Don Charles Wijewardena

Don Charles Wijewardena (1892–1956), who published under the sanskritized pen name Vijayavardhana, was a Sinhalese Buddhist lay writer and activist in late colonial and early independent Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). A member of the wealthy and politically influential Wijewardena family, he served on the Buddhist Committee of Inquiry and is remembered chiefly for a single, sprawling book, Dharma-Vijaya, or The Revolt in the Temple (1953), which fused Sinhala Buddhist nationalist historiography with an eclectic reading of Marx, Lenin, and European socialist theory. The book argued that the saṅgha's ancient communal practices anticipated Communism by more than two millennia, that Soviet-style Communism should be rejected for its violence and materialism while an evolutionary "Democratic Socialism" was the natural economic complement to a restored Buddhist state, and that the saṅgha itself needed thoroughgoing institutional reform. Widely credited with helping to articulate the ideology behind the 1956 electoral "Buddhist Revolution," Wijewardena is a minor but distinctive figure in the history of Buddhist-socialist synthesis in South Asia, even as his book's majoritarian nationalism has left it a contested legacy.

Biography

Don Charles Wijewardena was born in 1892, the fifth of seven sons of Muhandiram Don Philip Wijewardena, a timber, brick, and river-sand merchant who had made a considerable fortune supplying material for construction in Colombo and for the port's breakwater, and of Helena (née Dep) Weerasinghe, whose own father had prospered as an arrack renter. The family's wealth was thus mercantile rather than hereditary, but by the early twentieth century it had become one of the most influential in the country: Don Charles's brother, Don Richard (D.R.) Wijewardena, built the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon ("Lake House") into the island's dominant press empire, publishing the Daily News in English and the Dinamina in Sinhala, and giving the family extraordinary influence over public discourse. Don Charles's mother had contributed generously to the restoration of the historic Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara outside Colombo, and Don Charles, together with another brother, Don Walter, continued the family's involvement with the temple and with Buddhist affairs more broadly. At the time, the temple's chief incumbent was Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, a politically active monk who would later be convicted as the principal conspirator in the 1959 assassination of Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Unlike D.R., Don Charles never became a public figure of comparable stature, and the Sinhalese scholar Stanley Tambiah, one of the few academics to discuss him at length, describes him simply as politically conservative.

In 1924, following the death of his first wife, Don Charles married her younger sister, Vimala (born Vimalavathi Silva), then sixteen years old; the couple had three children. Wijewardena received an English "public school" education in Ceylon followed by further study in England, and his writing displays the wide, autodidactic reading in Western philosophy, history, and political theory that this background afforded him. He served as a member of the Buddhist Committee of Inquiry, the lay-monastic body appointed by the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress that produced the influential 1956 report The Betrayal of Buddhism, documenting the disadvantages allegedly suffered by Buddhist institutions and education under colonial rule.

Wijewardena had already circulated substantial parts of his central argument quasi-anonymously in 1946, identifying himself only as an editor rather than as the author. He drew these materials together in 1953 into Dharma-Vijaya, or The Revolt in the Temple, published simultaneously in Sinhala and English versions under the pen name Vijayavardhana to lend the work an air of historicist authority, and timed to "commemorate 2,500 years of the Land, the Race, and the Faith," that is, the traditional Buddhist jubilee (Buddha Jayanthi) due to fall in 1956. Tambiah judges the book important not for any great originality but as a synthesis, by "the wealthy educated Buddhist layman," of arguments already circulating among activist monks such as Walpola Rahula. Wijewardena died in 1956, the same year that the electoral coalition of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike swept to power on a wave of Sinhala Buddhist nationalist sentiment in a victory widely remembered as the "Buddhist Revolution" that his book has been credited with helping to prepare ideologically.

He did not live to see the aftermath. His widow, Vimala Wijewardene, entered the new government in June 1956 as Minister of Health, becoming Ceylon's first female cabinet minister, and moved to the portfolio of Minister of Local Government and Housing in September 1958. She held that latter post when, on 25 September 1959, Bandaranaike was shot at his private residence by the monk Talduwe Somarama; investigation and trial established that Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, the Kelaniya incumbent with whom the Wijewardena family had long been associated as lay patrons, was the conspiracy's principal instigator. Vimala Wijewardene was herself arrested and charged as a co-conspirator in November 1959; she was discharged before the Supreme Court trial and a 1963 Commission of Inquiry made no adverse finding against her beyond faulting her general conduct, but the affair ended her political career. The episode, together with the family's long connection to Kelaniya, has likely contributed to the reluctance of Sri Lankan public memory to engage with Wijewardena's own biography, notwithstanding the durable influence of his book. His nephew (the son of his sister Agnes Helen and Justice Eugene Wilfred Jayewardene), J.R. Jayewardene, became Prime Minister in 1977 and the country's first executive president in 1978, presiding over a decisive turn away from the state-led economic model that The Revolt in the Temple had championed and toward open-market liberalization, even as the book's cultural and religious nationalism remained embedded in state ideology.

Ideas

The Revolt in the Temple is organized as a modernized retelling of the classical Buddhist narrative of the sāsana's decline and restoration: a golden age in which Sinhalese kings ruled as Buddhist dharma-rājas is followed by colonial catastrophe, understood as the near-extinguishing of Buddhism by British rule and Christian missions, and the book closes by demanding the sāsana's restoration under a modern democratic state. This nationalist frame, and its argument for Buddhism's constitutional "foremost place," is the aspect of the book for which Wijewardena is best remembered, and it is not in itself a radical position; Tambiah, one of the few scholars to assess Wijewardena directly, characterizes him as a political conservative whose book's "insistent denunciation of Marxism and the left" reflects his class background rather than any socialist commitment.

