Features

Revisiting Humanism in Education:Insights from Tagore

Published

1 year ago

2025/02/17

Sahan Weerasooriya

Tagore

By Panduka Karunanayake

Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine and former Director, Staff Development Centre, University of Colombo

(The 34th J.E. Jayasuriya Memorial Lecture14 February 2025 SLFI Auditorium, Colombo)

Professor J.E. Jayasuriya is remembered today for his work in so many diverse aspects of the field of education. Indeed, one can be forgiven for wondering whether this is just one person or a combination of several. These aspects include his excellence as a teacher and a writer of textbooks on Mathematics; a renowned school principal, handpicked by Dr C.W.W. Kannangara to establish the first Central College; an able administrator; a Professor of Education in the University of Ceylon and a leading academic; a pioneer in the fields of educational psychology, population education and even my own area of medical education; a policymaker, analyst and commentator at both national and international levels; an advocate and political activist; an internationally recognised expert and author; and last but not least, a great teacher and much-loved mentor. My own debt to his work would be patently obvious to anyone who reads my book Ruptures in Sri Lanka’s Education, in which I have relied heavily on his insightful analyses. It is no surprise, therefore, that this memorial lecture had been delivered in the past by some of the most eminent women and men of intellect produced by our country, not only from the field of education but even other fields. I am truly humbled when I think of the stature of this great intellectual or read the list of those eminent past speakers. I will strive to do justice to the expectations placed on me by the J.E. Jayasuriya Memorial Foundation when they invited me to join that list of names, and I thank the President and Management Council of the Foundation. Following in Professor Jayasuriya’s path, in this lecture I, too, will deal with education as a social institution and look at it through a wide-angle lens.

Ladies and Gentlemen: For some time now, I have been impressed by the education-related work of the great Indian intellectual Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). (His actual name in Bengali is Robindronat Thakur: the name Rabindranath Tagore is an anglicisation, much better known across the world than the Bengali original.) Tagore was, of course, a very famous person: the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize; a well-known poet, lyricist, musician, dramatist, novelist and painter; a polymath; an inspiring writer and public speaker; a social reformer; a philosopher; and one of the most widely travelled Indians of his generation and, unsurprisingly, an internationalist. In fact, his work on education – while an amazing labour of love – might be thought of as a lesser known part in his fame. In this lecture, I wish to delve specifically on his work on education.

One could point out that he carried out his iconoclastic experiments in education a century ago, and that the educational institutions that he created back then exist now only in name. Their original nature has changed with the rigors of time. So am I here trying to recreate a world one hundred years past and propagate nostalgia? If you bear with me, I trust you will find that my reasons are better than that.

The reason why I was so impressed with his work is the significant currency of his ideas to the contemporary world. Now this will immediately seem like a contradiction. If the ideas are still current, why did the institutions that were based on those ideas have to change with time?

I would explain these two contradictory positions by saying that his ideas were actually prescient – they weren’t sustained, because they were ahead of their time. Besides, although he correctly identified problems and designed effective solutions, the problems were not fully solved by them – because of asymmetrical power relations and lack of funding. Today, we see the same problems throughout the globe – in all their enormity, reach and complexity. They engulf us and in a way blind us, because we have been trained to think that the reasons underlying them are ‘natural givens’. And by a quirk of fate, the solutions are now hidden in the sands of time.

Let me offer a quick illustration of this. We can clearly identify elements of humanistic education in Tagore’s ideas, even though humanistic education itself was recognised only some decades after his death and still hasn’t permeated education widely.

In this lecture, I would invite you to retrace my own steps into his educational philosophy. I, too, began with the belief that his ideas were hopelessly out of tune with our times. That was because I had been trained to see the world of education in a certain way, and from that position Tagore’s ideas seemed alien. I am reminded of something that Marcel Proust wrote: “The real journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” But as we all know, letting go of existing perceptions and forming entirely new ones is probably the hardest thing for the human mind to do. And yet, as any good educator would tell you, learning to form new perceptions is the very essence of education.

Current education landscape and its discontents

Let me start with a proposition. Education in today’s world needs a fundamental reposturing – not because it is doing its job badly but because it is doing the wrong job. Everywhere we can see educational institutions doing a great job, but our society is no better for it. This state of affairs hasn’t risen suddenly or recently; rather, it has been emerging slowly and developing over a century or so.

