Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka

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Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka A memoir of daily life in a Buddhist society during a time of civil war 1990 – 1995

Douglas Bullis

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Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka

Author’s draft subject to further editing and insertion of author photographs

Not for publication in this form

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Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka

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Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka

AN ATELIER PAPERBACK Published by Atelier Books Ltd., Grahamstown, South Africa February 1, 2022.

Copyright © by Douglas Bullis 2022 The right of Douglas Bullis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means — graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying or information storage and retrieval systems — without written permission from the publisher.

Publisher’s ISBN here

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Contents Tusitha and Serath Haircut Kusum’s Spice Garden The Old Song and Dance Great Walls The Flower Sermon President’s Day at the Temple of the Tooth Painting the Buddha’s Eyes Sacred River No Pause that Refreshes First Light till Dawn, Gangarama Vihara Tales from the Jatakas The Mahavamsa Sri Lankan Poetry Sri Lankan Folk Stories Glossary Bibliography

Word count: 101,264

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7 31 45 61 83 99 113 129 145 159 183 209 235 251 257 262 281

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Tusitha and Serath Mr. and Mrs. Herath are a Jack Sprat couple if ever there was one. He, like many Sri Lankan men, can't be more than fourteen inches in diameter anywhere on his body, and she, unlike most Sri Lankan women, abundantly fills a sari.

The Heraths had piled myself and eight of the family into a Hiace minivan and set off for the family farm near Naula, 45 miles and two hours away. Many Sri Lankan women believe there are three woman in every female body: Earth Woman, Sky Woman, and Life Woman.

They wear a brown, blue, or red sari according their mood. Today Mrs. Herath was wearing a resplendent blue.

Their son, Jayasekera and his wife Nilifoshanti and two daughters Sunali (age eight) and Amali (age four) were with us. Sri Lankan children look like Michelangelo carved them from chocolate.

Jayasekera was lucky. He was on vacation from his job in Kuwait as an X-ray technician when the invasion occurred. He lost all his household effects and most of his dinars. I asked him how he felt about it. "I'm looking for a local job. Money isn't everything." As an Xray technician in Sri Lanka he can look forward to a salary of 4,000 rupees a month, or $100. A university professor earns about 7,500 rupees, or $187.50 a month.

That is, Jayasekera will earn 4,000 rupees a month when and if a job comes available. Right now his family is staying as part of the Herath's extended-family tourist guest house. In addition there are two maids, two houseboys, a driver, two gardeners, and two to three cooks. None of these are members of the family. Their compensation package is a restaurant-booth-sized room with a bed, cupboard, and cloth curtain for a door, and rice and curry three times a day. The houseboy Kuruppu and maid Sriani earn five hundred rupees a month. That's $12.50. They are on call sixteen hours a day. In my entire stay with the Heraths Kuruppu got three days off, and so far as I know, Sriani got none. Yet they wouldn't be eating at all if it weren't 7

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for Mr. and Mrs. Herath. Unemployment means starvation; there's no Employment Development or Welfare Department.

The forty-five mile trip took two hours and two flats. In between chats about Sri Lankan customs and culture, they sang all the way up and back. No boom box, no stereo, and in fact, no car radio at all. Sri Lankans sing folk songs in the absence of these. The Heraths must have gone through forty songs each way, with Jayasekera translating for me. Someone would sing out three or four words and the entire van would erupt into song. Sunali's and Amali's voices were a coloratura of childhood above the women's a-capella choir, with the men baritoning and clapping out the percussion line beneath. One song was about the yellow in the center of the lotus. Another was about the night eagle. Another about the love of mothers. One described how the escape from this life is by way of the stars. Judging from the giggles, there were a couple of X-rated songs, which Jayasekera deigned not to translate.

Becoming more expansive after this recital, Jayasekera disclosed two verses from a song about the breasts on the painted maidens of the 1500-year-old frescos at the rock fortress of Sigiriya: On their breasts are golden chains And still they beckon.

Seeing these lovely ladies I want no other life.

The girl with the golden skin Enticed my mind and eyes.

Her lovely breasts recalled Swans drunk with nectar.

Jaya explained that in Sri Lanka the beauty of a women’s breasts is often likened to swans. When I asked how such sweetly luscious lyrics contrasted with the staccato masculine rhythms accompanying them, he pointed out that almost all village songs were invented by women but sung by men. The handclap-and-syllable vocal style simplifies memorization and it is common to find villagers who can recite a new song verbatim after hearing it twice.

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That explained the copious volume of songs nearly every Sri Lankan I met knew by heart. Hundreds of them — boatmens' songs, carters' songs, honey-collecting songs, songs for late night vigils in watch huts to keep marauding animals out of the ripening fields.

Plowing songs, planting songs, transplanting songs, harvest songs, threshing songs. Cow-call songs, child-call songs, songs about the blooming of flowers: Badda vatata suda moramal pipee la, Sadda kara bambaru e vaga kiya la.

Itith panith lova samatama beda la, Yannan bambaru duk masivili kiya la.

White mora flowers blossom all around the forest, la!

Which the bees announce with their noise, la!

Wax and honey they give to the world, la!

And go with their wailing message, la!

Invocations, invitations, supplications. Some of the world's most archaic lullabies. Prose songs, poetry songs, lamentations, dance songs, songs to be recited while pushing images of the gods on a swing. Songs in praise of kings, songs of parting recited by ladies of the harem, songs to accompany drama, songs describing how to work: Into the top of the mat weave a design of hisata flowers; Into the bottom a design of payata flowers; Into the center weave as-pan reeds; And to the four corners a criss-cross design.

And during a surprisingly Western Christmas season amid this Buddhist, Moslem, and Hindu culture, for two solid weeks the 1990 market square radios blared a new hit from twelve time zones away: She wore an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini...

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If my Q-Tips hadn't been stolen by monkeys, I would have swabbed out my ears.

I wanted to integrate myself into a family because only by living with a family could I learn how people really are. Luckily I fell into the Herath guest house. Their home on the outskirts of Kandy had a gorgeous view of fog-shrouded hills and a thirty-foot flowerfall of bougainvillea that in the pure brilliant white of the overhead sun made noon like living on the inside of a diamond. Nearly all their guests stayed for one or two nights, seeing the sights of Kandy before heading on to the Ancient Cities region to the north or the beaches to the south. When after a week I told Mrs. Herath that I intended to stay a year she replied, "You tell your Americans, you tell them about the real Sri Lanka, not the one in the headlines!" I told her that was exactly what I had in mind. I knew the horror stories appearing in the American press about Tamil Tiger terrorism in the north of the island, yet I also knew there was much more to the country than bylines from Reuters.

The visit to the Naula farm was my acceptance as one of the family. We visited the sick pregnant cow and talked about worms and the fact that flies were turning the cow's nipples into a black crust. I contributed fragments of nearly-forgotten knowledge from my boyhood on a farm. Someone took off in the van. Later I learned Mrs. Herath had decided to undertake the costs of a vet — a valued profession in this animal-loving country — based on some comments I'd made.

During a detailed tour of the grounds I learned about the difference in quality between government-supplied snap-bean seed and commercially-supplied: Row "A" was fat with beans, Row "B" was scrawny. Thus I encountered for the first time why many Sri Lankans are still irrationally fond of the socialist ideal despite its disastrous consequences in the 1970s: most Sri Lankan entrepreneurs are far more preoccupied with carving out safe monopolies for themselves than providing quality service or innovative merchandise.

"Mediocre bean seedlings are a shadow of the caste system," Jaya explained. "During colonial times the higher radala aristocratic and govigama cultivator castes held on to their privileges by cuddling up 10

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to the Europeans. They became mudaliyars — government administrators. They adopted the British accent and ways, one of which was a blend of snobbery with noblesse oblige. New businesses, on the other hand, were often started by the old salagama cinnamonpeeler and karava fish-salter castes. They became a new mudalali caste, wealthy due to their enterprise. Because they learned business from the bottom up rather than the top down, self-interest was more important to them than public interest. Securing an exclusive contract for hauling tea from the factories above Haputale to the docks at Colombo was far more enticing than creating an island-wide door-todoor delivery network serving all retail businesses. You can wait a week for a vital shipment of PVC pipe to travel the hundred-fifteen kilometers from Colombo to Galle, yet tea for export via slow freighter gets rush-order honors. Today people still look to the government to provide economic security, not business. Eighty percent of young people would rather work for the government than a business."

I recalled that after we had turned off the paved highway, about a mile up the rust-red dirt road, we had passed an acre-sized plot of ground still smoking from having been burned. The white dust of grass ash covered the road and fanned downwind over nearby paddies. The fire had burned through the low growth so quickly that only the bottom leaves of the half-dozen trees had been singed. A man and two boys were building a frond-covered hut in the center of the clearing. Mattocks that looked like oversized hoes lay on the ground.

"Chena?" I asked, referring to an ancient slash-and-burn landclearing system which for millennia has provided land for the landless at the expense of the land itself. Chena farming produces crops only for a few years before depleting the soil. The burned-out patches take a decade or more to return to their original diversity. The contrast of a lush tropical paradise and a hungry populace is never further from mind than a scraggly weed patch whose trees have singed trunks.

"Janisaviya," Jaya replied. "Janisaviya is a bootstrap financial system which channels IMF and World Bank funding to the farmers and small business owners who need it. In most countries 11

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international funding is filtered through layers of privileged bureaucrats who funnel off most of it for their offices, their relatives on the staff, their international junkets, and their cars. 'Their', 'their', and more 'their', with the leftover crumbs cast out on a few fields where journalists are taken. But now President Premadasa has devised a system in which the money goes directly to the intended recipients to help them develop their land or businesses."

He outlined a complex system in which Farmer X qualified by a specified level of poverty becomes eligible to receive 1,250 rupees ($31.25) in monetary credits a month for his family's subsistence, plus an equal amount that goes into a savings account that can't be touched until it reaches 25,000 rupees ($625). The credits must be spent at government suppliers where it goes to help purchase more raw goods and food directly from local producers. The farmer can't buy arrack with the credits or gamble them away.

"Twenty-five thousand rupees is two or three years' income for most farmers. What do they do with the windfall?"

"Some goes down the drain, of course. Providing a dowry or paying off the moneylenders. That can't be stopped. But the government doesn't just blindly give it away. They train Janisaviya recipients in diversifying crops, managing cash flow, establishing markets for produce or goods, and so on. More than ninety percent of Janisaviya money ends up improving their ability to become financially stable. The big change with farmers comes when they stop thinking subsistence and start thinking business."

Jaya pointed out that largely because of Janisaviya and other programs devised by President Premadasa, Sri Lanka often compares favorably in what is called "developing countries literature" — the professional journals read by the technocrats and world-hopping inspectors of organizations like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and aid-providing countries like Japan, the U.S., Canada, Finland, Holland, and Sweden. These journals are filled with phrases like "equilibrium price levels," "yield management," and "decision briefs."

