Editing Udakandawela Siri Saranankara (section)

== Biography ==

Saranankara was born on 7 January 1902 in a village near Gampaha, in what was then British Ceylon.<ref>Pieris, Kamalika (2020, April 10). "[https://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2020/04/10/uda-kendawala-siri-saranankara/  Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara]". ''LankaWeb''. ([https://web.archive.org/web/20260729044516/https://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2020/04/10/uda-kendawala-siri-saranankara/ archived]).</ref> Orphaned in early childhood by the deaths of both parents, he was raised by an elder sister.<ref>Abeysinghe, W.A. (1993). "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara: The Veteran Peace Champion". In: ''Essays on Buddhism and Buddhist Culture'': 54–64. S. Godage & Brothers, at 54. Reproduced, in a lightly revised form, as "[https://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2018/05/18/ven-udakendawala-siri-saranankara-the-legendary-freedom-fighter/  Ven. Udakendawala Siri Saranankara, the Legendary Freedom-Fighter]", ''Sunday Observer'', reprinted ''LankaWeb'', 18 May 2018, ([https://web.archive.org/web/20250119125029/https://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2018/05/18/ven-udakendawala-siri-saranankara-the-legendary-freedom-fighter/ archived]).</ref> He took novice ordination in his early teens at the village temple, then moved to the Kospillewa Vihara near Gampaha, and was briefly sent to the Paramananda Pirivena in Kotahena for higher education, a placement he disliked and abandoned.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara"; Abeysinghe (1993), "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara", 54–55.</ref> His first published writing, a critique of the feudal caste system among the Kandyan Sinhalese, appeared in ''Sinhala Jatiya'', the newspaper edited by Anagārika Dharmapāla.<ref>Abeysinghe (1993), "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara", 55.</ref> Still in Ceylon, he contributed to ''Swaraj'', a political journal edited by the labor leader A.E. Goonesinha and P. Givendrasinghe, alongside the monk Boose Dhammarakhita, in the context of the trade-union militancy Goonesinha led through the 1920s.<ref>Jayawardena, Kumari (1979). "Bhikkus in Revolt". Four-part series. ''Lanka Guardian'' 2.2 (15 May): 16–18; 2.4 (15 June): 13–14; 2.5 (1 July): 10–11; 2.6 (15 July): 7–9, at part 3, p. 11.</ref> In 1922, when Ceylon's Legislative Council unofficials staged a walkout in protest at government policy, Saranankara publicly attacked the Kandyan member T.B. Panabokke for refusing to join it, provoking a sharp reply that dismissed Saranankara himself as a "wolf in sheep's clothing" and no credit to the Buddha.<ref>Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 11.</ref>

In April 1921, at nineteen, Saranankara went to India as an intended Mahabodhi Society missionary under Dharmapāla's sponsorship, but enrolled instead at Tagore's Santiniketan, where he studied comparative religion, political science, and history, learned Bengali, and came into contact with Tagore, the Bengali renaissance, the Indian National Movement, and Bengali communists.<ref>Abeysinghe (1993), "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara", 55–57; Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 11.</ref> He traveled to Chittagong, then a predominantly Buddhist district, to organize secretly among Buddhist peasants alongside the young Chittagong revolutionary group, and witnessed militant anti-colonial actions at first hand.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara"; Abeysinghe (1993), "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara", 58.</ref> Having passed the London Matriculation, he enrolled at Calcutta City College in 1931 and was elected president of its student union, drawing continuous police surveillance; in March 1932 he was arrested and jailed in Calcutta for aiding "subversive" Bengali radicals, and in prison met Subhas Chandra Bose and members of the Communist Party of India.<ref>Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 11; Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja (1992). ''Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka''. University of Chicago Press, pp. 15–16.</ref> On release he was banned from Bengal and exiled to Benares for nearly four years, where he formed a Bengali Literary Circle and, in 1936, led a hartal procession against a visiting British governor; he was deported to Ceylon that April.<ref>Abeysinghe (1993), "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara", 59–60.</ref>

