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ANAGARIKA DHARMAPALA

 A Biographical Sketch

by Bhikshu Sangharakshita

BUDDHIST PUBLICA Kandy       1964

1952, In “Maha Bodhi Society, Diamond Jubilee Souvenir’’

Second Edition:           1956, Maha Bodhi Society, Calcutta

Third Edition:               1964, Buddhist Publication Society,

Kandy.

The Wheel Publication No. 70/71/72

First Edition:

ANAGARIKA DHARMAPALA

T HE prospects of Ceylon Buddhism in the 'sixties of the last century were dark indeed. Successive

waves of Portuguese, Dutch and British invasion had swept away much of the traditional culture of the country. Missionaries had descended upon the copper- |                colouredIsland like a cloud               of locusts; Christian

schools of every conceivable denomination had been opened, where Buddhist boys and girls were crammed with bible texts and taught to be ashamed of their religion, their culture, their language, their race and their colour. The attitude of the missionaries is expressed with unabashed directness in one of the verses of a famous hymn by the well known Anglican Bishop Heber, a hymn which is still sung, though with                less conviction

than in   the days  when it first made its appearance, in churches all over England :

What though thejipicy breezes Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle,

Where every prospect pleases,

And only man is vile;

In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are strowwn,

The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone.

Throughout the territories under Dutch occupation dhists had been compelled to declare themselves as

I Budiposition high even as their present one was low.

Beginnings of a great Sinhalese Patriot

Among the few well-to-do families which through all vicissitudes stood firmly and fearlessly on the side of their ancestral faith was the Hewavitarne family of Matara in South Ceylon. Hewavitarne Dingiri Appuhamy, the first member of this family with whom we are concerned, belonged to the large and respected goigama or cultivator class. He had two sons, both of whom exhibited the same devotion to the Dharma as their father. One of them became a bhikshu known as Hittatiye Atthadassi Thera and occupied the incum­bency of Hittatiya Raja Mahavihara. His teacher, Mirisse Revata Thera, was fourth in pupillary succession from the Sangharaja Saranankara, the greatest name in eighteenth century Ceylon Buddhism. The other son, Don Carol is Hewavitarne, migrated to Colombo, estab­lished there a furniture manufacturing business in the Pettah area, and married the daughter of a Colombo businessman, Andris Perera Dharmagunawardene, who had donated a piece of land at Maligakanda, erected on it the first Pirivena or Buddhist monastic college in Ceylon, and brought a monk from the remote village of Hikkaduwa to be its principal. Since then the names of the Vidyodaya Pirivena and Hikkaduwa Siri Sumangala Maha Nayaka Thera have passed, inseparably united, into the history of world Buddhism. Through the halls of this great institution of Buddhist learning, unrivalled throughout the length and breadth of Ceylon, have passed monks from Burma, Siam, India, Japan and China, and the memory of the great Buddhist scholar, mathematician and expert in comparative religion who

Christians, and during the period of British rule this  law was enforced for seventy years, being abrogated only  in 1884, when on behalf of the Buddhists of Ceylon  Col. Olcott made representations to_o the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London. Children born of  Buddhist parents had to be taken for registration to a  church, where some biblical name would be bestowed  on them, with the result that most Sinhalese bore either  an English Christian name and a Portuguese surname,  if they were Catholic ‘converts’, or an English Christian  name and a Sinhalese surname, if they were Anglicans.  The majority of them were ashamed or afraid to declare  themselves Buddhists, and only in the villages of the  interior did the Dharma of the Blessed One retain some  vestige of its former power and popularity, though even  here it was not free from the attacks of the thousands  of catechists who, for twenty rupees a month, were  prepared to go about slandering and insulting the religion  of their fathers. Members of the Sangha, with a few  noble exceptions, were intellectually and spiritually  moribund; monastic discipline was lax, the practice of meditation had been neglected and then forgotten ; and even to those who truly loved the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, it must sometimes have seemed that,  after reigning for more than twenty glorious centuries  over the hearts and minds of the Sinhala race, they were  doomed to be “cast as rubbish to the void”, and swept  into the blue waters of the Arabian Sea by the  triumphant legions of militant Christianity. But this was not to be. Low though the fortunes of the Dharma  had sunk the great beam of the national karma was  beginning to right itself, and gigantic forces were being  set in motion vhich in the future would lift them to a 4 for so many decades guided its destinies is revered | wherever the Dharma taught in the Pali Scriptures is known.

Both Don Carolis and his young wife Mállika  ardently desired a son, and when they knew that a  child would be born to them their joy was great indeed. But although they both desired a son the  reasons for which they desired him were by no means  the same. Mudaliyar Hewavitarne thought of a successor  in the family business, while his wife dreamed of a  bhikshu who would guide the erring footsteps of the  Sinhala people back to the Noble Eightfold Path from  which they had so long been led astray. Every morning  before sunrise the young bride, who was not yet out of  her ‘teens, would gather a trayful of sweet-smelling five-petalled temple flowers and offer them, together with coconut-oil lamps and incense, at the feet of the Buddha-image *in the family shrine, praying to the devas that she might bear a son who would rekindle the lamp of the Dharma in a darkened land. Every evening, too, she would lie prostrate in supplication before the silent image, which was a wooden replica of one of the great stone Buddhas of Anuradhapura,  the ancient city whose very name awakes in every  Sinhala heart an unutterably deep nostalgia for the  temporal and spiritual glories of long ago. Who knows  what subtle spiritual emanations from the liberated  minds of old passed through that image and penetrated  the receptive mind of the Sinhala maiden, steeping the  lotus of her aspiration in the dews of kindliness and peace, and purifying her heart and mind until they were  a fit receptacle for the Great Being who was to accomplish

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