Anuradhapura is no “Theocracy”

lakshmi | Friday, April 2nd, 2010 | No Comments »

Susantha Goonatilake Phd

The Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka (RASSL) and its members pioneered in the 19^th and 20^th centuries the study of Sri Lankan society, culture, history and archaeology. Through interaction between its Sri Lankan and Western members, the RASSL provided a platform for East-West discourse. Most of these pioneers read like a Who’s Who in these matters. These activities gave rise to Sri Lanka’s first University which was campaigned for by members of the RASSL and to the Departments of Archaeology, Archives and Museums which were created through the RAS. Two leading monks associated with the RAS led to the creation of the Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara Pirivenas which later evolved into the Universities of Sri Jayawardenapurs and Kelaniya

Over recent decades, these interests pioneered by the RASSL entered the universities institutionally as anthropology and archaeology university departments. In anthropology, this shift, however, resulted in a set of publications abroad which were tangential to the truth, making key distortions and deriding the Sri Lankan society it studied – all major transgressions of accepted anthropology procedure and ethics. Recent issues of the RAS journal have discussed this tendency^[1]. More recently, the same tendency towards misunderstanding of local society has been seen in the field of archaeology done by some foreign academics. One such apparent case is the attempt to designate Anuradapura, one of the “lost cities”^[2] of the then Western imagination, as a “theocracy”. This is in the work of Robin Coningham and his co-workers who had been doing excavation at Anuradapura^[3]..

The question of whether Anuradapura was a “theocracy” was the subject of an hours-long workshop at the RASSL in which Coningham as lead author and several of his junior authors as well as subject specialists on ancient Sri Lankan history were present (list given below). At this meeting, Coningham did not defend his use of the term “theocracy” and in fact, was strangely silent on the ensuing criticism of his key points made by local scholars. However, as “Anuradapura as a theocracy” has been introduced to the international conceptual vocabulary by Coningham, we record below the basic conclusions of the discussion.

It was noted at the beginning of the discussion, that archaeology was only a tool to reconstruct past societies, fleshing in the social dynamics of past societies required inputs from other sources including a correct grasp of the sociological imagination.

Conningham et al had designated Anuradhapura as a “theocracy”^[4]. This was because (in summary), Conningham et al had not found, apart from monasteries, permanent structures in the Anuradhapura hinterland. They posit Sinhalese monasteries as having played a dual role as both religious and secular administrators. They find that villages were only temporary and mobile.

The question was raised, how valid was the use of the word theocracy to Anuradhapura? And how valid were the comparisons with Indonesia, Cambodia and Central America that Conningham resorts to in his archaeology. To simplify matters, standard definitions of theocracy were resorted to.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defined “Theocracy” as “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided” and “a state governed by a theocracy”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia states, “Theocracy is a form of government in which a ‘god’ or ‘deity’ is recognized as the supreme civil ruler. For believers, theocracy is a form of government in which divine power governs an earthly human state, either in a personal incarnation or, more often, via religious institutional representatives (i.e., a church), replacing or dominating civil government. Theocratic governments enact theonomic laws”.

The term “Theocracy”, it was, however, observed in the discussion, is linked to the Abrahamaic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam where “truth” is revealed by “God” and has foundationally a supernatural overlay. Buddhism in contrast possesses strong elements of both observation and philosophy (apart from elements of the supernatural). There are also differences in what actually took place within Christian and Buddhist monasteries.

In a Christian monastery, life with rigorous schedules was centred around prayer and communal living. Prayer was to the Christian “God” and constituted a monk’s main work which took up most of a monk’s existence. While not praying, monks were given time to work on their activities of writing, copying, or decorating books. In this latter sense, Christian monasteries were centers of education and intellectual life.

Yet, the predominant ideology in these monasteries was that of the Dark Ages whose beginnings coincided with the burning of the excellent Library of Alexandria and other acts against free thought. And in the nearly 1000 year reign of the Inquisition, churches became the major centre for torture and murder of persons who challenged the Pope’s version of truth. This ideology of intolerance was transferred to Sri Lanka in the 16^th century where the Portuguese burnt all the Buddhist centres.

