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| Sunday, 11 July 2004 |
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Forms of Conversion Discourse : Mind Forged Manacles by Wilfred Jayasuriya We have been swimming in the sea of religious acrimony for some time and it seems an idle task to separate one current from the other when we are still struggling to keep our heads above water. However one must try.
There were only one and a half human beings that he had actually killed! "From this deed there arises no hindrance on the way to heaven. Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee O Lord of men.
Then we have the Thirty Years War in Europe fought between the Catholics and Protestants. Can one believe that doctrinal absurdities like transubstantiation and consubstantiation, free will and predestination were the driving forces of evil? Priest craft depends on identifying the unknown and scaring the living about what will happen when they are dead. The Thirty Years War divided each European country into two or more and was a combination of civil and international wars-like our ethnic conflict involving India too. Henry of Aquitane (if I remember right) was a Protestant who fought his way and finally arrived at the gates of Paris and considered whether he should sack the city, the last remaining stronghold .of Catholicism, the ancient capital of the ancient country named France. Or whether he should make peace and be reconciled with his fellow countryman. "Paris is worth a Mass," he declared and set about the task of reconciliation by attending Mass in the Catholic cathedral. The best known of religious wars, however, were the Crusades, where Christianity and Mohamedanism were the contestants, though both were "people of the book." The other "people of the book," the Jews, had been smashed and dispersed throughout the world until they reunited twenty centuries later in the reconstructed Israel. Is it the book that makes men into beasts in the name of God? Is it by quoting the book, be it the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita or the Dhammapada that men fortify themselves to kill other men? The Bhagavad Gita takes up this issue specifically. The hero of the story is reluctant to enter battle because the enemy too is his brother. While pondering on this issue, like Dutugemunu who felt sad that he had killed the just Elara and his army, Arjuna, the hero has a chat with his charioteer, who is really the god Krishna come to advise him, like the Arahant in the Dutugemunu story. Krishna says that it is not for Arjuna to worry about the effects of his deeds i.e. of engaging in battle and thereby causing loss of life on a massive scale. His business in life is to play his role as given to him. He is a warrior. So fight. "It says not that you lost or won but how you played the game," as Sir Henry Newbolt put it, many centuries later in the context of a school cricket match. The game, of course, was the game of life. Though the Bhagavad Gita has been praised as a great religious text, which it is, the implication of its message, in the context of the theory of karma and the caste systems that prevailed (and prevails) in that society is that your place in society, your caste, is God given by your birth. What more cast iron defence do you need to defend the oppression of fixing one's place in the world by one's birth? Of course the Brahamins, who composed the Gita, and who were on the top of the caste heap were the beneficiaries. Not the untouchables, the farmers and the warriors. Which brings us to the main point of the conversion issue? Caste and religion are determined by birth. Converting from one caste to another is now allowed under the Christian dispensation, where every human being is considered to be the child of God, equal in that way, irrespective of whatever other differences may exist. There is no caste in Christianity. But should religion too be determined by birth as the Hindus who believe in the caste system declare? Are we the captives of our birth? Human dignity or what we call fundamental rights is a secular concept built on the Christian value of the human being as being a child of God, born with free will to decide on his destiny in this world and the next. A freedom given because God, the creator, loved his creature so much that he gave him or her the greatest gift that a creator can give, the freedom to choose between good and evil, even to oppose God himself. In other words man, according to Christianity, is free. That is what the anti conversion concept destroys. It destroys man's inborn freedom to choose his wife, his religion, his position in life, his Member of Parliament, his country of residence or anything that affects him. This freedom is only limited by the freedom that others too enjoy. The limits of freedom there fore are always the cause of disagreement because one man's freedom should not be the other man's bondage as it was in Hinduism, where no one, including the Brahmins was free because they were determined by birth. Do we want that to be the ruling idea in life, that our birth determines our religion and everything else? Isn't that what the whole issue of conversion is about? Is "unethical" another word to say "Look, yakho! You were born a tree climber, what English for you? Who is going to pluck our coconuts if your children learn English in the school?" (A statement attributed to a Buddhist nationalist layman who is said to have been the cause of the SLFP deciding that the language of birth is what every child must be compelled to use as a medium of instruction). Look what we have done to this country with the mother tongue concept or birth determining one's future. Is birth determining one's religion to be added to that? Let me conclude by quoting the poem) from which the heading of the article is taken. I wander through each chartered street |
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The issue is as ancient as the volcanic eruptions that created Sri Pada
and the other mountains of Sri Lanka. There are the references to the
Mahayana/Hinayana controversy and battle for influence referred to in the
Mahavamsa, when the Mahavihare was the seat of Hinayana and the Abhayagiri/Jetavanaramaya
the seat of Mahayana. Mahasen, hero of the thirty tanks building exercises
was not welcome in the abode of the gods, unlike Dutugemunu, though it was
Dutugemunu who killed by the countless numbers and was named
"evil." Someone (a seer) came along when he was dying and said
that those he killed were not human beings (Damiilas).
Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed
than beasts." Was it because he patronised the Mahavihare that the
historian thus rewarded him? The rhetoric of the Mahavamsa still rings in
our years as the words of the Arahat are said to have rung in the ears of
the dying Dutugemunu.
