without coordination. The system does not fail in one place; it fails in the gaps between these layers.

Symbolic systems

What makes this condition more severe is that symbolic systems continue to operate at full strength even when structural systems degrade. Religious identity remains powerful. Political rhetoric remains strong. Cultural symbolism remains intact. But enforcement capacity, institutional coherence, and social trust degrade beneath them. That gap is where instability grows. Until that gap is addressed at the level of structure rather than sentiment, repetition remains inevitable. New scandals will emerge, new interpretations will circulate, and new cycles of outrage will follow. Nothing resolves because nothing is being reconstructed beneath the surface of reaction.

This is no longer repairable through adjustment or rhetoric. It is a form of decay that persists until it exhausts itself, because the mechanisms meant to correct it are now part of the same failure. It continues until rupture, not reform. At that point, instability ceases to be episodic and becomes structural. Pressure will accumulate into breakdown, and what follows will not be managed transition but forced reversal. The responsibility lies with those who govern these institutions to prevent that trajectory, not through language, but through change. The drama is ending; farce is over; what we are witnessing is tragedy unfolding with unprecedented consequences.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Features

Are threats to Buddha Sasana external or from within?

Published

12 hours ago

2026/05/31

Thilina Walpola

As Sri Lanka celebrates the birth, Enlightenment and the Parinibbana of the Buddha, almost a month after the rest of the Buddhist-world did so, there is widespread discussion about threats to Buddha Sasana provoked by some recent incidents. Regarding the views expressed about postponing Vesak celebrations in my article ‘May Day and postponement Vesak 2026’ (The Island, 25 May), my very good friend Dr Upali Abeysiri has sent me the following comments: “The Mahanayakas have a good reason to postpone Vesak. The dawning of the full moon has to be on the same constellation (nekatha) as when the Buddha was born and attained enlightenment. Although Adhi Poya is reckoned as the second full moon arising in the same calendar month, this is supposed to be an odd exception.” Though it would have been ideal if a consensus could have been reached prior to the split of celebrations, perhaps, it does not matter very much as celebrations occur on a symbolic rather than an actual date, there being no historical or archaeological evidence confirming exact dates.

Whilst there are no direct threats to Buddha Dhamma, as the expanding horizons of science continue to confirm the fundamentals of Buddha Dhamma, there is no doubt whatsoever that there are threats to Buddha Sasana. However, these threats become important as the Buddha Sasana performs the pivotal role in protecting and propagating the Dhamma and, hence, become an indirect threat to Dhamma itself. Therefore, it should be the concern of all Buddhists and it is in this spirit I am making some comments which some may interpret as disrespectful to the Maha Sangha. I can reassure that my intentions are entirely directed towards the preservation of the Buddha Dhamma and Sasana. Though the Buddha proclaimed that the Sasana consists of Bhikkhu, Bhikkhuni, Upasaka and Upasika, for all practical purposes Sasana had been led by Bhikkhus, often at the expense of others.

There is hardly any doubt that there are external forces at play in Sri Lanka and even some Buddhists seem to object to Sri Lanka being called a Buddhist country. Interestingly, no one seems to object to countries like the UK and the USA being called Christian counties. I

There is no registration or baptism in Buddhism and there are no rewards for Buddhists for conversions. As I pointed out in a previous article, ‘How does the Buddha differ’ (The Island, 1 May) unlike most other religions, Buddhism is not a ‘high-demand’ religion, nor ‘law-based’ religion and is not exclusivist. Perhaps, it is this liberalism, pacifism and gentleness, which are the real strengths, that are being exploited as weaknesses by others.

There will always be external threats and the Buddha too faced many during his lifetime. Before addressing those, is it not more important to address the threats within? One of the most important problems seems to be the breakdown of discipline. Bhikkhus are bound by Vinaya rules, laid down by the Buddha and some recent incidents highlight total deviations. Though there were many previous incidents like unsubstantiated claims of Arahanthood, Bhikkhus attacking each other on YouTube and Bhikkhus conducting YouTube channels, not for the propagation of the Dhamma but for the accumulation of rupees, attention was focused after the detection of 22 young monks carrying narcotic drugs.