Jaya saw my grimace at his mention of the name of one of these journals and rescued his own president from oblivion via the NGO (nongovernmental organization) Seal of Approval. "Prem is our 12

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'Barefoot President' because he is the first Sri Lankan president to come from a poor upbringing," he added. "The snobby hangers-on who never got over the British colonial system no longer dominate South Asian politics as they used to. The IMF and other agencies regard Prem as the most interesting leader in the Third World today.

That's why the IMF earmarked a hundred million dollars for Janisaviya."

We passed the fumescent smell of the henhouse on our way to inspect patches of yams and chalk-colored pumpkins, groves of mango and banana. I asked Jaya about three ropes emanating from the hut where the permanent help lived. The ropes fanned in different directions fifty to a hundred feet out, where they were tied to tree limbs festooned with clusters of tin cans and bottles dangling from strings. "They scare away the Seven Sisters," he explained as he shook one line into a clangor that sounded like basketball practice on a xylophone. "The Seven Sisters are pigeons that always flock in sevens.

You know a hawk's been around when you only see six."

Mr. Herath described how next April, just before the southwest monsoon, they would cut the patch of sawgrass, set it afire for the ash, then hire a plowman to turn it under. They would pay the plowman by the meter. After the spring monsoon's sixty-plus inches of rain they'll plant mangos, coconuts (five years until first fruit), chilis (highest cash crop: 700 rupees or $17.50 per hundred-kilo bag), tamarinds, and the thirteen varieties of bananas most popular in the markets. The Heraths weren't eligible for Janisaviya because they had income from their guest house business. Bank interest was twentythree percent; moneylenders ran to forty.

All day along these lines. I couldn't jot notes fast enough. By noon the hilltossed clouds had begun to coalesce into thunderheads. I could see the vague shapes of several women moving about in a frond-roofed unpainted mud-and-wattle hut behind the Heraths' whitewashed brick farmhouse. Smoke hued with spice smells drifted out from gaps in the fronds. An array of knobby, bespeckled, gourdlike vegetables lay on the ground outside the door.

Jaya picked up a stiff three-foot-long dusty green pod that looked like an okra with pituitary problems. "This is patthola or snake 13

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gourd. It's cut into three-inch segments and boiled in coconut milk for rice and curry."

He described how wattaka, a mottled yellow vegetable the size and shape of a pumpkin, is cut into chunks and steamed — also for the rice and curry. Alongside the wattaka were alu kesil gedi or celadon-green cooking bananas that never really ripen or acquire the banana's flavor, yet are perfect for — rice and curry. To this nowvoluminous rice and curry is also added bambutu — eggplant cooked in coconut oil with tomatoes that were poached in coconut milk.

A pile of ochre-yellow coconuts lay in a heap, looking like the munitions supply for a team of comic-book fusiliers. A young woman who didn't look over seventeen emerged from the hut holding a long katta knife with an upswept blade and squared-off tip. She picked up a coconut and lopped off its top with four chops around the circumference. One final chop into the center produced a spurt of pale liquid. She wore the housewife's working uniform: a blouse and a sarong. Jaya introduced her as Mrs. Liyasinghe. She covered a furtive gap-toothed smile with her hand then disappeared back into the hut.

From the smell and the smoke I knew it was the kitchen.

"New visitors think chilis are the centerpiece of our cooking," Jaya said. "But in fact, it is the coconut. Cooking begins with coconut oil and the final garnish at the table is coconut sambol. The dishes are simmered in thambili or coconut water." To make coconut oil, he said, "scrape the flesh out of the shell with a hiramane, boil the scrapings in water, put the mash into a wangadia-molgaha, a mortar-and-pestle, pound it into paste, and squeeze out the liquid in cheesecloth. Boil it until the water evaporates. What's left is oil. We use it in lamps as well as for cooking."

It turned out that Mrs. Liyasinghe wasn't seventeen, she was thirty and had been married for the last thirteen years. "Without children," he added as a seemingly reluctant afterthought.

I dredged up a statistic from my pre-arrival research. "Twenty years ago the birth rate was five to six children per family and now it's just a little over three. Sri Lanka's population is now almost twenty million, which nearly everyone agrees is too much. Too many poor are migrating to Colombo thinking they'll find jobs there.

Colombo's population is over a million, which everyone agrees is too 14

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much. Almost eighty percent of Sri Lanka's annual budget is provided by the IMF and other major aid agencies, which everyone agrees is too much. Perhaps Mrs. Liyasinghe isn't barren, she's taking birth control pills to make life easier for everyone."

"Dooglahss," he said, mispronouncing my name the way every Sri Lankan I met did. "You can’t rely on what you read in the foreign press. This is Sri Lanka. The statistics don't tell you that people live on a banana peel here. One slip and you go down. Women like Mrs. Liyasinghe walk on the banana peel of children. Men make money, but children are wealth. Statistics are statistics, compiled in cities by people who live in cities. This is the countryside. There are no statistics here. Logic isn’t the same as in the cities. Mrs. Liyasinghe isn't merely barren, she has dreams of Kalukumara."

We walked down to the irrigation canal that bordered the west edge of the farm for a refreshing swim. There Jaya introduced me to the power ancient gods and demons still hold over modern-day Sri Lankans. My readings had driven home the idea that Buddhism was the dominant force in Sri Lankan society. Those readings were written

by Buddhist men, just as the great epic histories of the Lankan civilization were written by Buddhist monks. Now I began to learn that beyond Buddhism were shadows of forgotten ancestors.

"There are several versions of Kalukumara's story," Jaya said, "but they all come from the fact that people aren't content with whole cloth so they embroider. Did you know there's a family in the Kalapuraya crafts village outside of Kandy that invented the technique of embroidering batiks? You'd think a batik is plenty decorated enough, but no. Now the family has imitators and soon a plain batik will never do. So with Kalukumara. You'd think that menopause, menstruation, and stillbirths would be pain enough, but no. One Kalukumara story is that he was the prince of King Boksala and Queen Sonalu. He was unsuccessful in love and turned blue from the anger of desire. He shows himself in seven forms — Handun Kumara, Sandun Kumara, Mal Kumara, and so on. All of them cast evil on women.

"Another legend is that Kalukumara was born from the ashes of prince Vijaya, the first Aryan to settle ancient Lanka. Vijaya first mated with a local princess, Kuveni. She was a yaksa, a member of 15

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one of the four aboriginal hunting tribes who lived here for fifty thousand years before the Aryans arrived in Northern India. At first Kuveni tried to tempt Vijaya and his followers so they could be captured and enslaved. But he seized her and threatened to cut off her hair. She then offered to help Vijaya overthrow her people if he would make her queen. She did, and he did. Then he threw her aside to marry an Indian princess of noble blood. Kuveni's people then stoned her to death. Vijaya the betrayer was reborn as Kalukumara, the god who punishes women for betraying the tribe.

"The third story is that Kalukumara is the wandering soul of Neela, a very handsome man. Once when Neela visited the city Stripura the women there all fell in love with him and wanted him to father their children. They abandoned their husbands and pulled Neela to pieces each trying to keep a part of him. His spirit became a devil taking revenge on women and children. So it makes no difference which legend you choose. Kalukumara is behind bad dreams, emotions, childlessness, illness, tragedy.

"Sinhalese women are considered superior to men because they can bear children. The old Lankans believed demons hate the fact that women have power over life. The demons want that power for themselves. Hence they bring all the sicknesses they can to women, and of all the misfortunes barrenness is the worst. Worse to us than impotence. Jealous relatives and neighbors hire sorcerers to spell a bride to not seem a virgin or a groom to be unable on the wedding night. There are demons for miscarriages, for obstructed births, for stillbirths, for husbands to stray or become drunk so often they can't be husbands."

On the other side of the irrigation canal, some boys rode by on bicycles. Strapped to their backs were satchels with oversized buckles that looked like something a lawyer would approve. They spotted my Westerner face and stopped to ogle. Westerners were very rare in this part of Sri Lanka, and me swimming in a back-country canal was virtually a once-in-a-lifetime sight.

"School pen? Bonbon?" one ventured hopefully. Everywhere I've been in Asia plaintive "School pen" and "Bonbons" emanate from children using the same plaintive inflection. How did Filipino kids working the GI bases manage to transmit this vocabulary across three 16

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thousand miles of ocean to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka? In a few years they will be saying, "Kawasaki" and "Rallye lamps" as instructed by satellite dish TV. But "Bonbon?" comes via no TV. I thought about the underground childhood languages that exist as years-broad streams across which the lives of children pass. Nursery rhymes at one age, "ashes, ashes, all fall down" a few years later, skiprope songs after that, hopscotch doggerels, "alee-alee-action-free" to the bounce of a ball, then jingles that taunt or defy. And beyond these, lingos as specialized as the phrases of developing-countries literature or law or machine language. Demons and gods are no more remote than language's schoolyard.

We entered Mrs. Liyasinghe's hut, which now smelled like a cross between a forest fire and a spice garden for the gods. I got a quick culinary tour of the ten-foot-square smoke-blackened kitchen, which had one window, one door, and three clay chattie pots steaming over pronoun cooking fires. Each lipa or cooking pit was made from a triangle of stones on which a chattie balanced, heated by burning sticks and the gouge-shaped ends of coconut frond stems. In principle the smoke exited up through the kumeri or chimney but in fact it hung in thick layers that stung the eyes before finally wafting away through gaps in the fronds. A black crystal-encrusted pot hung from a weave of twine pressed into the mud partway up the chimney. It contained salt water which Mrs. Liyasinghe ladled copiously into every pot as it simmered. Later when we ate seated cross-legged like ravenous meditators on the chilli drying pad outside, I noticed that what saltiness wasn't soaked up by the rice was masked by a curry that could get 6,000 RPM out of a detuned lawn mower.

In honor of my presence Mrs. Liyasinghe switched to English except for untranslatable terms. I soon picked up a potpourri of cooking terms like malu kapana and pihiya (knives used to bone and filet); latchiya (a spun-metal pan the size and shape of a halved softball used to cook a yeasty pancake called an appa or "hopper"); and a agile (stone rolling pin without handles) employed to crush chilis into red paste on a mirisgala or roller plate. "They cost two hundred rupees," Mrs. Liyasinghe informed me as she mashed a dozen chilis in three quick strokes. That calculated to five dollars and I wondered how long it took someone to carve two stones so 17

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precisely from solid rock for the same amount of money an American burger flipper earns in an hour. "If you crush chilis the wrong way you rub a hollow spot in the roller plate and ruin it," she added.

Then we danced under the tamarind tree to the fractured clapping of the men, who were by then wildly drunk on arrack, the local coconut vodka. I wondered if they ever heard of the term "designated driver." I don't drink, but I sure wasn't about to drive us home on those tires. Since the government owns the country's largest distillery, the only time you read about drunken driving is when someone is killed. I went to an AA meeting to see what it was like; there were only three men there, all self-consciously Catholic in the region of Sri Lanka which is most devoutly Buddhist. There was so much talk about the rosary, Virgin, and who was up for canonization I felt I'd blundered into a Recovering Catholics meeting.

On the way back we had the second of two punctures. The first we'd fixed by putting on the spare; now the jig was up.