Let us examine the last one hundred years or so. During this time, throughout the world, democratisation has given expanding access to education, decolonisation has helped to switch the medium of instruction from colonising languages to the mother tongue, expanding industries and middle class populations have led to increasing massification of university education, and the human capital theory has led to increasing investment and growth in all levels of education. Can anyone in education think of a better century?

But during this same period, what has education given society? Chemists invented the weapons of the First World War. Physicists invented the weapons of the Second World War. Biologists bequeathed us biological weapons. Medicine became more successful and less trustworthy. Economics created economic hit men and cross-border practices that made markets volatile and national economies vulnerable. The law reduced community rights and increased patent rights. Mass communications, which could not give populations any democratic skills, could nevertheless give them insatiable consumerism. Social scientists have not explained the underlying reasons, much less solve them, but continue to create faultlines in societies and fragment them. The humanities have failed to bring the human family closer. And the biggest invention that technology has given us thus far is climate change.

It would not be enough to merely put the blame for all this on a few demagogues or dictators – throughout this period, populations had at least acquiesced with them and had often strengthened them. The purpose of education should have been to give the masses the skill to avoid these traps, but instead, the masses have been compliant while the experts have been selling their souls. This is why I said that education – assuming it was doing its job well – has been doing the wrong job.

The question of why education went to work for ‘the wrong boss’ has intrigued me for some time now, all the more because I know that during this whole period, policymakers and educationists have mostly been genuine in their intentions. My earliest clues came from two writers from the 1960s and 1970s. The first was the iconoclastic social critic Ivan Illich (1970) who published the book Deschooling Society. The second was a relatively unknown American education administrator, Grant Venn (1965, 1971).

Venn pointed out that throughout the twentieth century, the role that was required of education in society was undergoing a gradual change, although its response was not forthcoming. The general organisational structure of education everywhere was one that had been inherited from the time of the Industrial Revolution, but changing times were demanding a new structure. But educationists everywhere were not perceptive to it. They merely kept the old structure and tried to tinker with it.

In the old days, the majority of schoolchildren were destined to end up in farms, mines or manufactories, and they only needed an education in the 3 R’s and some basic disciplines such as punctuality. Only a few had to be selected and groomed for higher office. Learning how to live well, on the other hand, was acquired quite easily outside of school. The school itself played a relatively small role in people’s lives, except for the select few, and nobody would have equated education to school-going, because much of education happenned outside school. Our organisational structure was one that was created for this era.

But all this changed after the increasing domination of scientific technology in society. Thereafter, more schoolchildren had to be educated to a higher level – as tasks transformed from physical ones to cognitive ones, ‘work’ transformed into ‘jobs’, and the preparation needed for a life transformed from apprenticeship to prolonged schooling. Schools became a pervasive presence in people’s lives and tied them to their destinies, both individually and at the national level. Gradually, education became equated to school-going – learning how to live well, which had been learnt outside school, became sidelined, ignored and eventually lost.

As Venn observed:

[C]hanges now confronting us must be thought about in terms of certain new relationships that have developed between man, education, and society. Essentially, for the first time in man’s history, education is the link between an individual and society; and for the

first time this is true for every individual. Education, instead of a selection agency, must become an including agency.

When he suggested here that education must change from a selection agency to an including agency, he was referring to inclusion in the world of work and community, rather than merely inclusion in the school. In other words, he wasn’t talking about access to education – he was worried about what would happen to school-leavers when they go to live in the world outside.

If we look back at how education did respond, we would see that it has been preoccupied with strengthening the link between school and work. Let’s take Sri Lanka. In the 1970s we had pre-vocational studies. In the 1980s we had life skills. In the 1990s we had soft skills. In the 2000s we had twenty-first century skills. Nowadays we have industry-based capstone projects and entrustable professional activities. By and large, these were not our own inventions – they were simply the global responses replicated locally. But even these had no chance of success, because while education could prepare school-leavers for jobs, the economy still had to create those jobs. Without that, all one could have is what Ronald Dore (1976) forewarned us: qualification inflation and qualification escalation. In the 1960s the human capital theory suggested that education could serve as a springboard for economic development, and there were, indeed, some early successes, such as with Japan and South Korea. But more recently, that theory, too, has run into controversies and failure.

