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| Sunday, 21 December 2003 |
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Ven. Gangodawila Soma : The monk as totemic figure Sunday Essay by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE The sudden demise of Ven. Gangodawila Soma, better known as Soma Hamuduruwo, in far away St. Petersburg in Russia has sent predictable shock waves through the Buddhist community.
Predictable, we say, because the Ven. Soma since his return from Melbourne, Australia several years ago has been something of a totemic figure of the Sinhala Buddhist movement, a popular preacher and even something of an agitator in the context of the rise of the Tamil insurgency and the perception in the eyes of the international community of the majority Sinhala Buddhists as a majoritarian hegemonic force. Hence the widespread sense of grief and desolation at Ven. Soma's unexpected death, the sense of a lodestar having been extinguished. In his condolence message Udaya Gammanpila, the Propaganda Secretary of the Sihala Urumaya, has compared Ven. Soma's death to that of the Ven. Panadure Ariyadhamma who too died at a comparatively young age in the early 1980's. It was Ven. Ariyadhamma who popularised the practice of the 'bodhi pooja,' rendering the Pali gathas into Sinhala verse which would be easily accessible to the large bulk of Buddhist devotees. Similarly the Ven. Soma popularised the practice of preaching in a language designed to take the Buddha, Dhamma to a larger audience. Each in his own way saw the need to take the dhamma beyond the narrow confines of the traditional temple and its 'bana maduwa' in an age which was being increasingly dominated by the organs of popular culture such as the electronic media much in the way that 'mod' Christian priests sought to introduce music into their masses in order to draw a youthful audience in the decades following the rise of the Hippie movement. Born in the Colombo suburb of Gangodawila, beyond Nugegoda, to middle-class parents in 1948, the year of Sri Lanka's Independence, Ven. Soma took to the robes at the relatively late age of 26 in 1976 receiving higher ordination two years later. He was fortunate, however, in his teachers, the late Ven. Madihe Pannaseeha Mahanayake Thero of the Amarapura Nikaya and the Ven. Ampitiye Rahula Nayaka Thero, another elder of the Nikaya. This meant that the Ven. Soma would gain access to both the Vajiraramaya, Bambalapitiya and the Sri Vajiragnana Dharmayatanaya in Maharagama, the nerve centres of the Amarapura Nikaya which came under the personal supervision of Ven. Pannaseeha. The role of the Vajiraramaya in Sri Lanka's national life merits an essay of its own. With its location at Bambalapitiya in the heart of cosmopolitan Colombo it was able to attract to itself quite a different kind of Buddhist from those who patronised either the rural temple or the suburban Colombo temples. The citadel of a coterie of intellectual monks of the Amarapura Nikaya such as the late Kassapa, Narada and Piyadassi Theros it propagated a variety of cerebral, metaphysical Buddhism which appealed to the more educated urban Buddhist of a bi-lingual type and which bolstered their pride in their faith by demonstrating that the Buddha's teachings could withstand the challenges and inroads of modern science and western rationalism. It is no accident that President Jayewardene as well as President Kumaratunga (at the two opposite ideological poles of politics) should have received their grounding in Buddhism at the Vajiraramaya. While the Vajiraramaya was the citadel of a sophisticated urban Buddhism the Dharmayatanaya at Maharagama named after the Ven. Pelene Vajiragnana, the founding father of the modern Amarapura Nikaya, was the bastion of a more earthy, even, populist type of crusading Buddhism identified with the late Pannaseeha Mahanayake Thero. Ven. Pannaseeha made regular if sometimes erratic forays into national politics until his last days earlier this year and it was this line which the Ven. Soma followed rather than the urban Vajirarama line. By background and upbringing too he was more suited for it since he was more a popular preacher than a scholar but it was as a crusader of pure Buddhism (more in consonance with the urban Buddhism of Vajirarama) that Ven. Soma made his mark first on the Buddhist consciousness. This crusade was against the pantheistic practices in which the bulk of Buddhists engage. Ven. Soma was critical of Buddhists worshipping the various gods of the Hindu pantheon and having 'devales' consecrated to these gods in the premises of Buddhist temples. This is, of course, part of the folk Buddhism which is widely prevalent in Sri Lanka, an attempt on the part of lay Buddhists to find some omnipotent agency to which they can turn in times of distress and which is not available in the teachings of the Buddha which upholds that only man can help himself and no other. In this sense Ven. Soma's crusade went very much against the popular current of the day. This phase however did not last very long. Very soon Ven. Soma was appearing in another persona as a vociferous champion of Sinhala Buddhist rights at a time of sharpening ethnic feelings and the accelerating LTTE-led insurgency against the State. Here he was very much a product of the media for it was the Government-managed ITN through the series 'Andurin Eliyata' and the newspapers which provided him with a platform. Through these agencies he was able to address a wide audience and secure instant popularity quite disproportionate to his late appearance on the national landscape having lived for long in Australia. He was Sri Lanka's first television bhikkhu. The high point of these high profile appearances was his television debate with the late Minister M. H. M. Ashraff on the alleged defacement of Buddhist shrines in the Eastern Province. It is said that Mr. Ashraff had improved his Sinhala especially to debate with Ven. Soma and came out quite creditably from the encounter. After that Ven. Soma continued his interventions calling upon the people to spoil their votes at the General Election in 2000 and even forming a political party which however failed to take off. Ven. Soma's vast popularity in a comparatively short time can be attributed to his vocal campaigning of the Sinhala Buddhist cause at a time when many prominent luminaries of the Maha Sangha either kept silent or took up ambivalent positions. This he could perhaps afford to do as a comparative outsider to the Sangha Establishment having lived abroad for long and having no great stake in the large temples and 'viharagams' which form so much a part of the life of the more influential bhikkhus of our time. Ven. Soma caught perfectly the sense of anger and helplessness of the majority of Buddhists confronted by the marauding LTTE and what they saw as its NGO apologists among the Sinhala peace lobby, a fact well borne out by the lachrymose editorial in an English newspaper well known for its aggressive Sinhala line. It is ironic that the manner of his death should feed rather than sublimate the current phobias and conspiracy theories and in that sense the Soma saga is more a parable of our times than a mere individual life. |
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