Sri Lankans keep immaculate homes. Grounds are groomed every day with coconut-fiber ekal brooms, and insects unceremoniously chased away with a broom. My room had permanently assigned to it one houseboy and one maid. The cooks could have a six-dish rice and curry dinner on the table in ten minutes. This cost me $6.25 per day.

But oily things like cars are another matter. I've never seen more bald tires than in Sri Lanka. At 3,000 rupees ($75) a new tire is out of the question; that's an elementary school teacher or policeman's monthly salary. Retreads are 1,500 to 1,800 rupees, but if they're driven hard on the grinding cobbled pavement of most Sri Lankan roads, they tend to lose the entire tread after a few thousand miles.

Flat repairs, however, cost fifteen rupees (thirty-five cents). Flat repair shops are as common in Sri Lanka as masseuses in California.

The repairman had the skinny, almost emaciated, body of a Kenner — the common laborer caste of the Kandy district. His legs weren't much thicker than a rhesus monkey's arms. At thirty-five cents a repair and a lot of competition, he probably picks up less than a dollar a day. But then, the lowest grade of rice costs thirty-five cents a kilo.

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He demounted the tire by standing on the edge and prying the rim loose with an iron rod that had been flattened on one end at the local forge. He vulcanized the tube in a device that had been cobbled up from a vice and an old clothes iron from which the handle had been removed. As the tire itself had the beginnings of a rupture in the band, he felt it needed strengthening. He cut out a piece from an old inner tube, put it over the break, ladled two tablespoonfuls of kerosene around the periphery, and lit it. I stood back for this. But when it had burned itself out I was astonished — a perfect seal!

Refilling was accomplished with a wheezy revamped refrigerator motor line-feeding into a hose. It took fifteen minutes to get to thirty pounds.

Meanwhile I went to the Muslim general store across from the Hindu temple a block down the street. Hindu kovils have hundreds of sculptured deities writhing over the entire building. These are elaborately carved or molded from plaster, then painted in an assortment of colors whose collective effect can only modestly be described as stupefying. Imagine for a moment the statues in the portals of Chartres painted in day-glo and aluminium and gilt with embellishing swirls, cross-hatchings, dotted lines, and geometricisms, and you've got it.

The Muslim store was cut from the same bolt as the fabled American general stores of old. Coils of rust-colored coir rope, limes in a basket, a display of wrenches, tins of fish, sari cloth, batteries both auto and flashlight, gold bracelets, crescent wrenches and a nice assortment of screwdrivers, boom-box radios, burlap sacks with ten different kinds of rice and six kinds of dried fish spilling over their brims, and — umbrellas! Dozens of umbrellas hanging from a pole.

With the great quantities of rain here, not to mention the intense midday sun, I needed an umbrella and had forgotten to pack one. I'd been drenched one too many times by a sudden shower on my way back from downtown Kandy or found myself meditating on the feeling of rain on my bald head at the local Buddhist temple.

So I bought two, at a hundred thirty-five rupees ($3.37) each. One was for me, the other for "Uncle" M.P. Perera, a retired schoolteacher living out a quiet retirement on a $42-a-month pension in a grassy bungalow below my room. He supplemented his income giving 19

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English lessons to schoolgirls in the area. We had taken a liking to one another after I spent half an hour helping him induce a monkey to give back a bottle of coconut hair oil it had stolen. By the time we succeeded (the bottle was empty by then as the monkey had figured out how to unscrew the cap), "Uncle" had picked up a few new words that I encouraged him not to pass on. This monkey was the leader of a pack of twenty five or so which periodically raided the homes in our area as a part of their foraging circuit. I kept wondering what was happening to my toothpaste and Q-Tips. They would disappear for no reason and yet I knew Kuruppu was honest. Then one day while quietly working at my desk I heard a soft "klink" from the bathroom; sure enough, when I peeped in there was a skinny brown arm fishing around through the louvers. I often wondered what they thought of the toothpaste.

The monkeys slept under the eaves of the home below my room and spent most of the day on the roof fighting and playing and copulating, picking each others nits, stealing food, and tearing out roof tiles to throw at each other. The local boys considered this a ready-made opportunity to throw firecrackers at them. BIG firecrackers. Firecrackers with thunderclap roars which, while the monkeys sat on the highest branches chittering at the racket below, reduced dogs with a high flinch factor to a state of apoplexy.

On the way back we sang songs while running on bald tires in a driving rain with lightning crackling off the hills in blinding glints.

We were experiencing the fading effects of the Northeast Monsoon blowing out of the Bay of Bengal. There are two monsoons. With such a short fetch for the wind to work on, the Northeast is the weaker of the two. The Southwest Monsoon, on the other hand, comes roaring in from the April equatorial Indian Ocean, where there's nothing between Dondra Head and Antarctica to keep it from building up a head of steam. Kandy, in the mountain region of Sri Lanka's center, gets the rains of both. Articles about irrigation management figure prominently in the local press.

Rocks of gneiss and schist and granite flew by, glinting with crystals. No wonder Sri Lanka is the gem capital of the world.

Fissures in the miles-deep earth where crystals form thrust them up 20

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here. While down there in the molten bakery of the Earth's crust, the aluminates and silicates and chromiums and titaniums and vanadiums had eons to pool and color and coalesce into gemstones as they cooled. Solomon is said to have sent to ancient Lanka for the jewels with which he wooed Sheba. The Romans knew of the gems from an island they called Taprobane. They were followed by Arab traders who called the island Serendib and whose descendants still form Sri Lanka's jewel trading caste. I glanced at one eroding granite plug larger than Yosemite's Half Dome, looked at Jayasekera and said, "In the river at the bottom of that ravine, I'll bet you can find gemstones." He said, "Dooglahss, how do you know about these things? They find sapphires, rubies, and zircons in the gravel there." I said, "As a boy I divided my time between building telescopes to study the stars and hunting for pretty rocks. I was raised in volcano country and I walked around a lot."

I saw a man carrying 20-foot lengths of bamboo balanced on a cloth on his head as he pushed his bike in the driving rain. "He uses the poles to knock down peppercorns in the spice gardens. They dry the red berries in the sun before the April monsoon. Four, five days.

Then they sell the pepper to Spice Islands." After that, "His wife, she cuts off the bamboo at each joint, fills them with rice and whole herb leaves and roasts them over the fire. It makes pittu, a national treat.

Nilifoshanti will make you some."

I looked back at Nilifoshanti. Sunali and Amali were sleeping cradled one in each arm. Nili is beginning to plump out a little like Mrs. Herath. Things are well in the Herath kitchen. I said, "Please, if you make pittu, go easier on the chilis than today." She smiled and replied, "I know. Western palate."

The Herath women and I had developed some confidences. We began to talk about child raising.

"How long did you breast feed your children?" I asked.

"Six months, but many women here, they have small mounds so they have to use Nestle."

Nestle has made a fortune off small-mounded women. Their powdered milk ads are everywhere. Until forced to stop recently by world outrage they would go into illiterate villages with commissioned sales reps dressed like nurses in white. They'd show 21

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how to make Nestle using bottles of water they'd brought along. The village women would then stop breast feeding and use local stream water to prepare Nestle. Child mortality went through the roof.

Nestle corporate P.R. blamed it all on the illiterate women. I thought of acid rain and the carbon dioxide filling the atmosphere and yet another grant to academic institutionalism to verify if the results of a previous study are the same.

I began drinking local tap water because I wanted to live life the way the locals do and not be an in-and-out tourist drinking imported bottled water. "Local" is "local", water included, and the only time I ever got sick from it was several trips to the Naula farm later when I swallowed canal water while helping give a young calf its first bath.

On my first walk to the Udawattakele Forest preserve at the top of the hill above my room I explored some wet, weedy forest paths. I came back with five leeches which I discovered when I pulled off my blood-soaked socks. In an unthinking moment of revulsion I yanked them off. The wounds bled for hours. I couldn't stanch the blood flow.

Later I recalled you're supposed to put salt or a flame on leeches so they retract their toothy suckers and stop exuding anticoagulant.

Three weeks later I still had the welts. Leeches have the most hideous form of locomotion known. They stretch out the sucker to each side and then straight ahead, attach it to the floor, then scrunch the rest of their body bow-backed up to the sucker. This plus the fact that they are shit-colored makes the things devised by George Lucas something you'd love to have around the house. "Local" is "local", leeches included.

Three children stood at the side of the road holding out baskets of chickpeas for sale. It occurred to me that in Sri Lanka I had never seen a child strike another, play pretend machine gun with its mouth and forefinger, chase an animal with a stick, or throw a rock at anything.

They did, however, work in a great many roadside and village vegetable stands. I asked about childrearing.

"Our room are small. Children, they sleep with their parents until well into their years. Sixteen or seventeen sometimes."

"What do you do about lovemaking?"

"If they wake, we play with them and finish quietly."

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"What about the theory that lovemaking is too violent an act for children to see?"

"We don't do it violently."

I wish Freud's database had been a little larger than a handful of frustrated middle class women in Vienna who had all been abused and whose husbands were having affairs, either with their businesses or other woman.

There's no pornography in Sri Lanka, not even the kind of cutesy come-on pictures of women with two blouse buttons undone while they hold a giant Champion Spark Plug, such as you find on the calendars of in auto parts sales windows. The assumptions behind pornography simply don't exist in Sri Lankan men. There's also equal pay for equal work. Male and female professors or secretaries or workers doing the same work earn the same pay. When I told Mrs. Herath that in America, if a man and a woman are doing the same job the man usually is paid a quarter to a half more, she looked mystified and said, "But why do they do that?"

Dusk descended as we navigated curve after curve along mist-filled hills. People and dogs and oxcarts loomed out of shrouding grays so subtly hued they were like examining a sari, silk thread by silk thread. I asked about some thatched huts along one particular length of road. They were built on ten-foot-high mounds of earth and smoke roiled from out of the eaves. "White dagobas, Dooglahs," someone said. "The men burn limestone. They add water to the ashes. They make whitewash. They paint."

I looked at the hills. No gashes of clearcutting's commercial rape of nature. I recalled our earlier conversation about how chena farming and illicit woodcutting were slowly deforesting the island. Even the teak plantations planted twenty years ago in a reforestation drive were disappearing after payoffs to local authorities. A little later we passed the Soyza Iron Works, a murky shed with log-fed fires and bellows operated by little boys. Two men were fabricating retaining rod by pounding red hot bar iron into a serrated mold. Hammers the size of two fists. Clangs, clangs, big red clangs, red hot iron at a dollar a day plus Mrs. Soyza's red hot rice curry.

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Behind their shop were three graves, marked by hoops of coconut-frond spine over which noodle-sized white polyethylene frillies had been draped. I had seen such graves often, and now thought to ask about them.

"White is the color of mourning," Mr. Herath explained. His first name is Serath and I hadn't yet sorted out what to call him. "Serath Herath" sounded like a phonics teacher with the hiccoughs. "When someone dies," he went on, "the whole village is decorated in white.

