Udakandawela Siri Saranankara

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

Udakandawela Siri Saranankara (7 January 1902 – 13 November 1966; also romanized Udakendawela or Udakendawala) was a Sri Lankan Theravāda bhikkhu who combined a monastic vocation with more than four decades of Marxist activism, culminating in the presidency of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka from its founding in 1943. Ordained as a novice in his early teens, he traveled to India in 1921 as an intended missionary for the Mahabodhi Society but instead enrolled at Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan, where he was drawn into the Indian independence movement and Bengali communist circles; imprisonment in Calcutta and exile in Benares followed. Returning to Ceylon in 1936, he joined the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and, after its 1940 split, the nascent Communist movement, using the temple sermon as a vehicle for socialist propaganda and editing the Sinhala monthly Navalokaya from 1941 until his death. He later led Ceylon's postwar peace movement and received the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize. He is the most fully documented Sri Lankan monk to have pursued a sustained party-political Marxist career, though the surviving record supports his political biography far better than any developed synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism in his own thought.

Biography

Saranankara was born on 7 January 1902 in a village near Gampaha, in what was then British Ceylon. Orphaned in early childhood by the deaths of both parents, he was raised by an elder sister. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. He also translated Bengali literature into Sinhala, including Maxim Gorky's Mother. His autobiography, Satanaka Satahan ("Sketches of a Struggle"), appeared in 1965. He died on 13 November 1966.

Ideas

The documentary record for Saranankara's own theoretical thought is thin, and this entry does not extrapolate a systematic Buddhist Marxism from indirect evidence; in that sense this section is chiefly a record of gaps and their most defensible reading, rather than a doctrine.

What the record does show, first, is that Saranankara saw no tension between the monastic vocation and party-political radicalism. He used the bana, the traditional temple sermon, directly as a vehicle for socialist propaganda rather than confining political argument to secular tracts or newspaper columns, and does not appear to have faced sustained institutional censure for doing so from within the sangha itself, in contrast to the controversy the Vidyālaṅkāra monks provoked a decade later.

Second, on the relationship between Buddhist ethics and revolutionary means, one authenticated statement survives, quoted from his autobiography: "Non-violence may be a great concept of Dhamma. Nevertheless, it has no meaning to the common man. More so, it has no bearing at all on a movement of national liberation." This rejects Gandhian non-violence specifically as a strategy for anti-colonial liberation, while pointedly leaving open the separate claim that non-violence remains valid as Dhamma; on its own it is not evidence of a developed argument connecting Buddhist doctrine to revolutionary violence or class struggle as such.

Third, his 1965 autobiography, Satanaka Satahan, is independently confirmed by Seneviratne, who cites it twice for markedly different kinds of content: once for the claim that the "five precepts of social service" administered by the Ramakrishna Mission (which Saranankara regarded as itself indebted to Buddhism) are "reminiscent of Buddhism," and once, alongside a rival monk's memoir, as a source of insider criticism and gossip about the Vidyālaṅkāra circle around Walpola Rahula, including an allegation that a prominent Vidyālaṅkāra monk had smuggled precious stones concealed in temple statues. Taken together, these citations suggest Satanaka Satahan is substantially a memoir, with some comparative-religion commentary, rather than a systematic work of Marxist or Buddhist-socialist theory; the RBP has not yet had access to the book itself, so this should be treated as a provisional reading rather than a settled characterization.

Finally, the title of his lost or unlocated book, translated by Jayawardena as Why Sri Lanka Needs Sama Samajism, at minimum indicates that Saranankara framed democratic socialism as something the nation specifically required, a framing that may gesture toward the dhammadīpa idiom, discussed on the Sri Lanka country profile page, that casts the island as a nation under a special dispensation; without the text itself, however, this remains a speculative parallel rather than an established interpretive claim.

In sum, the available sources document an activist who moved fluidly, and apparently without inner conflict, between the bhikkhu's robe and the Communist Party's leadership, but they do not yet document a philosophical synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism in his own voice comparable to what survives, for instance, for the lay Sri Lankan writer Neville Wijeyekoon. (Note that future access to Satanaka Satahan in full, to Navalokaya's twenty-five-year run, or to Warnapala's or Phadnis's fuller texts could substantially revise this assessment.)