The failure to adapt to these changing circumstances manifested as what we see today in its fully developed form. We have over-indulged ourselves in designing education to chase after employment, and compromised education’s role in preparing students to be citizens in the community. This is not to say that education should not have played a role in economic development or preparing its students for the world of work. It is to point out the loss of balance in achieving these two goals: economic development on the one hand and human flourishing on the other hand.

But while education may have lost sight of the second goal, it also didn’t do very well promoting the first goal. Even here, it has lost its way.

After the Cold War ended in the 1990s a bipolar world was replaced by a unipolar world, with ‘all roads leading to Washington’. When that happened, a more balanced use of technology – what used to be known in the 1970s as ‘appropriate technology’ – was replaced by the use of often highly expensive and inappropriate technology that came tied to funding. This was because the global economy was capitulating to the major industries and multinational corporations and conglomerates, which were initially situated in the West but are now situated in other countries, too. We can conceptualise these as the ‘core’ in the ‘core-periphery relationship’ in global financing, knowledge production and commoditisation.

The reason why education lost its way is because that, too, became merged with – and disappeared into – this core-periphery relationship. Education ceased to serve local communities or support appropriate technology, and instead began serving the interests of big industries and promoting inappropriate technological behemoths. In the past, a well-educated person was one who served one’s community well – today the well-educated person is one who works for a successful global industrial giant.

One of the interesting changes in education that was promoted by the World Bank in the 1990s was the concept of the ‘three E’s’ of education: effectiveness, equity and efficiency. They were meant to help align educational systems to national goals. But they were overly quantitative, promoting measurable outcomes and ignoring the unmeasurable ones. What they succeeded in doing is replacing the broad goals of education with immediately measurable outcomes. Thus, quality was pushed aside in favour of effectiveness, and value-for-money in favour of efficiency. Insidiously, we also began chasing after the measurable parameters that served the industries in the core countries. Today, we judge ourselves by their indices, such as webometrics, accreditations and citations.

Even before these quantitative indices emerged, Venn asked some insightful questions about ‘quality’. Can quality be measured based on how well the institution serves those most in need of education rather than only those who are lucky, or defined in terms of how well individual differences and unique talents are developed rather than how well students become like all others, or in terms of one’s behaviour and contributions after one leaves school rather than on what one does while in school? Can accreditation be based on how well the school succeeds in its own goals rather than those of other schools? Can status for an educational institution be gained by how well it meets unfilled needs of society rather than how much it is like recognised institutions? We ought to have focused on these tasks; but instead, we have lost these unmeasurable attributes in our rush to comply with measurable parameters.

But it is not merely that this approach has robbed society of important attributes that were unmeasurable. Arguably, even those who were ‘successfully educated’ lack a wholesome education. This had been noted even before the 1990s, as when Aldous Huxley wrote in his book Psychedelics:

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education…fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.

To use a phrase from his book, we have mistaken the menu for the meal!

So what kind of different organisational structure would help us achieve this balance? Let me quote Illich, as he hints the answer:

Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick and to work without interference from a teacher… Increasingly, educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations,…”

– and to this, today I could add ‘from social media and the Internet’.

In other words, although the education-industry link is important, we need to realise that education itself is a lot more than this role. In order to capture the other important goals of education, we must broad-base it. Education is not something that happens only in the syllabus; it happens outside it, too. It is not something that is destined to enter only the workplace; it enters our private lives and community life, too. In fact, its true value lies therein. We need to rediscover this balance – this broader concept of education.

It is when we begin to see the true role of education in this way that we can begin to see sense in Tagore’s ideas. So now, it is time to turn to him.

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Features

Is power devolution under JVP-NPP a political daydream?