Though many commentators were quick to condemn the Sangha on this account, we need to go deeper. Narcotic menace has become a huge problem in Sri Lanka and it looks as if the drug lords would resort to anything to achieve their objectives. Though it looks as if some gullible young monks had been duped by drug lords, we need to question why it was possible. Is it due to the lack of supervision of these novices by their seniors that allowed them to accept a request in a WhatsApp group? Should there be checks and balances on foreign travel by Bhikkhus?

What shocked Buddhists was what followed next; the arrest of the Nayaka of Atamasthana for allegedly having sex with a minor. Anuradhapura was our first capital and Sri Maha Bodhi is the longest surviving authenticated tree in the world. Ruwanweliseya and Jetawanaramaya were among the ten tallest man-made structures in the ancient world, Jetawanaramaya still holding the Guiness record for the largest stupa in the world. Cyberspace is full of theories. Whilst some have condemned the Nayaka Thero even before the conclusion of inquiries whilst others claim that this was a coup by another Nayaka Thera in an attempt of succession.

I was intrigued, reading in a Sri Lankan newspaper about the 80th birthday celebrations of a Nayaka priest, who was convicted in London in 2012 of historical child sex abuse and sentenced to seven years in prison. I remember the case very well as he was the head of the Vihara, we had our first contact on relocating to the UK. I also remember his devotees, who believed that he was wrongly accused, collecting over £50,000 for an appeal. In spite of being represented by one of the top Barristers in the UK, the conviction was upheld but the jail-term was reduced by a year. His name is still on the sex-offenders register in the UK and he is permanently prevented from association with children. One can argue that as he has served the sentence and not reoffended, this should not be held against him but what baffled me is that he is still being referred to as the Chief Sangha Nayaka. Should a person on the sex-offenders register be the Chief Sangha Nayaka?

It is high time we put our own house in order before fighting the external enemies. It is reported that the former president CBK has written to the Mahanayakas requesting urgent reform and we should be obliged to her for taking the lead.

There are many aspects that need urgent reform, the first being removal of caste barriers practiced by some Nikayas, which is the greatest insult to the Buddha who promoted equality. The second is the active encouragement of Bhikkhuni Sasana which has not happened in spite of the landmark ruling by the supreme court. The third is the establishment of proper disciplinary processes under a single Adhikarana Sangha Nayaka with powers and support than allowing the government to take over the control of even non-criminal Vinaya matters.

There are many other issues that need settlement like the controversy of the land of Buddha’s birth which seems to linger on. An expert committee should hear all evidence and settle this issue once and for all.

As I have pointed out on many occasions in these columns, it is high time a Dhamma Sangayana was held, as the last one was 70 years ago. Ideally, it should be different with active participation of lay experts as well. It is the duty of us Buddhists to ensure that the words of wisdom of the Buddha continue to enlighten generations to come.

By Dr Upul Wijayawardhana

Features

Vijaya Kumar: Academic, Activist & Genial Fellow-Traveller

Published

12 hours ago

2026/05/31

Thilina Walpola

Professor Vijaya Kumar

The University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, was in our time, a less-crowded residential university, where everybody knew everybody else or at least knew of everybody else.

I knew of Emeritus Professor Vijaya Kumar of the Department of Chemistry at Peradeniya, or Kumar, as we referred to him fondly, before I got to know him. His dear wife Savitri, also a member of the academic staff of the Department of Chemistry, was nicknamed Kumee, by some of their students (of which vintage is unknown to me) and the duo were thereafter referred to affectionately as Kumar and Kumee.

The Faculty of Science became a regular haunt of mine as I would go there in the company of my batchmates to attend lectures on Basic Mathematics given by Professor Maheswaran, as it was a requirement for our General Arts Qualifying Examinations. I would also go there to listen to some excellent talks under a programme that was held in the auditorium of the Science Faculty referred to as “Popular Science Gossip”. The “gossip” at these talks were not confined solely to science but were broad enough to include Literature, History and other branches of knowledge as well. I would often spot Kumar in the audience at these talks or bump into him in the corridors of the Science Faculty. But I got to know him personally only after he became the Warden of Arunachalam, my hall of residence, during my undergraduate years initially, and later, as a member of the academic staff of the Department of English.