Back in Ceylon, Saranankara joined the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and sat on its Central Committee, using the temple sermon (bana) as a vehicle for socialist propaganda against conservative politicians.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara"; Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 16.</ref> He wrote a Sinhala book arguing that Sri Lanka needed Sama Samajism (democratic socialism), which occasioned a published reply, ''Communist Falsehoods'' (1938), from the nationalist writer Piyadasa Sirisena.<ref>Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 11.</ref> When the LSSP split in 1940, Saranankara went with the pro-Moscow faction that became the Communist Party, and that year presided over the founding meeting of the Communist-led Ceylon Trade Union Federation.<ref>Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 11; Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara".</ref> From 1941 until his death he edited the Sinhala monthly ''Navalokaya'' ("New World"), which ran for twenty-five years and became a vehicle for Marxist commentary on domestic and international affairs, from the Soviet Union and China to the Vietnam War.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara".</ref> He was jailed a second time, from 1942 to 1944, for a seditious wartime speech at Tiranagama, and insisted on wearing the sangha robe rather than prison garb, a request the authorities granted.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara"; Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 11.</ref> At the Communist Party's founding in 1943 he became its first president; Jayawardena's contemporary account describes him afterward as the party's vice-president, though Tambiah, drawing on the same account at second hand, elsewhere calls him vice-chairman, a discrepancy resolved here in favor of Jayawardena's own, earlier wording.<ref>Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 11; Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', pp. 100–101.</ref> A surviving photograph from around the time of the 1937 Bracegirdle deportation controversy shows him alongside Selina Perera, Vernon Gunasekara, and Dr. N.M. Perera, placing him within the LSSP's core leadership circle from an early date.<ref>Jayawardena (1979), "Bhikkus in Revolt", part 3, p. 10.</ref> In January 1946, Saranankara was named, alongside Balangoda Ānanda Maitreya, Naravila Dhammaratana, and Walpola Rahula, among the leftist-leaning monks whose views publicly angered D.S. Senanayake, an episode that confirms his continued association with the wider left-monastic milieu even though he was not himself part of the Vidyālaṅkāra generation that dominated the "political bhikkhu" controversy proper later that year.<ref>Uduwadage, Pradeep, & Prabhash Siriwardhana (n.d.). "Āgama saha Dēśapālanaya" ["Religion and Politics"], 4–5. Authors' names reconstructed from a non-standard Sinhala font encoding and not independently verified; publication venue and exact date not established.</ref>

After independence Saranankara turned to the international peace movement, founding the Lanka Sama Mandalaya, Ceylon's branch of the World Peace Council, around 1949–50, and organizing 50,000 Sri Lankan signatures for the 1950 Stockholm Appeal against nuclear weapons.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara".</ref> In 1957 he presided over a World Peace Council conference in Colombo, the first held in Asia, attended by 400 delegates from 69 countries and focused on Buddhist objections to nuclear testing, and that year he also publicly offered, in a radio broadcast, to travel to Christmas Island and sacrifice his life in protest at British nuclear tests there. He received the Soviet Union's International Lenin Peace Prize the same year, 1957, resolving a discrepancy in the secondary literature (Abeysinghe gives 1958) in favor of the date given by Pieris and confirmed independently by published prize-recipient lists.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara"; Wikipedia: [[wikipedia:Lenin Peace Prize|Lenin Peace Prize]]" (accessed: 29 Juky 2026),  listing "Udakandawala Saranankara Thero (b. 1902)" among the 1957 recipients; cf. Abeysinghe (1993), "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara", 63, which gives 1958.</ref> He went on to lead Ceylon's branch of the Asia-Africa Solidarity Movement and presided over the second conference of the Asian and African Writers' Union in Cairo in 1962, was active in support of Vietnam as secretary of the Lanka Buddhist Vietnam Society, and in 1964 helped found a multiethnic Sinhala-Tamil-Muslim writers' organization headed by Martin Wickramasinghe.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara".</ref> He also translated Bengali literature into Sinhala, including Maxim Gorky's ''Mother''.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara".</ref> His autobiography, ''Satanaka Satahan'' ("Sketches of a Struggle"), appeared in 1965. He died on 13 November 1966.<ref>Pieris (2020), "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara"; Seneviratne, H.L. (1999). ''The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka''. University of Chicago Press, p. 135 n. 8.</ref>