They have a procession to the grave. A truck is in front. Men in the back of the truck throw fresh sand on the road so the mourners won't walk on dirty pavement. The truck is followed by boys throwing firecrackers to scare off demons. Then the people come holding old spears and shields and the shroud." Serath had been a tour guide for seventeen years and had developed the skill of imparting information without sounding like a tour guide. "There are no laws that say you have to bury the dead all in one place like a graveyard. The Catholics do that in the coastal region, but in the places where the Kandyan and old kings ruled, people are buried near where they died."

"Why don't they cremate, as the Buddha himself was."

"We still do, but most people can't afford wood for a pyre, so they bury."

I pondered the significance of wood too expensive for age-old rituals, but not for plywood shipped to Kuwait to be used once for concrete forms then discarded. In Sri Lanka, Iraq translated to 100,000 refugees who had lost everything, and a twenty-one percent unemployment rate. Tea, Sri Lanka's second major cash crop after overseas repatriations, went eleven percent to Iraq. Not now. There was an emergency request before the World Bank to cover $300 million in lost international income.

In Sri Lanka's north, the LTTE (Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam) are killing Muslims because they're Muslims and Sinhalese because they're Sinhalese. The Tigers recruit twelve- to sixteen-year olds who've heard the word "Tiger" all their lives; now they tell their village girls they are "Tigers" and shoot AK-47s. The Tiger leadership has announced no political agenda to speak of, they just want to get rid of everybody who isn't Tamil. Why? They have backstabbed the government so many times with phony cease fires that nobody 24

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believes anything they promise any more. Why? Clearly there is more to their false truces than giving them time to rebuild their trenches and redeploy their troops. What about the articles I had read in European and Canadian newspapers about the widespread involvement of "refugee" Tamils in heroin distribution? Why are so many Sri Lankan Tamil names associated with so many Asian drug smuggling rings that involve heroin from the Golden Triangle? What kind of liberation results when a war of liberation is financed by white powder? What story is the New York Times and Washington Post neglecting?

Clangs, clangs, big red clangs.

We pulled into the wet, cobbly house driveway, the whole car teaching me the Sri Lankan national anthem in Sinhala. Two weeks later the malaria hit. I'd been told I didn't need to take Chloraquin in Kandy because the mosquitoes there aren't the virulent kind. But I forgot about Naula, its paddies, its water-filled iridescent green paddies, the potholes wild elephants make as they wallow.

The first day of malaria is shaking so violent it's equivalent to nonstop convulsions. You really fear a truly vital nerve function might go, like the commands to the heart. You feel like you're freezing to death but are soaking wet with sweat. I asked Kuruppu to hold my head while pouring water down my throat because my hands were shaking so uncontrollably I was afraid of breaking a tooth. Next morning the Heraths came to my room with Jayasekera.

X-ray techs in Sri Lanka are given a solid background in general medicine before they specialize (Sri Lankans have the highest literacy rate in Asia after Japan).

He said, "You're burning up a lot of energy. Get some of this down." He produced a tumbler full of water in which half a cup of sugar had and some salt been dissolved. "I'll bring another one in two hours."

The second day I was down to shaking like a dog crapping carpet tacks. We advanced to pulped fruit and curd. Curd is buffalo-milk yoghurt. Mrs. Herath brought in a two-quart thermos and said, "This is 'porridge'. It's pureed garlic, ginger, rice, and four ayurvedic herbs: rampa, sera, karapincha, and karawila. It's our ayurvedic cure for many sicknesses. Drink as much as you can."

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Karawila is a plant leaf that's said to work many different kinds of cures. When children get chicken pox, their mothers lay them on a bed of it to sleep. It keeps down scarring from the welts. It tastes like the bottom of a midwinter pond.

From the suffix "vedic" in "ayurvedic" I gathered how old the Sri Lankan herbal medicine system is. The vedas were first written down in India about 1500 B.C., over a millennium before Aryan sailors on trading expeditions discovered "Tampabanni" on their trips to India's Malabar coast.

The porridge worked wonders. In four days I was back at the laptop. Now the afternoon rain is falling softly and for the first time in a week I've had a decent sleep. Outside three roosters are crowing round-robin from three nearby farms. Four different kinds of crickets are chirping. The dozen or so watchdogs at the local businesses along the Anagarika Dharmapala Mawatha begin to howl in spurling waves that will go on all night long. The sky is losing its hues.

Myriads of birds are ending their day. The mist is filled with hundreds of crows flying from the paddies where they eat insects and snails and centipedes to their nesting place in the giant trees bordering Lake Kandy. In France farmers shoot crows and use insecticides. In Sri Lanka they are sacred birds.

Gradually the evening's sensations come down to one: the way a nightingale sings. The nightingale's soliloquy is of two parts. The rhythmic part is made up of lilting upswings of beat mixed with thrushes of quivering blended into mockingbird imitations of other birds in irregular rushes disproportioned as if they were meant to be anonymous to each other yet in some part the same.

But that is only the rhythm of the nightingale, the drumbeat potatoes and violin parsley in the back corners of The Magic Flute orchestra while up there on stage are operatic voices raising whole orchards. The nightingale's song begins as dwindling twists down through a quarter of an octave, eight notes microtoning themselves into long curlicue chirps. Then a series of monochrome tones as relentless as Beethoven's last seventeen beats of the Ninth. Then after, what can only be described as a flight into coloratura so beyond Joan Sutherland it could be the opening bars to the entrance of Paradise, an hour-and-a-half solo compressed into ten seconds without the loss 26

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of a single essence. Then imagine such singing from dusk until dawn.

No contractual bickering with the Symphony Management, no FiveStar hotels for the sweep-through diva, no pedantic complaints from belittling reviewers. Just singing.

The auto horns of the night interrupt like something John Cage would write for an auto parts supply firm. The paintbrush sky turns mixed shades of gray, and slowly the horizon-to-horizon dark shadow of the earth rises from the east into the vanishing day's azures. Flowering trees first lose their luster, then their colors, finally their shapes.

Under their coconut skies villagers never see the golds at either end of the day. Dawn is when there's light enough for fields or fish.

Evening is light that has lost its gold. Cooking fires flicker and if someone has a television it is surrounded by faces. The hour of dusk until the sky goes black is the most sociable time of day. Sri Lankans are outdoor people. The village's entire contingent of young girls chat in twos and threes as they carry water pots to the hand-pump village well, then carry them back one resting on a canted hip and another balanced on their heads. Boys split firewood into forearm-sized pieces. Bicyclists swerve across the road without any kind of signal.

Clusters of friends discuss the day's events. In the middle of the road a seven-foot Green Reaper snake wriggles across on its way to a bower. A motorbike jammed with father, mother, and three kids rasps by at suicidal speed. One-lung two-wheel tractors pink-pink along the roads towing two-wheeled carts jammed to the runnels with field workers on their way to the bathing streams.

These same tractor-transport bus systems also serve Sunday moviegoers, their black hair streaming in the wind as they converse their way to the tin-roofed tin-walled town movie house with bare wood benches and names like The Excelsior and twin bills comprising one saccharine Sri Lankan romance and one American shoot-'em-up with the bloodletting in slow motion and subtitles that have people laughing in the oddest places as dying crooks go out in a hail of one-liners. Entrance five rupees in the front row to forty rupees in the "dress circle", a single row of chairs — with backs, even — lined up on a riser in the rear. No popcorn, only peanuts still in their shells and paper cones of semi-soft chickpeas the taste and texture of unripe 27

Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka

corn, and home-made ice cream grainy with raw sugar crystals. No chewing gum to paste on the bottom of benches; by the end of the show the floor is littered with banana peels and mango seeds. The end of an average day.

The vet passed through on the way to a supply house in Kandy to buy medicine for the cow. She had made the fourteen-mile trip out to the farm, five of them down muddy tracks, followed by a ninety-mile round trip to Kandy, then back to the farm. Total cost: 750 rupees ($18.75).

Welcome to Sri Lanka.

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Haircut I needed a haircut. I asked Serath if there was something a little closer than downtown Kandy, a mile away. They said, "Walk towards Kandy but stop at the KVA Saloon, fourth boutique on the right."

I'd walked past this place several times before. Inside was an odd assortment of greeting cards, teddy bears, hairspray, men and women's colognes, shredded coconut, coconut oil, coconut husks, plaited coconut fronds, and dog deworming pills. The last item threw me until I realized that this is a mixed residential/small boutique/ light industrial district, with a dozen or so lathe works, tire repair shops, appliance sellers, and so on, mixed in with residences and shops selling mangoes, "cool drinks", tinned fish, daily newspapers, candy, cookies, soap, and a varied assortment of products derived from coconuts. The term "cool drinks" doesn't necessarily mean that the Cola or Fanta or Lime Crush is actually chilled; it only means that they were beverages of the type that could be cool if there happened to be a refrigerator available.

At night all these establishments are guarded by dogs. Unlike in India, I've never seen an emaciated dog in Sri Lanka. I've also never seen deworming pills in India. This explains why night on the lee side of the Lewalla grade sounds like a kennel just after a coyote has howled. I can't imagine how anybody on that street gets any sleep at night.

I went in, mystified where the barber might be amid all this. A shy, pretty girl dressed in her school uniform of white shoes, white socks, white pleated skirt, white blouse, and red-and-black striped tie, directed me to a back room beyond a cloth curtain wafting lazily in the light breezes. There are few interior doors in Sri Lankan homes; when people go to bed they pull a curtain across the doorway.

Windows, if any, are closed only when rain is pelting down.

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Behind the cloth curtain was, lo and begorra, a hair salon. The proprietor was a smiling, benign, elderly man in possession of about half of his teeth. He greeted me by bowing, taking my fingers in his hand, and touching them to his forehead. This greeting is mostly used as a gesture of respect upon meeting someone, but is also used when you want to convey apologies to someone you've inadvertently offended. Apologies for graver events entail getting down on your hands and knees, touching your forehead to the floor, then lifting just enough to press the hem of the offended person's sarong or sari to your forehead. This gesture is also used by sons and daughters taking leave of their parents after a visit in which it will be a long while before they see each other again. In both cases, the meaning of the gesture is conveyance of humility.

Thence to the haircut. The cover was two towels front and back draped with no pin. He was an expert with scissors and had me clipped short in three minutes flat. "You sweat, sir, you from cold climate?" It was 92 degrees and 90 percent humidity as my hair clung to from his scissors. Less than two weeks before I had arrived from Amsterdam, where there was rime ice on the puddles in the morning.

Then a razor trim around the ears angling inward down the nape of the neck. Last time I had one of those was in Spain! Then a fiveminute scalp massage, first brusque, then kneading, then a light thrumming like a tender rain of fingertips. Followed by coconut oil scented with plumeria.

As I gazed out the glassless window over the luminous greens of mile after mile of coconut palms I grasped why this boutique — and indeed every other boutique I had come to know in my first week in Kandy — was so replete with coconut products.

Coconuts begin to fruit about five years after they are planted, and produce all year long for the next ninety to one hundred years.

They are as close to an all-purpose plant as one can find in the tropics.