Key Western universities such as Oxford, Cambridge (12^th and 13^th centuries), and Durham University, the abode of Conningham, all started as religious centres.

Durham, a later university had a strong tradition of theological teaching, and was created in 1832, at the instigation of Archdeacon Charles Thorp and the Bishop of Durham. This was roughly the time when in Sri Lanka, Buddhist higher learning institutes were again beginning to assert themselves after the Christian destruction of the 16^th century.

Buddhist monasteries and universities contrasted themselves with Christian monasteries and the early Christian monastic universities like Cambridge and Oxford. The world’s first universities were actually the Buddhist monasteries in Taxila, Nalanda, Vikramashila and Mahabodhi in India. In the 4^th century AC, the Sinhalese King Meghavanna (304-332 A.C.) built the Mahabodhi monastery at Buddhagaya which for 1000 years remained the world’s first university complex funded by a foreign country – in this case, Sri Lanka. At Anuradhapura, Mahavihara, Abhayagiri and Jetavanarama monasteries were similar in nature to those Indian counterparts, and had according to Sinhalese and foreign sources, thousands of monks. The Chinese traveler to Anuradhapura, Fa Hsien mentions 5,000 monks residing in Abhayagiri in the 5^th century A.C. ^[5].

Both laymen and monks studied in these pirivenas, as witnessed even up to the 1990’s in Cambodia. Monks in Sri Lanka differentiated themselves into two categories: “Forest-dwelling” (Vanavasin) concentrated on meditation while the “village and town dwellers” (Gramavasin) emphasised book learning, As pointed out in well-known texts, these monasteries also specialised in “lay” subjects including architecture, art, astrology, astronomy, logic, medicine, poetics, poetry, political science, rhetoric and sculpture. The Dambadeni Asna written circa 1303-1325 AC mentions that the sciences and arts taught in the monasteries include languages, grammar, astrology/astronomy, law, logic, history and painting^[6]. The Hansa Sandesa (15^th century) describes the curriculum of one institute as literature, Asian languages, Buddhism and logic. The Gira Sandesa lists several nonn-religious subjects taught at the Vijayabahu Pirivena of Totagamuwa whose chief was Sri Rahula, a “Shad Bhasha Parameshvara” (Master of Six Languages) ^[7].. Approximately 500 monks were in residence here. Subjects such as grammar, poetry, drama and rhetoric, philosophy, logic, art and architecture, economics (Artha Sastra), law (Niti Sastra), medicine (Ayurveda), astronomy, astrology and mathematics (including Surya Siddhanta) were studied. (Surya Siddhanta, a Sanskrit work was probably the world’s first textbook on trigonometry) ^[8].

Pires writing in around 1512-15 AC, noted that Sinhalese were “well educated” ^[9].. The Portuguese chronicler, Queyroz observed that there were in the 16^th century, three men who distinguished themselves in the study of the stars, namely Totagamuwa [Sri Rahula], Vidagama and “Maluate” – all chief monks of rival monasteries^[10]. He further observed that Sinhalese consider mathematics the “maha sastra“- the great science^[11].

John Davy writing in 1821, shortly after the Kandyan Kingdom was taken by the British, at the lowest point of decline of the country noted, “reading and writing are far from uncommon requirements and are almost as general as in England among the male population”^[12]. The learning was in temple schools.

What was taught and thought in Buddhist monasteries was thus more open than those of the Christian churches of the “Dark Ages” and the Inquisition. They were nearer to modern university structures than the theocracies of the Christians.

Conningham also uses the arguments of Edmund Leach in his discussions. His discussion on Leach on irrigation ignores the major discussions since Leach’s initial article. These observations of Leach was also linked with the false associations of Asian societies with an alleged Asiatic Mode of Production (Marx) and Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel). None of the later fitted into Sinhalese reality.