Read closely, however, the book's economic argument is considerably more ambivalent, and its final third (Part III, "Man and the State," together with the closing chapter "Towards a Better World," which Wijewardena opens with Marx's eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach — "the philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways; the thing is, however, to change it") sets out a genuine, if idiosyncratic, attempt to fuse Buddhism with left economic theory. Discussing the Soviet Union at length, Wijewardena distinguishes sharply between Communism as a spiritual ideal and Marxism as a materialist philosophy of history, arguing that "Buddhism and Communism in their essence and nature are spiritual" where Marxism is not, and that the Buddha himself had preached a form of Communism "2400 years before Karl Marx was born" through the Vinaya rule that alms given to the monastic community (saṅgha) be shared according to need. On this reading the saṅgha's traditional communal ownership of property is itself a working, voluntary "Buddhist Communism," offered as a model superior to the coercive, atheistic Communism of the Soviet state. He rejects Leninist revolution chiefly for its violence rather than its economics, writing that "a large number of us are admirers of Russia, and, so far as we can see, we in Ceylon have a lot to learn from her," while insisting that Ceylon should not have to pay Russia's price in suffering; the Soviet experiment, he concludes, will eventually give way to "Democratic Socialism," a "final solution" located between Communism and capitalism.

The chapter "Towards a Better World" develops this evolutionary socialism into a concrete economic program for Ceylon. Wijewardena endorses Marx's argument, drawn from an unpublished essay he cites via the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, that land nationalization is the precondition for ending capitalist exploitation, and he condemns private landownership in terms borrowed from Rousseau and Proudhon, arguing that "Communism as public control of private property has always existed and must be present in every culture." He proposes a gradual, constitutional transition — compensated nationalization of banking, transport, insurance, and heavy industry under the right of eminent domain, cooperative rather than collective farming suited to Ceylon's smallholding peasantry, profit-sharing co-partnership in industry, and a permanent National Planning Board to coordinate production according to need — explicitly presenting this cooperative economy as an extension into secular society of "the Buddha's idea of community in ownership and sharing which is the basis on which His Order of the Sangha is established."

Wijewardena's radicalism is not confined to economics. He turns the same reformist logic on the saṅgha itself, arguing in the book's titular chapter that the monastic order "has lost its grip" and is "daily deteriorating materially and spiritually," and calling for its wholesale reorganization: monks should be trained in social service alongside doctrine, secluded pursuit of individual Nirvana should give way to "a life of self-forgetful activity," and Buddhism should shed dogma and ritual to become what he calls a "Social Religion" open to anyone living a moral life regardless of temple affiliation. He casts the Buddha himself as history's paradigmatic "rebel" against reactionary convention, and frames feudalism's historical replacement by capitalism, and capitalism's coming replacement by socialism, as instances of the same Buddhist law of impermanence (anicca) that licenses — indeed demands — the saṅgha's transformation.

The overall picture is thus of a lay Buddhist nationalist who is simultaneously majoritarian in his politics of religion and genuinely engaged, on his own idiosyncratic terms, with the vocabulary of socialism and institutional saṅgha reform: he rejects revolutionary Marxism's materialism and violence while annexing its critique of capitalism, its vision of common ownership, and even its rhetoric of praxis to a specifically Buddhist and nationalist project. This tension between a conservative communal politics and a redistributive, reformist economics is precisely what later scholarship identifies as characteristic of the wider mid-century Sinhala Buddhist revivalist milieu from which Wijewardena's book emerged.

Writings

• Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana), D. C. (1953). Dharma-Vijaya, or The Revolt in the Temple: Composed to Commemorate 2500 Years of the Land, the Race and the Faith. Colombo: Sinha Publications. [Wijewardena's only book-length work and main surviving basis for his ideas. Combines a nationalist historiography of the "sāsana's decline" with an extended discussion of Soviet Communism, Marxist economics, and a program of "Democratic Socialism" and saṅgha reform for Ceylon. First published in parallel Sinhala and English editions; substantial portions had already circulated quasi-anonymously in 1946.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Bretfeld, Sven (2025). "D. C. Wijewardena: The Revolt in the Temple (1953)". In: Kleine, Christoph, Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz, & Hubert Seiwert (Eds.), Global Secularity: A Sourcebook, Volume III: Buddhist Asia: 70–94. De Gruyter. [An open-access introduction and annotated excerpt covering the book's nationalist and religio-political argument; the best available scholarly orientation to the text as a whole, though it engages only briefly with the economic chapters emphasized here.]
• Seneviratne, H. L. (1999). The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press. [A wider anthropological history of the politicization of the twentieth-century Sri Lankan saṅgha. Does not discuss Wijewardena by name at any length, but supplies essential background on the milieu of activist and "social service" monks (including the Vidyalankara and Kelaniya factions) within which his book intervened.]
• Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja (1992). Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press. [Contains the fullest available biographical and analytical treatment of Wijewardena (pp. 38–40), situating The Revolt in the Temple within the Buddhist Committee of Inquiry and the 1956 "social revolution," and assessing the book as a derivative but influential synthesis of themes already current among activist monks.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Don Charles Wijewardena". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 28 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Don_Charles_Wijewardena.