Our Science Faculty undergraduate contemporaries, especially those at Arunachalam Hall and its immediate neighbour, Jayatilaka Hall, both within a stone’s throw away from the Science Faculty, shared many an anecdote about Kumar and their other lecturers. One of these anecdotes, had to do with a spectacular (motor car) driving feat of Kumar’s. Legend has it that he drove from his university bungalow-home to the Faculty of Science deploying only the reverse gear of his car! Kumar, on hearing of this, had told certain of his student friends, including some who became his colleagues later on, that this story is one of the biggest yarns he had heard in his life!

Some of his one-time younger colleagues, now in retirement like Kumar, tell me that Kumar exuded warmth and friendliness in all of his professional and administrative interactions with others in the wider university community. But there was no warmth or mercy for those who indulged in the unsavoury pastime of student ‘ragging’. He was a very strong proponent of the need to ensure to all freshers an environment free of the menace of ‘ragging’. He remained ever-vigilant during the ‘ragging’ season. There are stories of his chasing ‘raggers’ and catching them. Professor Maheswaran, who later became an intimate friend and remains so after more than half a century, was another who was fiercely opposed to ‘ragging’. I was a personal witness to Mahes chasing a ‘ragger’ up and down the stairs of the main library to nab him. Yet another of his students has noted that Kumar’s office room in the Faculty was a total mess at all times. It had tables, piled so high with books and documents that one could not easily spot Kumar at his desk. He, however, had the knack of pulling out from amidst the clutter, any document that he needed at any given time. If anybody were to volunteer to help tidy his desk, Kumar would respond firmly with “Don’t you touch my desk!”.

Kumar, like several of his colleagues in the other faculties as well, had his own eccentricities. According to information received from reliable sources, Kumar who taught Organic Chemistry used to carry his lecture notes in his shirt or trouser pocket with ‘the entire lecture condensed in point form on a half-sheet or half of a half-sheet of paper’. The way he rummaged through his sling bag filled to the brim with stuff to find an item that he needed was another ritual that amused onlookers.

Kumar, interestingly enough is a Royal-cum-Thomian product, in that he had his primary education at S.Thomas’ Prep School, Kollupitiya and the entirety of his secondary education at Royal College, which he entered in 1953. In a note written by Kumar himself, he notes that despite having had excellent teachers at Royal, his was not a notable school career. He goes on to say that “the only achievement I could boast of was my being the joint-winner of the school General Knowledge Prize”. However, he had been active in a Scout Group outside of school (1st Port of Colombo, Sea Scouts) where he “was Queen’s Scout, Patrol leader, and later, Assistant Scout Master”.

Kumar entered the Faculty of Science of the University of Ceylon in 1961 and secured from it an honours degree in Chemistry in 1965. He joined the academic staff of the Department of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science, University of Ceylon, Peradeniya in 1965 and left the following year for Magdalen College at Oxford University, from which institution he obtained his doctorate in Chemistry. His entire teaching career was at Peradeniya, where in the period 2003-2006 he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science, a position that his late father-in-law had held a few decades earlier.

Among the other highlights of his career are: Chairman of the Industrial Technology Institute (formerly the Ceylon Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, CISIR); Member (representing Sri Lanka) of the Geneva-based UN Commission on Science and Technology from 1999 to 2007 and its President from 2001-2003; President of the Sri Lanka Estate Workers Union from 1989 onwards; Member of the Politburo of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party from 1988 to 2014 and currently, a member of the Executive Committee of the National People’s Power (NPP).

Vijaya and Savitri Kumar are parents of daughters Shamala and Ramya, who are following in the footsteps of their parents: with the former teaching in the Department of Agricultural Economics in the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Peradeniya and the latter, in the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Jaffna.

(I wish to thank the following who assisted me in the writing of this brief essay: Mr. Bandula Warnakulasuriya, Emeritus Professor Ratnayake Bandara, Professor Mahinda Wickramaratne, Professor Swarna Wimalasiri and Mr. Manik de Silva).

*Editor’s note: Prof. Vijaya Kumar, a member of the NPP’s National Executive Committee and is still active in politics turns 84 today. This article by Tissa Jayatilaka, former Executive Director of the United States – Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission for Mutual Academic Exchange, was written for an upcoming collection of essays on Kumar’s life by his friends.

(Colombo Telegraph)

By Tissa Jayatilaka