Published

24 hours ago

2026/06/7

Thilina Walpola

Former President Chandrika Kumaratunga

The JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva’s recent remarks at a news conference in Jaffna where he ruled out the possibility of holding provincial council elections this year has been widely reported and widely criticized. About the same time there was another media event in Jaffna that went largely unnoticed and unreported outside Jaffna. What was said at the second media event may carry far more political implications than Tilvin Silva’s election timing talk. A veteran Tamil political participant made the startling yet not implausible statement that the prospect of having political devolution under the JVP-NPP government is becoming “a daydream”. The statement was made by Dr. K. Vigneswaran, who served as Provincial Secretary to the only North-East Provincial Council Government that was elected under the auspices of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Dr. Vigneswaran is a Professional Civil Engineer who studied at Royal College, graduated with First Class Honours in Engineering in 1964, and went on to complete a pioneering PhD at the university of Waterloo, Canada, applying the finite element method (FEM) in the field of Geotechnical Engineering. His engineering career has always been at the Irrigation Department where he rose to a Deputy Director. That was when the department was in its golden years, and Vigneswaran was known for his technical mentorship, meticulous administrative skills, and for knowing the fine print of everything. While at the Irrigation Department, Vigneswaran married Ramya de Silva, a fellow irrigation Engineer. After 1983, Vigneswaran became a fulltime political activist and a powerful resource in Tamil politics, but with unwavering commitment to nonviolence, democracy and federalism. The family moved first to India and then Canada, and Vigneswaran has been shuttling between Canada and Sri Lanka.

Devolution: Tortuous Trajectory

Since 1987, the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, and the 13th Amendment, Vigneswaran has been a permanent fixture in all the politics and institutional dynamic of implementing 13A and establishing provincial councils. He served as Secretary to the only elected Provincial Government for the Northern and Eastern Provinces. After 1994 and the election of Chandrika Kumaratunga as President, Vigneswaran became a key participant in all the civil society efforts and government initiatives to restore the PCs and implement 13A, both during the Kumaratunga presidency and the succeeding administrations of Mahinda Rajapaksa and the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe duo.

Devolution efforts stalled after the election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who in so many words declared that he had no time for 13A or PCs in his presidential agenda, whatever it was. Only that his whole agenda turned out to be a wholesale disaster for the country. Already by then, all the nine Provincial Councils had fallen into abeyance with the cancellation of the 1988 PC elections by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe duo, with the TNA standing by. The abeyance continues under the JVP-NPP government with no apparent end in sight after Tilvin de Silva’s statement in Jaffna.

I say all this to provide the proper context for Vigneswaran’s statement in Jaffna that the prospects for power devolution under the JVP-NPP government are becoming a political daydream. He said something else as well: that of all the government leaders he has encountered over the years, the only leader who has been genuinely sincere about power devolution is former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, and no one else. I am constrained to add that the insincere category would include Ranil Wickremesinghe, who for all his handsome promises, never matched any of them with experiential sincerity. The present JVP-NPP government still has time to show that they are not an insincere lot.

It is not my purpose to agree with or question Dr. Vigneswaran’s assertions, but to use them as cue and context to comment on the widening mismatch between the JVP-NPP government’s promises and its practices on the matter of power devolution and the restoration of the PC system. With a stalling economy, rising prices and external shocks, it is obvious that the government has all the economic matters to worry about, but that does not mean that it can ignore all the other government responsibilities. No government is put in power to solve a single problem or address a single issue. It is in the nature of governments to deal with multiple problems with varying priorities. Otherwise you could have a single cabinet minister to deal with one problem at a time. That is never going to be the case.

The economy is of course the top of mind priority for the government even as it is a top of mind concern for the people. Even on the economic front, the government is holding steady but is showing little progress. And there are other government initiatives where political accountability will call for answers: to wit, the catchall Clean Sri Lanka programme, ambitious educational reforms, contentious energy sector reforms and, yes, power devolution as well as the overpromised constitutional reforms. Not to mention the sprawling unforced errors over substandard coal imports, foreign exchange fraud, and the chronic neglect of developing the renewable energy sector. Correcting these fields of errors may require a separate ministry for each.

Devolution: Daydream or Deliverable

On the PC system and constitutional reform, there has been scant progress in spite of handsome promises. On both, the government is inadvertently deepening the holes that it had dug itself into through indifference, inaction or procrastination, or all of them and more. In the matter of devolution and provincial councils, the government can simply defuse the situation by directing the Election Commission to conduct elections at the earliest opportunity that is logistically possible. Making his statement in Jaffna, Mr. Tilvin Silva alluded to funding shortfall and legal complications as reasons for the necessity to postpone PC elections until next year. Neither reason holds water.