Only the olive is an older source of oil. In the "Coconut Triangle" region where coconuts are grown on large plantations as a major export crop, villagers' bullock-drawn chekkhu portable mills used to extract coconut oil are as ubiquitous as the ancient stone olive oil mills one still sees in Turkey and Morocco.

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Coconut oil is used for hairdressing, cooking, margarine, votive lamps in the temples, and home lighting in the evening. The residual meal after crushing is called poonac and fed to cattle. The dried halves of shells are called copra and burn intensely hot. They fuel the smoky, brilliant yellow torches used in the many perehera religious processions, including the Kandy Perehera which is the largest public festival in Asia. Some coconut meat is not pressed for oil; it is removed from the husk using a hand-twirled reamer that looks like a cross between a lemon juicer and archaic torture device. The grated coconut is mixed with hot chilis, lime juice, and maldive fish (slices of dried skipjack) to make a delicious condiment called pol sambol. This is one of the most useful condiments on earth. Despite that unlikely combination of ingredients, pol sambol is used even over ice cream!

The milk of an unripe coconut is called thambili. Thambili is so pure and sterile that physicians used it when they ran out of bottled glucose during World War II. Today's visitors who mistrust local water keep more coconut huskers happy than the Sri Lankans do; locals blithely drink faucet water anywhere on the island. In fact, I drank tap water from the day I arrived, even from wells in villages where tourists are so uncommon that the children hadn't yet learned to plead "bonbon?" or "school pen?"

Coconut juice is the source of several other useful liquids. Kiribath coconut milk is served to children being weaned away from mother's milk. This takes place about the age of two-and-a-half. The transition is eased with generous portions of jaggery, a rock crystal made by boiling down palm sap and coconut milk. Its smoky flavor resembles barbecued molasses. If the heat is taken off before the toddy crystallizes, the muddy syrup which remains is called treacle. Baby elephants adore treacle and one of the most humanitarian ways to capture a young one is to entice it with balls of treacle-soaked rice at the end of a woven coconut-frond trap. It says much about the character of the Sri Lankan people that they would devise such a method rather than the elephant-drive approach used in the rest of Asia, in which a sizable force of tame elephants forces a wild herd into a fear-filled, milling, trumpeting cul de sac where some elephants have to be shot because of injuries or because they go berserk.

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Lankans are no less fond of treacle than the baby elephants, especially if it is spooned over a generous bowl of buffalo milk yoghurt called curd. Curd is thick and creamy, comes in a large clay pot, and has a nutlike flavor that is as close to ambrosia as one can find in a milk product.

The sugar palm — a relative of the coconut — ferments into toddy or ra, which looks like semen on top of cottage cheese. Toddy has the alcoholic potency of beer. Although by itself it is an important symbolic component of certain festivals, most Sri Lankan men talk about toddy the way American construction workers talk about elderberry wine. Sri Lankan men are much given to toddy's far more potent distilled form, arrack. Thirty sugar palms yield about three hundred quarts of toddy in a year, and this distills to about five gallons of arrack. Arrack is probably the closest thing to legalized poison which has yet been approved by the alcoholic beverages industry. It costs moderately more than gasoline and can be used as a mileage extender if you think you're about to run out of petrol on a back-country road.

All this lore was passed on to me while the barber was massaging my scalp. But now that he had finished he was as eager to go on talking as I was to listen. I asked about the reddish ekel broom he was using to sweep up the clippings. He pointed out that the staff of the broom was bundled from the stiff midribs of the fronds. He explained that Marco Polo described how the ancient Lankans soaked and beat coconut husks into fibers, and from those wove twine to join ship planks. Today the same process is used to make dugouts — and for that matter, to make almost all the rope and twine used in Sri Lanka.

Once the coconut liquid and meat have been removed to boil down into oil, the emptied coconut husks are put in large nets, weighted with large stones, and soaked underwater in coastal estuaries for eight to twelve months. Women then beat the pulp with sticks until it disentangles from the husk and becomes fluffy. Then they spin the resulting coir fiber into a rust-red tarn with which they make rope, mats, brooms, brushes, upholstery padding, and mattresses. At the word "mattresses" I grimaced: I'd been sleeping on one of those "mattresses" since I arrived. The discomforts medieval ascetics endured from horsehair shirts were benign compared with the 34

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swayback sag and coarse-cloth brush burns I developed after a week on one of these.

A final comb and look in the mirror. Perfect! After I set the mirror down, he talked of his mother, his cousins, the recent marriage of his wife's sister's third cousin, the plight of his jobless nephew in Colombo, the new retail store venture being started by his mother-inlaw's sister's son in Matala eleven miles and forty minutes to the north, and the marriages of his four sons and three daughter to good spouses they had found through newspaper ads. I was surprised how often he referred to someone not by their name but by their role in the extended family — "My sister's niece's mother-in-law said...."

The ads were behind a framed glass on the wall. He took it down and showed it to me. Three of them read: "Buddhist Govinda father seeks suitable partner for eldest daughter, 19, employed in mercantile establishment as English stenographer. With means. Malefics in Virgo Seventh House. Reply with horoscope. MB-2721, P.O. Box 1135, Colombo."

"Buddhist Govinda father seeks professional person or well established Govi or Kamalkaru businessman for attractive daughter 5' 4", 27. Looks younger. Dowry a flat in Kandy, one lakh, car, and other assets. Reply with copy of horoscope. MB-2879, P.O. Box 1135, Colombo."

"Buddhist Govinda parents seek for son 30 years old 5' 10" now owning house in Ampitiya District Kandy, professional or similar status English educated employed bride, very kind, pretty, long hair. All details with horoscope. MB3201, P.O. Box 1135, Colombo."

Some of the codes in these ads were self-evident — the P.O. Box 1135 was the address of The Sunday Observer, the only Englishlanguage paper to publish classifieds for marriage proposals. The code number was to prevent criminals from finding the addresses of advertisers who possess, for example, "one lakh". The word lakh in Sinhal is defined as "any very large number," but in practice it means 35

Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka

100,000. In matrimonial ads it means 100,000 rupees in cash ($2,500).

A lakh is a formidable sum in Sri Lanka and I've seen ads offering brides with dowries of up to twenty lakhs.

A comparison of horoscopes is an absolute necessity in any marriage. Although the daily papers print the usual syndicated astrological columns — in other words useless fluff — momentous occasions such as the selection of a spouse, moment of marriage, the moment of conception, the moment of birth, the moment of opening a new business venture, best hour to lay the cornerstone for a new house — for these an astrologer must be consulted. After duly connecting the positions of the planets, sun, and moon on a circular chart of the Zodiac, and comparing their respective ascendents, houses, squares, and trines, the astrologer says whether the marriage will be compatible, at what date and time the rings should be exchanged and the thali (the gold necklace signifying marriage) be clasped by the husband and bride's mother forever around her neck, and what times the parents should try to conceive ("Patience, dear!

Three, two, one...").

People influenced by certain planetary signs are to be desired or avoided, depending on one's inclinations. Mercury or Buda, for example, is ever smiling and truthful with a body "as beautiful as a prostitute's", a wise personality, and jovial character. All these are good qualities, but unfortunately Mercury is also a eunuch. Kuja or Mars, on the other hand, is strongly built with a broad chest on a medium-sized body. Kuja possesses an excess of bile, protruding red nerves, and cruel red eyes. He is fickle and hateful but is fond of sex.

Chandra the moon has excessive wind and phlegm and therefore is wise. She has roundish limbs, hand, and feet, and is pleasant to look at. She is affable, highly sexed, and wears a turban. Ravi the sun cheers all bald men such as myself. Ravi compensates for his baldness by being full of merit, witty, wise, and warm. (I taped this description to my mirror, which forever mystified Sriani my maid.) And then there's Sani or Saturn. Sani is not only a eunuch, but "lowly and evil in appearance", having a slim angular body and limbs, red eyes, big teeth, diseased skin, hair all over the body, and a lame left leg. Saturn speaks in harsh phlegmatic language — and who wouldn't given that physique?

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But the real code words in the barber's ads were "Govinda", "Govigama", and "Kamalkaru". Though nowhere near as powerful as in India, caste thinking nonetheless effects vital decisions in Sri Lanka, and one of those is the caste of a future spouse.

When the Portuguese arrived in Asia in the 1500s, they soon noticed that the natives divided society into a large number of groups which were hierarchical, did not intermarry, and related to each other through complex system of ritualized language and behavior. The Portuguese called these stratified groups casta, meaning "pure". The Sri Lankan and Indian peoples called them jati, meaning "birth".

Caste systems divide people into the three fundamentals of class consciousness: hierarchy, specialization, and aversion. They organize society into hereditarially determined hierarchies that preserve social order and job stability. They are as diverse and yet similar as the sculptors of Melanesia, the warriors of pre-Colombian America, the merchants of medieval Europe, the bards and blacksmiths of many African tribes, and opening night at the opera just about anywhere.

The caste system particular to South Asia originated with the Aryans who invaded India from the Middle East about 1,500 B.C. They sought a method which would set themselves above and apart from the dark-skinned native peoples they conquered. Not surprisingly, the Aryans thoughtfully appointed themselves at the top of the social heap, based on their light skin color.

The overall system comprised four varnas corresponding to the social roles of brahmin or "educator", warrior, cultivator, and worker.

The cerebral self-image of the brahmin is mirrored in the aristocratic castes of India, Japan, and pre-revolutionary France, wherein one's obligation was not merely to rule but to be brilliant. But unlike racially mono hue France and Japan, the brahminic system was a hierarchy of color whose racism runs so deep no conflict in South Asia can be understood without knowing its caste and racial roots.

For example, why do the Tamil Tigers attack and extort their own Tamil populace with the same ruthlessness they apply to Sinhalese and Muslims? After all, one would think it astute to be on good terms with one's own economic base. However, the Tiger leader Vellipulai Prabhakaran is a Karaiya, a second-level caste, from the fishing village 37

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of Velvettiturai on the north coast of Sri Lanka near Jaffna. For centuries bordering on millennia, smuggling has been the chief source of extra income in Velvettiturai. Even before the emergence of Prabhakaran and the Tigers this village was notorious for its secrecy.

Visitors without specific business were questioned harshly and expelled. Any local who discussed village affairs in neighboring villages was punished. Velvettituraians rarely moved away to start life elsewhere, and they invariably chose smuggling over education as the route to material self-improvement. Among the Tamils there has existed a long enmity between the Karaiya fishing caste and the higher Vellala cultivator caste. Karaiyas who sought to elevate themselves beyond the fishing profession traditionally branched out into commercial ventures, whereas the Vellalas opted for educated administrative posts and professions like engineering and the law.

Hence three caste-based features of Tamil Tiger behavior: financing themselves by smuggling arms and heroin and by extorting money from educated Vellalas at home and abroad, extreme closemouthedness which takes the form of suicide by cyanide capsule if captured, and forcibly conscripting young people (including women) before they can finish high school.

