Editing Don Charles Wijewardena (section)

== 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.<ref>Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja (1992). ''Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka''. University of Chicago Press, p. 38.</ref> 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.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 38.</ref> 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.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 38, n. 1; p. 44.</ref> 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.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 38, n. 1.</ref>

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.<ref>"[[wikipedia:Vimala Wijewardene|Vimala Wijewardene]]". ''Wikipedia''. Retrieved 28 July 2026. This detail rests on an online tertiary source in the absence of fuller archival biographies of the couple, and editors are encouraged to substitute a firmer citation if one becomes available.</ref> 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.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 38.</ref> 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.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 38; 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, p. 71.</ref>

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.<ref>Bretfeld (2025), "D.C. Wijewardena", p. 71.</ref> 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.<ref>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, title page; Bretfeld (2025), "D.C. Wijewardena", p. 70.</ref> 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.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 40.</ref> 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.<ref>"[[wikipedia:Vimala Wijewardene|Vimala Wijewardene]]". ''Wikipedia''. Retrieved 28 July 2026; Bretfeld (2025), "D.C. Wijewardena", pp. 71–72.</ref>

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.<ref>"[[wikipedia:Vimala Wijewardene|Vimala Wijewardene]]". ''Wikipedia''. Retrieved 28 July 2026; Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 38, n. 1.</ref> 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.<ref>"[[wikipedia:Assassination of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike|Assassination of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike]]". ''Wikipedia''. Retrieved 28 July 2026.</ref> 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.<ref>"[[wikipedia:Assassination of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike|Assassination of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike]]". ''Wikipedia''. Retrieved 28 July 2026.</ref> 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.<ref>"[[wikipedia:D. R. Wijewardena|D.R. Wijewardena]]". ''Wikipedia''. Retrieved 28 July 2026.</ref>