Editing Sri Lanka (section)

===  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>