As brahmanism evolved into Hinduism its caste system became more and more complex, until today there are over 3,000 castes based on family birth and occupation. The system soon became stultifyingly rigid and by the sixth century B.C. several philosophies and religions cropped up which rejected brahmanism. Some of the philosophies were remarkably like those being devised in Greece about the same time — Epicurianism, Stoicism, and Sophism in particular. But two religions developed which were totally unlike anything known in the West. One of them was Buddhism; the other predated Buddhism by almost a century and came to be called Jainism. Both proposed that the ultimate goal of existence was achieving a state of understanding beyond thought, and for that matter, beyond existence itself.

If Buddhism and Jainism were attitudes about non-attachment, Hinduism and its castes is about nothing but attachment. The basic concept underlying caste is psychic and spiritual purity. If personal salvation is the ultimate goal of life, individuals who have progressed further along the road have so purified themselves that they must be 38

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careful to preserve at all costs their own purity and the purity of the social group to which they belong. They must avoid close contact with persons of lower purity; otherwise they will be polluted and their purity will decline to a lower level.

Among Hindus the idea of spiritual purity quickly evolved into a set of complex and highly bureaucratic purification rituals. The purer one's lifestyle, the higher the caste. Brahmins, being vegetarian teachers, were much higher than barbers, butchers, leatherworkers, washers, warriors, and others whose lives necessarily entailed impure objects or acts. Any exchange of a substance between two people entails a problem of purity. Cooked food is more impure than uncooked food because it involves processing and personal contact, not to mention the death of a living being, even if the living being is a sprig of parsley. Higher castes must therefore not partake of food given by a lower caste. Clothes washers pass their hands through bodily wastes, hence their caste must be very low. Some farmers are high caste and others are not: their caste depends on whether they are cultivators who till their own soil, or non-landowners who must supplement their income by hunting and gathering. Sex, naturally enough, is fraught with taboos, although it was not considered so impure for a high-caste man to have congress with a low-caste woman on the grounds that it is less polluting to send forth substances than to receive them. All this breeds an intense preoccupation with the minutia of the material world which is reflected aesthetically in the extraordinarily complex imagery of a Hindu kovil compared with the utter serenity of a Buddhist dagoba.

The caste system arrived in Sri Lanka with the first Aryan settlers about 500 B.C., well before Mahinda arrived to preach the dhamma to King Devanampiya Tissa in 247 B.C. During his life the Buddha had proscribed the caste system. In India this was ignored; Hinduism took care of the threat Buddhism posed by simply grafting the Buddha into their already boggling pantheon of gods. The Sinhalese, with their conservative yet easygoing ways, took the middle course and retained some aspects of the caste system. However, over time they pruned the number of castes to a couple of dozen, all occupationally related and reflecting a strong preoccupation with farming and 39

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fishing. Significantly, in the Sinhalese system there was no caste corresponding to the brahmin. During colonial times, especially under the British, the caste system was either frowned upon or used to advantage depending on the Governor's needs for cooperation with the former aristocracy. For example, in the 1830s the British embarked on a long transition from a mercantile state-controlled economy to a laissez-faire capitalist economy. The tea and rubber plantation system developed from this. The British imported lowcaste Tamils from South India to work the plantations, and thus introduced another caste into an already complex brew.

Capitalism also provided opportunities for non-aristocratic castes to rise economically and therefore socially. The old radala caste of former members of the Kandyan royal family and high nobility suddenly found itself becoming economically and socially irrelevant.

Recognizing the dangers of this, the British countered by throwing governmental support behind the old aristocracy. Governor Sir William Gregory in the mid-1870s even went so far to admit members of the radala caste into a sort of limited partnership in the government, with the British of course being the general partners.

This effectively defused any radala resistance, much in the way Louis XIV defanged the nobility by turning them into courtiers.

For many centuries the caste system was based on one's occupation, marriage, and whether one was low-country or upcountry. Upcountry Kandyans consider themselves automatically of a higher plane, even within the same caste, because they maintained the purest form of Buddhism and Sinhalese culture while the coastal lowlanders were corrupted by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British.

The forced conversions to Christianity by the Portuguese were considered especially demeaning, even though it had been accomplished by the sword.

Without going into exhaustive and pedantic detail, here are some of the original castes and the occupations from which they derived: Radala — descended from the former aristocracy; of these the progeny of the Kandyan kings (the last one was deposed in 1815) are considered the highest; also, current Govigamas from Kandy.

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Govigama — paddy workers and paddy dike repairers.

Sometimes spelled Govinda and abbreviated Govi. As with Hinduism, food providers are considered second only to rulers. The primacy of Govigama status is now being challenged by the Karava caste.

Vellala — The highest cultivator caste among Tamils. Vellalas have long dominated the Tamil educational and commercial elites. They comprise over half the Tamil population and Vellala values are strongly imitated by members of the other Tamil castes. Tamil castes have virtually no influence among Sinhalese.

Bodu — menial farm workers who own no land of their own.

Vahumpara — domestic service in higher households; also actively involved in commerce. Said to trace their descent from the attendants of Mahinda, the son of Asoka who brought Buddhism to ancient Lanka during the reign of King Devenpiya Tissa.

Mudalali — entrepreneurial businessmen and traders in the process of becoming successful.

Mudaliyar — high-ranking military officers or government officials.

Maha Mudaliyar — In British days, chief aide to the British governer in each province; the highest ranking native official.

Kamalkaru — artisans such as goldsmiths, brass workers, leatherworkers and so on; the Muslims who dominate the gem trade are not considered part of the caste system, for even though artisans, they are Muslim.

Navandanna — artificiers.

Galada — stonecutters and builders.

Salagama — originally cinnamon peelers; now an ill-defined caste midway between Radala and Govigama, often adopted by successful self-made business people.

Karava — fish driers and salters. Many members of this caste converted to Catholicism during the Portuguese colonial 41

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period. Over time many of them became wealthy due to their access to English education and involvement with business enterprise. As a result their actual power and caste status are much greater than the lowly fisher caste of their origins.

Karaiya — A Tamil caste directly beneath the Vellalas, comprising, as with the Sinhalese Karava caste, individuals who have gone beyond the boundaries of their caste into the world of entrepreneurs and commerçants.

Durava — toddy tappers, and by extension arrack makers.

Hakkura — jaggery makers.

Hena — washerwomen; also called Rada.

Huna — lime burners (makers of cement); often these are Tamils.

Batgam — foot soldiers, pejoratively called Padu. In the Kandy region the term applies to any menial agricultural laborer.

Berava — drummers, and by extension dancers and musicians; in many villages they double as cultivators but keep the Berava name because of its relationship with Buddhist rites.

Kinnara — in the Kandy district, low-caste common laborers.

Rodiya — outcast communities such as petty criminals.

Ahikuntika — Gypsies, the true roma that spread out all over India and Europe in the fourteenth century. Many Sri Lankans hold an incorrect belief that Gypsies never stay in one place more than seven days because their excrement will have begun to draw too many worms and flies, and they exhaust the local market for their palm-reading and tinkering skills. Gypsies commonly camp by stream-sides and move their goods with donkeys, and tend to make a new campsite at least two days' walk from the last.

The social mobility of today's relative wealth and a fluid job market have, for all practical purposes, blurred caste distinctions 42

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for most social interactions. A radala is as unlikely to address a street beggar as an American socialite is ill-likely to address a panhandler. But in day-to-day commerce, the caste system is scarcely to be seen. It does, however, figure prominently in the page upon page of classifieds entered by parents seeking suitable spouses for their children. Although marriages of love occasionally happen (and are increasingly so) about seventy percent of all marriages are arranged with an eye to strengthening the clan.

Couples learn to love their lifemates. The system seems to work, because affairs are uncommon and the Sinhalese divorce rate is 1.3 percent (1.7 percent with Tamils, and 7.3 percent with Muslims).

The children are the centerpiece of the family.

My haircut was finished. A final whisk all around for the loose hairs, and a dust with powder. We held each other's fingers to our foreheads, the parting sign of regard. Total cost: 20 rupees, or 50 U.S. cents.

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Kusum’s Spice Garden Touts are a breed of parasite Linnaeus somehow missed. Their prey is the wallets of tourists all over Asia. Their lure upon spotting a foreigner is to sidle up and either cast the hook directly: "You need help, sir? I know this city well," or if you are already walking they'll troll with something like, "Nice shirt, sir, Christian Dior?" Once you nibble, you're dead. The next questions are so quick you don't have time to fend them off — "What your name? What country you from?

Where you going? Where you stay?"

If you have a specific hotel in mind you'll hear something like, "Oh no, sir, that place gone all downhill," or "Oh, that place full up."

Not giving you enough time to consider how it is, given any town's dozens of hotels, the tout is privy to such intimate details about the precise hotel you're after, he immediately suggests a nice place he knows, quiet, good food. Of course, your bill will be doubled to pay the tout's fee, which is why his copious chatter avoids details like room rates. If you pause to check your copy of the Lonely Planet guide to see if it lists the hotel the tout recommends, you'll get, "This hotel not in Tony Wheeler! Tony Wheeler only for hippies! They travel cheap, want cheap place. You want fleas, you go Tony Wheeler place. Spiders big as saucers there."

With the possible exception of the saucer-sized spiders, which are as harmless as puppies and live off a diet composed mainly of cockroaches, nothing could be further from the truth. Tony Wheeler personally researched the Sri Lanka Travel Survival Kit and it is one of the best in Lonely Planet's seemingly endless list of guides to exotic locales. It's the places not in Tony Wheeler that you want to avoid — the kind of places that touts steer you to.

The key to understanding touts is: Everyone who has unlimited spare time to escort you to a commercial establishment is after the money 45

Time and Timeless in Sri Lanka

you will spend there. Kandyan hotel touts are so aggressive they'll take the train to Colombo and intercept you on the way up. A Hawaiian friend of mine was waylaid by two of these fellows working secretly in tandem. After an hour of cheerful hail-fellow-well-met conversation over a bottle of arrack, they checked him into the most expensive hotel in Kandy and arranged to rent a car to take him on a two-week tour. We fell into conversation at dinner and when I added up the touts' fees they came to roughly three times what he would have paid arranging the visit through the Government Tourist Agency. Even by Hawaiian tourism standards his tour would have been blue chip, and these two touts were a long way from blue chip.

Unlike reputable guides, touts don't study much history and culture.

They rely on assertive superlatives of the largest/longest/costliest/ oldest variety. The tout's idea of The Tourist's Major Hits consists of visits to woodcarving shops, batik factories, gemstone dealers, lacemakers, spice gardens, and knick-knack purveyors, all of whom pay kickbacks.

Other touts, after being rebuffed, will still tag along on the off chance that when you arrive they can claim they brought you. Even the government's tourist agent in Badulla follows visitors to determine which guest house they're headed for, then calls ahead, says he sent them, and demands forty percent of the proceeds from their entire stay. If he gets to the tourists before they get to the hotel he quotes triple the normal rate.

When a tout waylays you, your best defense is no reply at all.

Walk on as if he is not there. Do not feel you are offending the famous hospitality of the Sri Lankan people — touts in Sri Lanka are Sri Lankans in name only; in practice they are global gougers and might just as well be working in Bombay's drug bazaar or the Bangkok brothel district. And if you think my opinion of touts is low, just ask Sri Lankans what they think!

