Editing Sri Lanka (section)

== Radical Buddhism in Sri Lanka ==

Sri Lanka presents something of a paradox for the history of radical Buddhism. Few colonial or postcolonial Asian societies combined so many of the conditions that elsewhere nurtured Buddhist socialism: one of Asia's oldest and best organized Marxist movements, a highly politicized and educated saṅgha, an influential Buddhist modernist movement, and a vigorous Sinhala print culture capable of carrying radical ideas to a broad public. On these grounds alone, a substantial tradition of Buddhist Marxism or Buddhist socialism might have been expected. Yet the surviving documentary record of any such synthesis is remarkably thin, especially set against [[Japan]], [[China]], or [[India]], where comparable movements left extensive published bodies of thought. However, this scarcity should probably be read as evidence of poor archival survival and of a research literature that has not prioritized this specific question, rather than as proof that no such thought existed.

Three distinct phenomena are easily, but should not be, conflated under a single label of "radical Buddhism in Sri Lanka." The first is Buddhist social reform activism that draws on Buddhist ethics to address social suffering without developing a systemic, anticapitalist critique, of which the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, discussed below, is the leading example; these are better classified as engaged Buddhism than as radical Buddhism. The second is the presence of Marxist movements operating within an overwhelmingly Buddhist society and membership, of which the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), founded in 1965, is the clearest case: the JVP's cadres, culture, and symbolism were deeply rooted in rural Sinhala Buddhist society, and the movement drew, at least rhetorically, on Sinhala Buddhist nationalist sentiment, but this does not by itself make the JVP an instance of Buddhist Marxism in any doctrinal sense, since the movement did not attempt to derive its politics from Buddhist teaching.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', pp. x–xi, 341–342.</ref> The third, and the phenomenon of primary interest here, comprises figures who did attempt, with varying degrees of rigor, to derive socialist or Marxist conclusions from Buddhist doctrine itself, or vice versa.

Buddhist involvement in radical politics has roots in the early twentieth-century labor movement. Dharmapāla himself, despite his own class position and his generally moralistic rather than systemic critique of poverty, praised railway strikers in 1912 for demonstrating "the national spirit among the Sinhalese" and contributed to their strike fund, and other lay Buddhist revivalists lent similar support to the labor organizer A.E. Goonesinha during the strikes of the 1920s.<ref>Kumari Jayawardena, ''The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon'' (Duke University Press, 1982), p. 154, quoted in Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 15, n. 1.</ref> When the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) was founded in 1935, several monks saw no contradiction between Buddhist vocation and Marxist commitment, including Balangoda Ānanda Maitreya, who publicly welcomed the party's anti-imperialism, and Naravila Dhammaratana, who wrote regularly for the Sinhala newspaper ''Silumina''.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 16.</ref>

=== Udakandawela Siri Saranankara ===
{{Main|Udakandawela Siri Saranankara}}
The most fully documented of these monks is Udakandawela Siri Saranankara (1902–1966; also romanized Udakendawela or Udakendawala), a Theravāda bhikkhu who studied under Tagore at Santiniketan, was imprisoned in Calcutta and exiled to Benares for anti-colonial activity in India, and returned to Ceylon in 1936 to join first the LSSP and then, at the Communist Party's 1943 founding, the new party itself, of which he became first president.<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> He edited the Sinhala monthly ''Navalokaya'' from 1941 until his death and later led Ceylon's postwar peace movement, receiving the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1957.<ref>Pieris, Kamalika (2020, April 10). "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara". ''LankaWeb''. ([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>

=== Walpola Rahula and the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirivena ===

It was in the mid-1940s, however, that Buddhist political radicalism in Ceylon became a genuinely public and organized phenomenon, through the group of young, India-educated monks associated with the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirivena in Kelaniya. In 1946 the Vidyālaṅkāra monks issued a short manifesto, ''The Declaration of the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirivena'', asserting that the monastic vocation properly included political and social action on behalf of the public welfare, a claim elaborated at book length by the Vidyālaṅkāra teacher Walpola Rahula in ''Bhikṣuvage Urumaya'' (''The Heritage of the Bhikkhu'', 1946), which argued that monks had exercised such a role since the earliest period of Sinhalese history and had a duty to reclaim it.<ref>Seneviratne (1999), ''Work of Kings'', pp. 135–137; Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', pp. 18–19.</ref> The same year, radical monks founded the Lanka Eksath Bhikkhu Maṇḍalaya (Ceylon Union of Bhikkhus), which affirmed the right of monks to participate in politics and, at its 1947 convention, adopted resolutions rejecting the Soulbury Constitution as inadequate to full independence and endorsing the nationalization of transport, mines, and estates.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', pp. 19–20.</ref> Vidyālaṅkāra monks, including Rahula, campaigned openly for the LSSP and the Communist Party in the pivotal 1947 general election, provoking a fierce public debate, joined even by the conservative All Ceylon Buddhist Congress, over whether monks should engage in party politics at all.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', pp. 17–20.</ref> This explicitly leftist mobilization of monks proved short-lived: once national language politics and Sinhala majoritarian grievance displaced class politics as the dominant idiom of Buddhist activism over the following decade, the same activist-monk tradition that ''The Heritage of the Bhikkhu'' had helped to legitimate flowed overwhelmingly into Sinhala Buddhist nationalism rather than into socialism, culminating in the 1956 election of Bandaranaike, discussed further below.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 20.</ref>