The funding question would seem to have been put to rest by the statement of Health Minister and Cabinet Spokesman Nalinda Jayatissa, presumably reflecting cabinet consensus, that there are no funding issues and if needed additional funds could be arranged through supplementary allocations. It is also disingenuous to cite legal complications as a reason. The so called legal complications arose because of the collective stupidity of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe parliament that included the then miniscule NPP and the politically-lost TNA. The JVP-NPP has now ballooned from a handful MPs to a two-thirds majority and it can expedite any legislation that it wants to enable the PC elections to be held without delays.

Alternatively, the elections can be held under the old arrangement of proportional representation with assurance by political parties to honour their commitment to fielding more female candidates. Already at a gathering of all political parties, including the NPP (but not the JVP), and civil society groups, convened by People’s Action For Free & Fair Elections (PAFFREL), the political parties jointly committed to a 25% quota for women and youth under the old electoral system. The ongoing parliamentary committee exercise studying the legal matter, headed by the overstretched Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, is also an unnecessary red herring. The Election Commission is ready to go under whatever law or electoral system that is before it. So, there is no reason to hide behind legal complications to further delay the PC elections.

Somewhat amusingly, Public and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananda Wijepala has trotted out the argument that the NPP government has already conducted two nationwide elections during the one and a half years it has been in office, and that unlike the Ranil Wickremesinghe government the JVP-NPP is not in the business “to delay elections for our personal benefit” – whatever that means. Unfortunately, the good minister is missing the point. The question is not how many elections can the JVP-NPP hold in how many years, but how many years do people in the provinces have to wait before they vote in another provincial election? How many more years? That really is the question.

We know the current situation in the provinces. There are provincial governments but no elected provincial councils. The government administration in every province is being run by the President of the Republic through his handpicked governors and unelected government officials. This is a travesty of democracy and the euthanizing of the PC system. Already under 13A, the office of the provincial governors has been constitutionally and legally compared to the office of the Governors of old Ceylon who represented the monarch in what was then a crown colony. The irony is that a JVP-NPP President may have inadvertently positioned himself as the monarch of all he provincially surveys, courtesy of the Thirteenth Amendment!

The JVP was in the forefront of the litigation that caused the demerger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. If Dr. Vigneswaran’s assertion were to prove correct, a potential dissolution of the provincial system under the JVP-NPP government would be the consummation of the JVP’s original opposition to the introduction of the provincial council system itself. The whole system may not be eradicated, but it could be devoured of its democratic essence while preserving the administrative shell as the medium for the country’s president to overreach into the provinces. That would be worse than a daydream, a real nightmare.

by Rajan Philips ✍️

Features

Rewiring Brain: Meditation to Break the Cycle of Craving

Published

24 hours ago

2026/06/7

Thilina Walpola

“Craving begets sorrow, craving begets fear. For him who is free from craving there is no sorrow; how can there be fear for him,” Dhammapada verse 216 states. The mental factor craving, Tanha in Pali, is central to Buddhist Teaching, as its ultimate goal is the cessation or extinction of it—tanhakkhaya. Even though Tanha is translated as craving here, it can sometimes mislead modern readers into thinking tanha only refers to extreme or physical addictions. Just as with any Pali term, it has broad meanings. Venerable Walpola Rahula describes it as “thirst” or unceasing wanting, one of the deep-rooted proclivities or latent tendencies (anusaya) of life (Rahula 1959), without which life as we know would not exist.

Even though the Buddha recognized this natural phenomenon two and a half millennia ago, it was only in the late 20th century that science took note of it and gave it a captivating term—the Hedonic Treadmill. The advantage of this empirical investigation to us Buddhists is that it provides a way to gain penetrative, experiential comprehension (anubodha) of this concept using the vernacular of this technology-savvy age—an alternative to struggling with the language of a bygone era.

These investigations have revealed that there are no hard-to-comprehend metaphysical or mysterious elements involved with this phenomenon; it is a biochemical process fundamental to sustaining life. What is more, an effort to grasp this concept would be well within the goals of Vipassana meditation described in the Sutta Pitaka, incorporating the four elements of investigation: body (kayanupassana), sensations (vedananupassana), mind (chittanupassana), and natural laws (dhammanupassana).