You might as well adjust yourself now to the fact that you will be pestered by touts, whether they offer help you don't want or insist you need a "guide". There is no end of benign-looking gents palming off phony credentials in the form of some photocopied document printed in Sinhala whose blank lines have been filled in with a typewriter. Family photos are often dredged up if your firmness 46

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shows any cracks. Insist that you know where you are going, or that you have already paid your hotel in advance. The reply will come before your words are done: "What your hotel? Where you stay? Why you stay there? I live here. I know good places. You read book. Book no live in Sri Lanka. I live in Sri Lanka! I take you good place Sri Lankans go!"

If you are too fatigued or bewildered to resist a tout's harangues, find a policeman on the street. The Sri Lankan police wear khakhi uniforms with large silver badge numbers over their right shirt pockets; they are ubiquitous in towns frequented by tourists. My experience with the Sri Lankan police were unfailingly helpful, even when they spoke none of the usual tourist languages — English, German, or French. Aside from their ability to give you directions to a reputable hotel (or the hotel you seek if you already have reservations), accosting a policeman will give you a free demonstration of the fastest tout disappearing act you've ever seen.

You can also tell a cab driver the price range you're looking for and he'll find you something — although chances are his uncle will own it and there'll be a tout-like fee added on.

If you don't have a hotel, or don't even know where one is, half an hour of walking will find you two or three. However, the word "Hotel" on many shops often is used in place of "Restaurant" and the establishment displaying it will have food but no rooms — or at least, none that you'd want to stay in. If the place doesn't look large enough to offer accommodations (a one-story low sloping roof is a useful tipoff) it probably doesn't.

Aside from asking a policeman, a convenient way to find a good hotel is to ask a shopkeeper who knows you will return to do business with him once you're happily lodged. Jewelers are particularly useful because nearly all Sri Lankan gem and jewelry dealers are Muslims. Their attitude is that if you're happy with their advice about a hotel, you'll trust their advice when it comes to gems.

If you are lucky, a jeweler will send you to a Muslim hotel. There aren't many of them, but they have the triple advantage of no alcohol served on the premises and therefore no drunks crooning through the wee hours, superb food, and the best ice cream in Sri Lanka.

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Whatever you find on your own or a cab driver locates for you will almost certainly be better than what a tout will steer you to. Very few reputable hotels or retail businesses encourage touts. You can virtually guarantee that any business which uses touts has secondrate products. A tout's fee has to come from somewhere. The shop owners know you'll never be back in town and whatever bad reports you pass on about them won't reach nearly as many people as the tout will. That means they can sell shoddy goods with some assurance you won't discover it until too late. Reputable hotel managers and other business owners realize touts blacken Sri Lanka's reputation in a time when the country has much to offer and needs tourist income. Additionally, touts are indiscriminate about who they bring in, and sometimes they arrive with travelers going about Asia on the cheap. These hotel owners have seen too many unkempt beds and unpaid bills from these types and they have better things to do than deal with a chatterbox tout and two people of dubious demeanor. Hence they treat touts like recent arrivals from a leper colony. If you show under tow of a tout you'll get an excuse like, "Sorry, full up, sir, an unexpected delegation of forestry experts from Burma just arrived." Then at an opportune moment someone on the staff will whisper in your ear or give you a shoulder shrug to the effect of, "Get rid of him and come back."

India has the most aggressive touts, they just won't let up. They also double as pickpockets so if they don't stick you one way, they'll stick you another. By compare, the ones in Sri Lanka are relatively benign. Their prey is the totally ignorant or naive tourist. Tell a tout you know where you are going and what you want, and he'll usually look for someone else. If all else fails, threaten to go to the Tourist Police. This very efficient force exists specifically to protect visitors.

While the regular police are very helpful and will shoo away a tout, the Tourist Police are made of much sterner stuff. If they catch a tout pestering tourists the tout quickly finds himself thinking it over for a day or two in remand. In Kandy the remand jail is a solid brick windowless structure in which the air conditioning is whenever the wind blows through the holes in the roof and the food is only slightly more attractive than a POW camp's. Pickpockets (and for that matter other petty criminals caught victimizing tourists) are assigned to 48

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something called "rigorous punishment". You don't want to contemplate what a day of that might be.

Hence, by comparison with some other Asian nations, particularly India, the tourism crime rate almost doesn't exist. And, in all my time in Sri Lanka, meeting hundreds of visitors from all over the world, I never once heard a woman relate she had been fondled.

In India on the other hand ....

The tout you must shun at all costs is the gemstone tout. He's the "Psst" type. He doesn't even have an interesting story to tell, just a handkerchief full of different colored objects. His products are about as reliable as the consequences of sex with a syphlitic. I'm an amateur when it comes to jewels yet even I know blue glass when I see it (swirly striations when you hold it up to the sun; genuine stones have tiny bubbles, cracks, or glistening reddish hair-thin rutile fibers embedded within). In addition, there is a thriving market in faked stones from Thailand called "geudas". These are low-quality semiprecious stones which have been heat treated in such a way that they acquire the color of a much more valuable stone. Only a real expert with a hardness tester and scratch plate can tell a sapphirecolored geuda from a genuine stone. Your best bet is buy from Laksala, the official government retail stores, or from reputable gem dealers. The Government Tourist Offices in Kandy, Colombo, Ratnapura, and other major cities will guide you to reputable dealers of all kinds, gemstones or other items, but Laksala is still the best bet.

Kandy has a terrible reputation for overpriced stones, which may or may not have to do with the gemstone dealers' extensive use of touts there. Some visitors do their compatriots a favor by going along with the tout to the shop and then informing the owner they will tell all their friends to avoid that particular shop because the owner uses touts. I did this after being bothered by the same tout eight times, and it was the last I ever saw of him.

But sometimes you learn the hard way. It was a very hot day in downtown Kandy. I'd been driven to the bank by my driver, Galle. I needed some aspirin. He had an errand to do in a different direction.

I agreed to return in five minutes.

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For some reason I couldn't locate the pharmacy I usually patronize. A lot of Kandyan business district streets look the same. I was a block off and couldn't figure out which one — north, south, east, or west.

That's when he hit.

"You have nice pair of shoes, sir, they Gucci's?"

I was so hot and nauseous I didn't realize the situation for what it was.

"No, I don't like to waste money on false pride."

"You looking for something? You looking lost."

"Yes, I'm looking for the Awella Pharmacy. But I have to be back with my driver in five minutes."

"Oh, they too far, sir, I take you to another one closer."

"Take me" is hardly the word for it. He took me six blocks under the blazing sun. We passed a pharmacy on the way.

"Hey, how about this one?"

"Oh no, sir, they prices way too high. They gouge tourists."

This is code for, They Don't Pay Touts. Later I recalled that nearly all consumer product prices are fixed by the government and printed on the label of each container.

"You just follow me, take only few more minutes."

"Few" meant "ten." By now I realized my mistake but it was too late, we were in a part of town I was as yet unfamiliar with. I needed him to get me back.

We arrived at the pharmacy. The owner greeted him with a look Queen Victoria must have reserved for dealing with unwanted pregnancies in the maid's quarters. It was clear the tout had steered people here before and a pharmacist isn't at liberty to turn a sick person away. He was in sympathy with my position and now had to overcharge me. The overcharge, I found out later by checking with my regular pharmacy, was fifty percent. Weeks later I passed the same pharmacy on my way to the British Council Library. The owner rushed out, caught up with me, and apologized profusely.

I got back to the car twenty-five minutes late and Galle was politely livid. I apologized at least three times and gave him a pack of the prestige cigarette in Sri Lanka, 555s, which I always carry in my over-the-shoulder bag just for situations as these. That mollified him 50

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considerably. He looked at me and smiled. "Tout?" he asked. I drew my finger across my throat. He roared with laughter, slapped the steering wheel, and almost hit a minicab as he backed out onto the street.

Sometimes, however, being taken in by a tout can turn into a lovely experience. The Spice Garden tout was a new one. He zeroed in on me halfway across the Mahaweli suspension bridge. This bridge, two kilometers north of downtown Kandy, is a football field long and all of eighteen inches wide. That is wide enough for a Sri Lankan but a lunky Westerner like me has to hold on to the guard ropes and lean out over the water to let people pass. It's forty feet straight down. I was grateful for my mother's insistence on swimming lessons.

Yet standing there stock still, I was amazed how a tiny people as the Sri Lankans can make such a big bridge tremble. The bridge is at the bottom of the Lewella hill and standing in the middle on a moonlit night in May with the water rushing below and the Southern Cross due south below Scorpio is the secular equivalent of a mystical experience.

The bridge is a heaven-sent opportunity for a tout. He sees you before you get to him, and has a chance to size you up. Corpulent, sweating, no shirt, shorts, and massive hiking boots? He speaks German. Short-sleeve shirt, pressed shorts, rucksack, and carrying a guidebook in hand so as not to miss a thing? He tries French and if that doesn't work switches to Italian. I was wearing jeans.

"Hi. You American I see. How you like Sri Lanka? Sri Lanka best country in whole world. The Mahaweli, it the longest river in Sri Lanka, 206 miles. Starts near Adam's Peak, where the Buddha left his footprint...." It went on like this for a minute, but by then I was so mesmerized by his patter and his quaint British Raj accent that I was hooked.

His modus operandi came in three phases.

Part "A": Setting the hook. Charming tales of nonexistent World War Two experiences — "Oh I knew Monty well. Topping chap. He stayed at the Suisse, where I was houseboy at the time."

Now, the Hotel Suisse is a former colonial mansion. Its pruned grounds are as elegant as the crimson-jacketed guard at its gate.

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Unfortunately Lord Mountbatten made no headquarters there. He stayed at the lovely Old British style administrative buildings in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens six miles away. [As an aside, Peradeniya is no mere arboretum. Its 146-acre grounds are far and away the finest true botanical gardens in Asia, representing every known Sri Lankan species plus others ranging from Japan to the Himalayas to the Seychelles. Immaculately kept. An absolute mustsee.]

Part "B": Qualifying you and finding your angle. Money? "Hey, you no carry no big cash, they fellas here, they no pukka fellas, they on this bridge, they cut your pocket with razor. You got VISA? You carry VISA in your shoe. Oh bad guys, they got bad guys. Say, fella, how much you got in cash?" Place to stay? "Oh, that place is not a good place, they all gone downhill. Look, I got this cousin...." Drugs? "Hey, the local water gives you headaches, makes you sick? You get too tired when you walk? I got another cousin, he has fix pills, good fix...."

A short-time girl? No words for that, he just inserts a finger from one hand into the curled-up thumb-and-forefinger of the other, and wiggles a couple of times. That's probably two more wiggles than you'd get out of the girl. Dinner? "Oh, you must be hungry, you been to Degaldoruwa Vihara today, that at least two miles. Look, I got this cousin, he has restaurant...."

Most touts are pretty perfunctory, but this fellow was an art form.

A little further into his verbal fishing weir he brought out his wartime photos (kept for what any furniture dealer would immediately spot as the closing sale) in tatty fold-out isinglass sheets in a little leather album.

