Dual system of education

I have not prefixed "Saints" (occurring in the title) with the words Christian, Roman Catholic or orthodox due to my ignorance as to whether saints get canonised or exist in other religions. As far as Buddhism is concerned, I can safely vouch for their absence. That brings me to a juncture when a non-Buddhist accused me of being bigoted.

"You keep on writing only about your faith and its doings and its hallowed shrines. Why don't you expand your orbit in our cosmopolitan set-up?"

Flattered, I told her that she had a good point in what she said and mulled over her suggestion. Then I remembered a felicitation article I had written on an octogenarian who looks three fourth that age.

Of course, I wrote that article on invitation using data given to me. Otherwise how do I know that 'Prince Octo' went to school in the 1940s, in a canoe paddling along a tributary of the Kalu ganga amidst idyllic pastoral scenery to reach Panadura ferry.

The 1940s when the "mother country" was in the throes of a fiery war, were frugal days and the cost of hydro travel was negligible. The Thuttuwa in our own childhood days had already gone out of circulation getting incarnated only in Raban Pada that informed that on the Pettagama are three thuttus, which is a high fraction of a cent. Anyway, this is not a dissertation on the coinage system in the colonial days and let us get back to my friend.

Anagarika Dharmapala

A Buddhist boy from a well-to-do family he was rowed so long from Jambureliya to reach the famous college in that area, St. John's College.

Saint John

Ironically to Buddhist children the pride of this college is not in the fact that it was founded in honour of Saint John, but that a foremost leader of the Buddhist and oriental languages Renaissance, G.P. Malalasekera was a student there.

He himself had studied there under a western name as was the order of the day till Anagarika Dharmapala, once Don David or Davith, climbed on to stages and thundered at the treacherous Buddhists who flaunted Para Nam (foreign names).

He was joined by Tibetan S. Mahinda Thera from Panadura who called all Sinhalese who sported foreign names shameless slaves and exhorted them to adot Aryan Buddhist names.

Pardon me, his was a strange kind of nationalism for he himself originally hailed from Sikkim, a border state of India then, yet forgot all about his own country and became a full-blown Sinhalese hoisting it to the greatest race on the earth, that should not emulate any other race. His own Sikkim name went into oblivion and I remember a long newspaper debate as to what his own name was. Such are the quirks of humans.

Proper perspective

In one fiery mood, he bursts out whether lightning and thunder have struck the eyes of the Sinhalese (As gedi dekata hena gahalada Sihalunge) that they cannot see things in their proper perspective. We have now digressed far beyond the student of St. John's, who rowed by boat to school at the initial stage.

His father dies and an uncle, takes him over. A fiery nationalist who roars lion-style about the Sinhalese heritage while cocooned in the Matale hills, yet he sends his nephew to St. Patrick's College, Matale. That is the boy's second great encounter with the holy Saints of Christendom canonised in the Vatican which I had the good fortune to visit recently. Years glide and the boy grows in years and Matale's schools are not enough for him. The uncle packs him off to St. Sylvester'S College, Kandy from where he enters the university. A brilliant career follows for Leel, the lovable boy.

According to him, none of the Saints had made him a saint or ever tried to, via their deputies. Instead the boy is today one of the foremost Buddhist leaders in the country-cum-president of many a Buddhist associations.

He says that none of the saints or their deputies pursued him for conversion for funds or any other help. They had done their duty of educating and disciplining the boy and that was all. In fact they had made a good Buddhist out of him.

But yet up crops an issue. Surely there is something left unsaid and 'Prince Octo' answers it wen I put the question to him.

Buddhism

"Five days a week we went to the Christian school where the baby Jesus and the Madonna and the Saint stood in lonely corners and gazed at us compassionately and on Sundays we attended the Dhamma school and just got grilled in Buddhism."

As the Bo leaves fluttered in the wind and the dagoba flaunted a white marvel while vermillion robed young Bhikkhus went about in slow gait carrying Patras and Ran Kotale full of water, just as in the days of the Buddha, of course in his own mother country of Bharatha Desha. So, 'octo' along with many others of that age seems to have had the best of both worlds.

But that kind of bi-education needs concerned parents or guardians. Prof. Malalasekera's biography reveals the pains his father took to have his son well versed in the Buddhist way of learning and made him learn all the worthy Buddhist texts. And that, while attending the educational institution of Saint John's. Read Poojitha Jeevitha (The revered lives) and many of those who have reached the top, in Lanka's scholarly and religious field have gone through this dual system of education. Long live the Saints, I hail them forgetting that they are already dead.

But a critic springs up again, "You have overdone it. Be careful that you do not get attacked on the streets for forgetting the great Sinhala Buddhist colleges catering to Buddhist boys as Ananda, Nalanda, Mahinda, Dharmaraja and Jinaraja.

Ananda especially was once named the Pettah Buddhist English School and had to shift all over North Colombo to resist attacks. They will pay you some unpleasant compliments such as that you are a goon of the colonial regime.

You cannot satisfy everybody. Truth lies somewhere in the middle. Education goes on, countries go on and regimes go on as fashioned by the particular times. Let us not quarrel with the past nor with Saints.