Vipassana and modern science

Vipassana meditation is an in-depth exploration of how humans perceive the world, gain knowledge, and interact with themselves and the environment. Knowing this with wisdom allows one to lead a harmonious way of life (samadhi), a condition conducive to curbing the “thirst” and achieving the Buddhist ideal. The goal of modern science is also to investigate life, but humanity has often used that knowledge to increase material wealth and comfort, providing only lip service to spirituality on the fringe.

An attitude that tends to ignore the consequences of wanting more and more – thirst, potentially endangering the planet. However, that does not prevent us from using scientific information as and aid or a tool to grasp Buddhist concepts. The scientific method bears parallels to the Buddhist approach: it is based on causality (paticcasamuppada), empirical verification (ehipassiko), systematic observation (meditation), and rejecting dogma and beliefs. The primary difference is simply the vocabulary used.

The process of perception: five aggregates

Our five external sense organs receive data (vedana) containing information on the environment: Eyes: receive light, Ears: receive sound, Skin: senses physical contact and temperature, Nose & Tongue: sense chemical properties of substances. The data received by the sense organs is transmitted to the brain, where it is registered as neural networks (sanna). Neural networks, which are interconnected groups of nerve cells (neurons) can be viewed as mind-readable QR codes.

The activity of the brain, or mind (mano), processes this data and converts them into actionable information (sankhara). Modern neuroscience and psychology have made great advances in understanding these processes at the molecular level. This process allows the individual to become aware of their environment, build an autobiographical memory or the notion of a self (atta), and take actions to protect and perpetuate life.

The Pali term vinnana refers to the collection of information committed to memory. Translating vinnana as “consciousness” can be confusing, as the latter often refers to all brain activities. All physical phenomena that sense organs encounter and the mental constructs (sankhara) are referred to as Rupa. This activity of mind forms the basis of all knowledge, representing the entire world as perceived by the individual. This process is what the Teaching refers to as the Five Aggregates (pancakkhanda). The critical takeaway is that the world we perceive is merely a mental construct. While an objective world exists, our sense organs have limitations in seeing it—a fact easily realized through the hundreds of illusions used for entertainment.

Evolution and emotion

The evolutionary purpose of this data processing mechanism is to enable living beings to respond to environmental factors for survival. The psychological and physiological state that arises prior to acting is called emotion. Primarily, emotions can be of three kinds: desire (loba) – seeing a new phone causes an urge to buy it, even though the current one works fine; aversion (dosha) – encountering a vicious dog triggers a “fight or flight” response; delusion (moha) or illusion – an unanswered message to a loved one triggers worry or speculation. Thus, tanha or thirst represents how we connect to the world in its entirety; it can be desire, aversion, and delusion, not merely simple greed. Consequently, these are natural phenomena beyond our immediate control, which are intended to sustain life. In other words, emotions are the forerunner to volitions or intentions, which the Teaching defines as kamma.

The biochemistry of craving

Emotions result from the interaction between the nervous system and biochemicals known as neurotransmitters and neuromodulators (e.g., dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, GABA, glutamate, acetylcholine, and endorphins). Just as the Buddha’s simile of two bundles of bamboo supporting each other describes, these two processes are interdependent and co-arising. Every thought or emotional state corresponds to patterns of neural firing. When neurons fire, they release these chemicals into synapses, influencing how one feels and acts. This release perturbs the body’s normal balance, or homeostasis. Once an action is complete, these chemicals are reabsorbed, and the body returns to its baseline.

Return to baseline is essential for survival. For example, if we stay satisfied with just one meal forever, we could not sustain life. Nature has developed another mechanism to prevent us from being satisfied – we also habituate. In the case of dopamine, the brain adapts by reducing the response to the same stimulus. To get the same level of satisfaction with repeated experiences, the amounts of neurotransmitters needed keeps increasing. This leads to the cycle of craving and dissatisfaction—the Hedonic Treadmill. You “run” toward happiness on the treadmill, but it does not take you anywhere, leaving you in the same emotionally unsatisfactory state, wanting more and more.