=== Neville Wijeyekoon ===
{{Main|Neville Wijeyekoon}}

Writing under the pseudonym Leuke, the lay civil servant and businessman S.N.B. (Neville) Wijeyekoon published ''Gautama the Buddha and Karl Marx'' (1943), an explicit comparison of Buddhist and Marxist-Leninist metaphysics that, in its final chapters, develops an original philosophy centered on "the merging of one's self in social welfare" as the means to negate self-centeredness and achieve "mental harmony," a goal he attributed jointly to a reinterpreted Buddhism and to a socially oriented "dialectical materialism" of his own devising rather than to orthodox Marxism-Leninism. He returned to related themes, stripped of overt Buddhist and Marxist framing, in ''The Message of Democratic Socialism'' (1949) and ''The Achievement of Mental Harmony'' (1957), the latter proposing an "elite" of self-transformed individuals as the vehicle for social change. Wijeyekoon's ideas are of interest less for orthodoxy in either tradition than for the distinctive, individually worked-out synthesis they represent.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2024). "Buddhism, Marxism, and Negating Self-centeredness — Preliminary Remarks on the Philosophy of Neville Wijeyekoon," F=ma. ([https://web.archive.org/web/20260729051703/https://www.lajosbrons.net/blog/wijeyekoon/ archived]).</ref>

=== Don Charles Wijewardena ===
{{Main|Don Charles Wijewardena}}

Don Charles Wijewardena (1892–1956), a member of one of Ceylon's wealthiest and most politically connected families and a member of the Buddhist Committee of Inquiry, is remembered for a single sprawling book, ''Dharma-Vijaya, or The Revolt in the Temple'' (1953), published under the sanskritized pen name Vijayavardhana. The book is chiefly known as a nationalist history of the sāsana's colonial-era decline and demanded restoration, but its final chapters develop a genuine, if idiosyncratic, argument that the saṅgha's ancient communal ownership of alms anticipated communism by more than two millennia, that Soviet communism should be rejected for its violence rather than its economics, and that an evolutionary "democratic socialism," including land nationalization and cooperative farming, represented the natural economic complement to a restored Buddhist state. Widely credited with helping to articulate the ideology behind Bandaranaike's 1956 "Buddhist Revolution," Wijewardena is a minor but distinctive figure in the history of Buddhist-socialist synthesis, notwithstanding the fundamentally conservative and majoritarian character of his book as a whole.

===  A.T. Ariyaratne and Sarvodaya Shramadana ===

Buddhist social activism took a very different, and considerably less radical, turn with A.T. Ariyaratne's Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, founded in 1958 and one of the most internationally celebrated examples of twentieth-century engaged Buddhism. Ariyaratne reinterpreted the Four Noble Truths as a diagnosis of and remedy for "the decadent village," tracing rural decline to "egoism, competition, greed, and hatred" and mobilizing village volunteer labor (''shramadana'', "gift of labor") to meet locally identified basic needs.<ref>George Bond, "A.T. Ariyaratne and the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka", in Christopher Queen & Sallie King (Eds.), ''Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia'' (SUNY Press, 1996): 121–146, at 129–130.</ref> Like Dharmapāla's, Ariyaratne's rhetoric rested on an idealized, largely imaginary picture of a precolonial Sri Lanka free of caste and class, a picture the economist Susantha Goonatilake, reviewing the first volume of Ariyaratne's collected writings, criticized in detail as "patently false."<ref>Goonatilake, Susantha (1983). "Review of Collected Works of A.T. Ariyaratne". ''Journal of Contemporary Asia'' 13.2: 236–242, at 238–239. See also Brons (2022), ''Buddha Land'', p. 69.</ref> 

More importantly, Sarvodaya Shramadana's critique of capitalism has remained rhetorical rather than systemic: Goonatilake calculated, citing the political scientist Estelle James, that some 94 percent of Sarvodaya Shramadana's resources came from abroad, and documented how such foreign-funded non-governmental organizations, Sarvodaya Shramadana prominent among them, effectively absorbed welfare functions vacated by a state retrenching under IMF- and World Bank-driven structural adjustment after 1977, operating in practice, in his own phrase, "as a normal capitalist enterprise working on commercial criteria."<ref>Goonatilake (1983), "Review of Collected Works", 238, 240. Goonatilake later reiterated the point at length in ''Recolonisation: Foreign Funded NGOs in Sri Lanka'' (Sage, 2006), p. 59.</ref> Sarvodaya Shramadana is accordingly best classified as engaged rather than radical Buddhism, illustrating by contrast how conformist and accommodationist much of institutionalized twentieth-century engaged Buddhism became even where it retained radical-sounding rhetoric. The review itself became a minor episode in this history: according to a note appended by its editors, Ariyaratne petitioned Sri Lanka's president directly over Goonatilake's criticisms, after which Goonatilake was reportedly barred from leaving the country and from writing further on the movement, an illustration of Sarvodaya's political reach notwithstanding its formally non-governmental status.<ref>"Editor's Note" appended to Goonatilake (1983), "Review of Collected Works", 242.</ref>

=== Buddhist violence ===

Beyond these individual cases, Sri Lanka's twentieth and twenty-first centuries also produced a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist militancy running in a very different direction from any of the above, including monastic involvement, prominently that of the Kelaniya incumbent Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, in the 1959 assassination of Bandaranaike; the 2004 electoral debut of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (National Heritage Party), which fielded some 260 monk candidates and won nine parliamentary seats on a platform of restoring a Buddhist state; and, in more recent decades, organizations such as the Bodu Bala Sena, whose monks helped incite anti-Muslim violence in Aluthgama in 2014 and Digana in 2018.<ref>Faleiro, Sonia (2025). ''The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism Is Shaping Modern Asia''. Columbia Global Reports.</ref> These lie outside the RBP's definition of radical Buddhism, which concerns the left rather than nationalist militancy, but they form part of the same broader history of the politicized twentieth-century saṅgha from which the LEBM, Wijeyekoon, Wijewardena, and Saranankara also emerged, and they are noted here for context.