Writings

• Contributions to Swaraj (Colombo, 1920s), a political journal edited by A.E. Goonesinha and P. Givendrasinghe. [Alongside the monk Boose Dhammarakhita, Saranankara wrote for this labor-movement journal during Goonesinha's trade-union campaigns of the 1920s, predating his LSSP and Communist Party years by more than a decade.]
• Essays on the Indian anti-imperialist movement, contributed from India to Sinhala Jatiya, Swadesha Mitraya, Sarasavi Sandaresa, Saraswati, Lakmina, and Sinhala Balaya (early-to-mid 1920s). [Reported by Pieris (2020) without individual titles or dates; none of these pieces has been independently located.]
• My Country (n.d., probably late 1920s or early 1930s). [A Sinhala booklet attacking both British rule and the "slavish attitude" of Ceylonese collaborators; some 10,000 copies were distributed, and it drew a formal warning from the colonial Criminal Investigation Department. No copy has yet been located.]
• Why Sri Lanka Needs Sama Samajism (n.d., before 1938). [Title as translated by Jayawardena (1979); the original Sinhala title is not yet confirmed. It occasioned a published reply, Communist Falsehoods (1938), from the nationalist writer Piyadasa Sirisena. No copy has yet been located.]
• Navalokaya ["New World"] (Colombo, 1941–1966). [A Sinhala monthly journal Saranankara founded and edited until his death, running twenty-five years; it propagated Marxist ideas in Sinhala terminology and covered the Soviet Union, China, the Vietnam War, and the Asia-Africa Solidarity Movement alongside domestic politics. No run of the journal has yet been located for the RBP archive.]
• Satanaka Satahan ["Sketches of a Struggle"] (Colombo: Janata Lekhaka Peramuna, 1965). [Saranankara's autobiography, and the primary source underlying nearly all subsequent biographical writing about him, including Jayawardena (1979) and, for two specific citations concerning comparative religious ethics and Vidyālaṅkāra-circle gossip, Seneviratne (1999). The book itself has not yet been obtained for this archive.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Pieris, Kamalika (2020, April 10). "Uda Kendawala Siri Saranankara". LankaWeb. (archived). [The fullest single English-language chronology of Saranankara's life, drawing on Jayawardena (1979), Warnapala (2002), and Abeysinghe (1993); included under the RBP's exclusion clause in the absence of a fuller academic biography.]
• Warnapala, W.A. Wiswa (2002). Udakendawela Siri Saranankara: An Assessment of His Role in the Anti-Imperialist Struggle in Sri Lanka. S. Godage & Brothers. [A 62-page dedicated biographical study, apparently the only book-length treatment of Saranankara to date; known to the RBP only through its library catalog record and not yet consulted directly.]
• Seneviratne, H.L. (1999). The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press. [Cites Satanaka Satahan directly at pp. 135 n. 8, 137 n. 12, and 196 n. 15: once for comparative material on the Ramakrishna Mission's "five precepts of social service," and once as a source of insider criticism of the Vidyālaṅkāra circle around Walpola Rahula. The only source consulted for this page that engages with the specific content of Saranankara's own writing rather than only his public biography.]
• Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja (1992). Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press. [Discusses Saranankara at pp. 15–17 and 100–101, drawing on Jayawardena (1979) at second hand; the two passages differ on whether he became the Communist Party's vice-president or vice-chairman, a discrepancy resolved in this entry in favor of Jayawardena's own, earlier wording.]
• Abeysinghe, W.A. (1993). "Udakendawela Siri Saranankara: The Veteran Peace Champion". In: Essays on Buddhism and Buddhist Culture: 54–64. S. Godage & Brothers. [The fullest account of Saranankara's India years, and the source of the one confirmed direct quotation from his autobiography, on non-violence and national liberation. Reproduced, in a lightly revised form, as "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])]
• 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. [The earliest and most detailed account of Saranankara's career, drawing in part directly on his own autobiography; part 3 (1 July) contains the fullest biographical passage and a photograph of Saranankara with Selina Perera, Vernon Gunasekara, Dr. N.M. Perera, and M.A.L. Bracegirdle. Nearly all subsequent English-language writing on Saranankara, including Tambiah (1992) and Pieris (2020), derives from this series.]
• Warnapala, W.A. Wiswa (1978). "Sangha and Politics in Sri Lanka". Indian Journal of Politics (April–August). [Cited by Jayawardena (1979) as one of her own sources on the political-monk phenomenon generally; volume and page numbers not yet established, and the article itself has not yet been consulted directly for this page.]
• Phadnis, Urmila (1976). Religion and Politics in Sri Lanka. C. Hurst & Co. [Cited by both Jayawardena (1979) and Tambiah (1992) for the roster of monks in the so-called Vidyālaṅkāra group, among whom Phadnis includes Saranankara. Not yet consulted directly for this page; the publication details given by Tambiah (London) and by Jayawardena (New Delhi) have not been reconciled, and may reflect simultaneous UK and Indian editions.]

Secondary Literature in Sinhala

(To be added.)

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Udakandawela Siri Saranankara". The Radical Buddhist Project. Version of 29 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Udakandawela_Siri_Saranankara.