Breaking the cycle

This explains why achievements and possessions do not bring permanent happiness, and lead to a cycle of struggle, addiction, crime, and other ills of society. For Buddhists, it also explains why we cling to meaningless rituals. The Dhamma captured this complex phenomenon in the Four Noble Truths: pleasant experiences are impermanent (anicca), leading to grasping (tanha) and unsatisfactoriness (dukkha). The remedy is the Eightfold Path that involves wisdom (panna), conduct (sila), and harmony (samadhi).

Neuroplasticity and the point of liberation

While we cannot stop the sense organs from receiving stimulation (vedana) and sending them to brain, the mind can be developed to prevent vedana from leading to tanha. This is the “point of liberation,” the seventh link in the paticcasamuppada formula. We may not have free will, but we have ‘Free Won’t’ or the ability to say no to the natural tendency to act upon stimuli. We can rewire our neural connections to do so. This ability can be cultivated by practice and repetition, and neuroscience refers to it as neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change with experience.

The natural tendency of the brain is to strengthen frequently used neural networks while weakening and eliminating lesser used networks and building new ones as needed. This is known as neural plasticity or rewiring the brain. As described in the Eight-fold Path, the way to weaken and eliminate dopamine-driven neural networks includes three aspects. First, the process leading to thirst must be understood. One must engage in sila – activities and thoughts that cultivate Metta: loving-kindness and goodwill, Karuna: compassion, Mudita: appreciative joy, and Upekkha: equanimity, emotional stability, calmness, and evenness of mind in the face of gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, pleasure, and pain. That must be done with wisdom, ritualistic behavior does not strengthen the correct neural networks. These activities promote a “cocktail” of oxytocin, serotonin, and GABA, subduing the role of dopamine and helping us step off the Hedonic Treadmill. This leads to a tranquil state of mind and a harmonious existence – samadhi. Again, it is an interdependent, co-arising process that improves upon repetition. Using mind altering substances hijacks this process, thus the need for adhering to the Fifth Precept.

The goal of Vipassana is to understand this process and train the mind to say “no” to tanha. It is not just about sitting on a mat; it requires developing a lifestyle that maintains homeostasis or harmony, samadhi, at every moment. Pali term bhavana means the development of wisdom and insight. In modern vernacular – rewiring brain. This model must be assessed for its efficacy by the individual and realize the benefits by themselves –ehipassiko; knowledge without practice does not work. According to what the Buddha taught, that is the path to cessation or extinction of craving – tanhakkhaya, the supreme goal.

by Geewananda Gunawardana, Ph.D. ✍️

Features

‘Spectrum’ Art Exhibition Showcases Emerging Talent at Lionel Wendt

Published

24 hours ago

2026/06/7

Thilina Walpola

A new art exhibition, titled Spectrum ,will be held at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre on the 20th and 21st of June 2026, bringing together a collection of works by ten emerging artists.

Athsara Wijegunawardena

Neha Thirumavalavan

Dillai Joseph

Wasantha Siriwardena

Champika Dias

Nipun Dias

Dr. Prasanna Siriwardena

Kalhari Perera

Siromi Samarasinghe

Chandana Illankone

All ten artists have trained under the guidance of renowned Sri Lankan artist Royden Gibbs, and this exhibition marks an important point in their individual journeys.

Dr. Prasanna Siriwardena

Spectrum brings together a mix of styles, subjects and approaches, giving visitors a chance to experience a wide range of work in one place. The exhibition will include pieces in watercolors, soft pastels, oils and charcoal, reflecting both the discipline and personal direction of each artist. The work ranges from scenery and portraits to still life and studies of the human form, offering different ways of seeing and interpreting familiar subjects.

: Nipun Dias

: Wasantha Siriwardena

Dillai Joseph

Although they share the same mentor, each artist presents a distinct point of view. The result is a show that feels varied yet connected, with each piece carrying its own character and intent. It is this balance that gives Spectrum its identity.

The exhibition aims to support and highlight emerging talent within Sri Lanka’s art scene, while also creating a space where artists and audiences can connect. Visitors will find work that shifts between quiet observation and more expressive pieces, making it an engaging experience for both seasoned collectors and those simply interested in art.

Spectrum is expected to draw art lovers, collectors, students and members of the wider creative community. It also offers an opportunity to discover and support new artists at an early stage in their careers.

Open to the public over two days, Spectrum invites visitors to experience a range of work in a venue that has long been part of Colombo’s cultural landscape.