Conningham also brings in the ancient sites in Indonesia, Cambodia and Central America to claim that Anuradhapura was part of a set of tropical forest civilizations. But these sites have very different characteristics to Anuradhapura. South East Asian centres like Angkor Wat/Angkor Thom differ from Anuradhapura in terms of the nature of geographical centres, distribution of religious/intellectual sites and irrigation systems. In Cambodia, the centre-periphery relationship, as Hall pointed out, changed dramatically with the adoption of Sinhalese Buddhism in the 13^th century and the consequent decentralised spread of Sinhala/Buddhist culture. The Angkor irrigation system was dependent on reservoirs and canals, and was very different from that of Sinhalese systems. If post 13^th century Cambodian culture was deeply influenced by Sinhalese, so were Pagan (Burma) and Sukothai (Thailand) influenced by Sinhalese architecture and culture. Pagan is situated not in a forest, but in a plain^[13].

Comparisons with forest-based pre-Columbian American sites also are far fetched. Pre-Columbian sites, although they had pyramids in size reminiscent of stupas were used for a very different purpose. For example human sacrifice was a major form of worship – a strong contrast to peaceful Buddhists circumambulating a stupa remembering the sanctity of lfe.

Again questions arise how valid are Conningham’s comparisons of Anuradhapura with Java and his use of the work of Lansing on Javanese irrigation system. Java has very different irrigation systems from that of the tank-based system of Sri Lanka. Lansing in his work applied complexity theory to irrigation, a far-fetched stretching of complexity theory^[14]. Conningham ignores recent work indicating the influence of Anuradhapura (Abhayagiri) architecture on major Java sites such as Ratu Boko (influence from the tapovana forest meditation monasteries at Anuradhapura) ^[15] as well as, possibly on Borobudur^[16].

The work of Conningham is Janus faced, one consisting of good physical archaeology and the second consisting of an extreme lack of a multi disciplinary contextual knowledge in interpreting his physical data. This failing is the more surprising in that Kelaniya University is home to many disciplines that would have provided this contextual knowledge on Sri Lanka in its Buddhist, Pali, Sanskrit and History departments of which Coningham (and sad to mention also his junior Sri Lankan colleagues) shows an extreme lack of interest.

This particular example of foreign-local collaboration contrasts itself with the multi-contextual 19^th and early 20^th century collaborations between Western and Sri Lankan scholars including those from Vidyalankara Pirivena, the precursor of Kelaniya University. The RASSL had provided a fertile but nascent fruitful interaction between East and West. But some current archaeology seems to have lost the sprit of that interaction. The Sri Lankan archaeologist Senerat Paranavithana would have winced at the uninformed conclusions of Coningham . More so would be Major General Alexander Cunningham, the first Director of the Archaeology Survey of India and a friend of Buddhism and of Sri Lanka’s cultural heritage^[17]. Unlike Robin Coningham,Alexander Cunningham had approached Sinhalese sources to find the meaning of his Indian finds. Thus, it was from the Buddhist monk Waskaduwe Sri Subhuti, Cunningham got his explanations for the carvings at the Bharhut and Sanchi sites as illustrations of the Jataka stories^[18]. Alexander Cunningham had a long correspondence with Subhuti who explained many knotty issues in Buddhist texts which were directly relevant to Cunningham’s archaeology, such Buddhist textual context being deliberately expunged from the latter day Robin Coningham ^[19].

Not William Jones, the legendary founder of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, but Indiana Jones the grave digger archaeologist seems to partially haunt Robin Coningham’s approach.

Susantha Goonatilake

^[1] Goonatilake, Susantha

“White Sahibs, Brown Sahibs: Tracking Dharmapala” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka New Series pp 53-136 LIV 2008

“Locating South Asian Anthropology within the Shift to Asia” in N. K. Das, V. R. Rao (ed) Identity, Cultural Pluralism and State, Macmillan India Publication, New Delhi 2009

“The Construction of the Panadura Vaadaya as Buddhist Fundamentalism”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka New Series Vol. XLIX 2004 pp 87-118 Special Number on the Panadura Vaadaya

“’Buddhist Protestantism’: The Reverse Flow of Ideas from Sri Lanka to the West” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka New Series Vol. XLV 2002 pp 35-71

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