ROLL OF bUDDHIST MONKS IN SRI LANKA

The monks who composed the Mahavamsa asserted that the Buddha had entrusted the care of pure Buddhism to the Aryan Sinhalese on this sacred island after driving off the aboriginal "demons" living there; from then on, whenever the island was invaded, it was to be reconquered in the name of Buddhism. The central figure of this "reconquest mythos" is the young warrior Dutugemunu (161-137 B.C.), accompanied by 500 Buddhist monks and a monk-general, as he mounts a relic of the Buddha on the end of his spear and sets out to reconquer Sri Lanka from the South Indian kings. After slaughtering thousands, Dutugemunu is stricken with guilt, and dread of the karmic consequences of his acts. But monks in attendence consoled him that since there had only been one man who had taken Buddhist precepts and another who had taken refuge in the Three Jewels, there had therefore been only one and a half "human" victims.

The origination of a historical literature in Ceylon in the existing form was an intentional act of political relevance. Its object was the propagation of a concept of national identity closely connected with a religious tradition, i.e. the identity of the Sinhalese Buddhists. This idea has shaped the history of Ceylon from the days of the earliest chroniclers to the present day in its particular way. Without the impact of this idea, the remarkable continuity of the cultural as well as of the political traditions in spite of the vicissitudes in the history of the island would have been impossible. Its impact has at the same time, entirely changed the Asokan ideology (the original model for king-Sangha-people unity). For Asoka, the idea of a non-denominational welfare-state was born from the inner conflict of the king resulting from his repentence of the war he had made before his conversion to the Buddhist religion.

VILLAGE MONK

Village A can be seen as a shining rural monk leadership model. The bhikkhu there had, in 1974, at the age of 18, left the town temple where he had been ordained and studied, and in which he had familial inheritance rights, to live alone in a small lean-to hut in this extremely isolated, poor and inhospitable village.

The villagers were low-caste people, and all of the forty families, living in a narrow plateau near the top of a mountain, practiced just-barely-above -subsistence rice paddy and slash-and-burn cultivation. They depended for necessities on what extra income their women could bring in from tea work on 3 a nearby estate. Almost all had been born in the village, though some of the youngest mothers had received pre-natal care at the clinic at the foot of the mountain, a two-hour climb down a narrow mountain path. The town beyond the clinic is where the villagers trek every other day to buy those foodstuffs that they can afford, those which aren't already available at one of the three small shops which perch on the path up to Village A. Each household provided meals to the temple on a rotating schedule devised by the monk to spread his burden more equally.