At the point I began to think like a carp: why not suspend disbelief and go into that round net at the end of the weir?

By the time he got to Part "C", I was wondering just how many aces he had up his sleeve.

"Say, you like to see Spice Garden?"

At first I thought he was talking about a brothel and I informed him I had respect for woman.

"No! Cinnamon! Clove! Pepper! Cardamon! Real spice garden!"

Bingo.

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So we heighed off past rice paddies and coconut groves. Naked children were washing themselves under village-pump spouts.

Women were beating clothes clean by swacking them on stones with bountiful swopps. The bushes and grass were covered with so many clothes drying in the sun it looked like an orgy in the color department of Esprit.

"Ike, he bought four pounds cloves here. You must buy four pounds, too."

I didn't have the heart to tell him Eisenhower never visited Ceylon.

We entered the spice garden, escorted by a gaggle of grinning kids. It was a haven of coolness and colors and scents. The family home was in the middle. The spice trade must be good, as it was a rather large and nice home by Sri Lankan countryside standards.

There was a ten-foot periphery around the house floored with finegrained sand that has been trod over the years into a type of footprint sandstone. Sand is free, grass is expensive, and a lawn mower!?

Import taxes run to 200 percent and more for luxury items. Crisscross foot-wide sweep marks told of constant grooming with ekel brooms made from the stiff fibers of coconut frond stems. You see oxcarts loaded to their palm-thatch roofs with these fronds on their way to the small rope and broom shops in Kandy.

Coconut husks were also pressed into another service as box borders. The garden's man walkways and terraces were rows of coconut husks stacked atop each other like bricks with no mortar.

The tout introduced me to Kusum, the thirty-fivish woman who planted and now manages the garden. She also works part-time as a nurse in the nearby village dispensary. Her husband Kudutuwaku (most male Sri Lankans seem discontent if their name doesn't have at least three syllables) is an irrigation engineer, a profession as necessary in these rainy highlands as municipal waterworks engineer is in a major American city.

Kusum suggested a tour of the grounds, after which we would have tea from her own special mix. I knew I'd have to try to divine the blend myself. A Sri Lankan woman guards her tea and curry recipes like a French housewife guards her terrine.

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Cinnamon is a twenty-foot gangly tree, sparsely leaved, with unfissured bark splotched with lichen that looks like an ash-colored version of the white birch. The bark is peeled by making a long slit with a knife into the cambium beneath. The knife's blade is made to cut just to that depth. Then a putty-knife-like tool begins the peel. The cutter works his way around in wobbly up-and-down wrist motions, to separate the cell layer between bark and cambium without damaging either. When he reaches the end the piece is pulled off.

Almost immediately it snaps into a coil only slightly larger than the spice you get in bottles at the store. Clearly there is more holding the cinnamon tree up than just the water pressure in the cells inside. It made me think of the monocoque style of metalworking used on many airplanes and racing cars, in which the principle strength of the thing is the clenching of its skin. Cut cinnamon is bundled by twine in fourfoot lengths that look like Mussolini's fasces symbol minus the ax.

The leaves are stripped and pressed for oil before they turn color and dry at the end of the season. If you pick a leaf while you're on a hike and rub it vigorously in your hands, for the rest of the hike you'll walk in a cinnamon-smell cloud.

Clove is a green-and-yellow splotchy-leaved fairly full plant about the size of a hazelwood bush. It looks like something a homeowner would be delighted to have gracing the back yard.

Cloves begin life as tiny half-inch puffs of stamens growing out of a nubbin at the end of a bud. The stamens fall off and the nubbin grows into a clove, encased within a pale yellow sheath. When harvested the sheath dries into shreds and the clove remains. Rub the leaves between your fingers and you get the most delicate faint hues of clove mixed with hints of lime. This is what the clove buyers do as they decide, like French wine negotiants, how much to bid per kilo for the harvest. The delicacy and complexity of the odor of the preharvest leaf heralds the quality of the "nail" when harvested.

Nutmeg is a thick-trunked twenty- to thirty-foot canopy tree with shiny deep green leaves. The garnish for your fruit salad or spice cake starts life as a tiny flower with the shy downcast demeanor of the Lily of the Valley. The fruit that grows from it reaches the size of a lemon, but is more pale and with a touch of brown. When it falls the fruit is set in the sun and left to rot to black. To try to husk it would damage 54

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the nut. When it is mushy enough the flesh is washed away, exposing the nut beneath. It is covered with thick veins of mace that completely cover the top of the nut and drip liquidly over it in blobs that end before they reach the bottom. It resembles the old "Cover the Earth" paint ads in which red paint floods over the North Pole to drip off into space at the Equator.

Pepper is a creeper entwining itself about tree and palm trunks.

Its leaves also hug the tree — broad, thickly veined leaves that when seen close-up have a furrowy look resembling the stratigraphy of the Appalachians as seen from space. The peppercorns develop as a cluster of a hundred or so knobs along the length of a spiky, yellow, six-inch-long stamen. Squeeze one of the corns even when a nubbin, and you can smell in the faint pungency the far-far-distant biftek-àpoivre. Buyers evaluate a pepper crop the same way they do clove.

The stamen clusters ripen into cranberry-red berries in about five months. The clusters are knocked down with long sticks of bamboo (given enough time, pepper can scale a 30-foot-tall tree) and only when they are ripe do the pods snap and fall. The red berries are dried three days in the sun or a week in the shade. The husk doesn't rot, it shrivels. Rub the husk between your hands to reveal the white corn beneath. Some is sold that way, to be ground into the black-andwhite pepper powder by the shaker on your table. For cooking, however, the husk doesn't release the true flavor of the corn. So it is crushed by rubbing it in coarsely woven baskets, using circular motions with the hands like the Moroccans make couscous. As it is time consuming and Kusum has a lot to do, the kids get the job.

Vanilla, too, is a creeper. It is classified as orchidaciae, a member of the orchid family, and as you look at the tiny streaked veins on its quatrefoil petals, you can see the faint jungle echoes of the florid hothouse corsage on a lavender gown. Its flowers are fertilized by a single species of butterfly.

And curry — a plant? I always thought curry was a blend of spices — cardamom, clove, cumin, ground chilis, fenugreek, and the housewife's secrets as she hums a tune at the mortar and pestle.

But no, there is such a plant, a thickly leaved six-foot high thing whose shape looks like one of those transparent cupola-shaped umbrellas carried by office workers or shoppers in midwinter 55

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EuroAmerican cities. Its leaves are a quarter-inch wide and threequarters long. It doesn't at all smell like its namesake spice blend.

Rather, it is a cross between faint cumin and faint lemon, with a leafy odor that can only be described as the smell of green. Sri Lankans do in fact grind it in with their powder, but they also add it whole — to almost everything, including your breakfast omelette. It improves an omelette much in the same way as fresh sliced chive or chopped basil.

It's also a folk nostrum that, when combined with lime, macerated pepper leaves, ash, and salt, is said to calm an acid stomach.

Allspice looks like a gangly unkempt weed that's managed to grow into an eight-foot tree. Its bark comes away in strips of grayish flakes, rather like a eucalyptus but much smaller, only four or six inches long. These Kusum powders and puts in a jar stoppered with a twig.

For some reason there's an ambience between allspice and cardamom. Cardamom is an almost unnoticeable plant in this forest of the world's cookery. It looks like a weed growing from around the roots of the allspice and other shrubs whose limbs are bare at the bottom but whose leaves provide plenty of shade. At best its tallest stems are three feet high. From them quail's-egg-sized pale green berries grow. When they turn pigeon's-blood red they are nipped off and dried in the sun. The pod contains many seeds. The cardamom, when powdered, is called coriander.

And at least a dozen other plants, described in similar detail.

Pure ripe avocado rubbed on the skin will keep the complexion clear.

Coffee beans come in clusters that look like the nuclei of atoms and when the berry is broken open while green the bean inside looks like a wet pistachio. Betel leaf combined with arica nut husk, ash, and cardamom will, when chewed, whiten the teeth; on full-moon poya days, gifts of this mix are presented to the bhikkhus at the temples.

There are twenty-three kinds of bananas, of which Kusum's garden has fourteen.

All this is conveyed by Kusum, a full woman with umber-hued skin, bright white teeth, and a voice that sounded like Lena Horne.

Her utterances stood in counterpoint to the chirps and twitters from a pair of parakeets she kept by the door, "because I like their sounds in my kitchen" It was clear that Kusum's place was not a spice garden 56

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for tourists. Perhaps it is a comforting sign of the role of small entrepreneurialism in the Sri Lankan economy that so many tourist roads are lined with "Spice Garden" and "Woodcarving Village" signs fronting modest groves of recent plantings or workshops with chips flying in every direction and a small pee-mound of sawdust in one corner. On the other had, most of these establishments exist solely for the tourist trade and charge four to six times the price local people pay in the public markets. It is disheartening to see a large packagetour bus parked in front of something billing itself in Day-Glo paint as "Number 54 Spice Garden" and know not merely that they are being overcharged, but worse, they are being deprived of one of the best experiences in Sri Lanka: bartering five minutes over a few hundred grams of cloves or curry with a market square stall owner who looks and talks like a recent arrival from a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.

We went in the house for tea. We sat in chairs, the tout interrupting with his British colonialisms. I noticed that the tout had seated himself in a corner on a stool several inches lower than the chairs. Later I learned that most countryside homes provide a low stool for visitors of low caste and that the tout instinctively looked for this stool when he entered Kusum's home.

By now she and I were were so absorbed in the minutia of spice gardening that we were not paying attention to him. He got the drift and sat silently, waiting for his payoff. Her tea was the most complex cup I ever laid tongue to. There was at least cardamom, clove, allspice, something that had the air of mango, and at that point I gave up trying and just enjoyed it. No nutmeg, though, that would have overpowered everything. She introduced her daughter Aumila, a smiling black-haired (and I mean black!; her hair made coal seem positively pallid) thirteen-year-old. One of the prettiest girls I've ever seen. Rounded cheeks and dimpled chin and deep-set eyes. I compared her full, rounded facial curves with the flatnesses of the faces of the West that Modigliani carried on out to the furthest reaches of abstraction.

Kusum sealed the spices into long tubular plastic packets as she told me about the tricks spice gardens use to cheat tourists. Papaya seeds dry into kernels that look much like pepper but are not so 57

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wrinkled, so you must reject pepper if some corns are smoother than the rest. Some dealers put sandalwood powder into their packages of curry. This extends it and adds to its smell, but becomes bitter and muddy tasting when cooked. Food adulterers seem to be part of a bottom-feeding caste system that also includes coin-debasers, shortweighers, touts, and malpractice lawyers.

Of all the spice cheats, the free-lancers who flourish at tourist stops are the worst. These fellows flock at the entrance to the Peradeniya Gardens, at the scenic overlook on Rajapihilla Mawatha (King's Bath Road) above the east side of Lake Kandy, and the parking lots at the Citadel in Polonnaruwa and Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura. Their technique is to startle you by blindsiding you with a dramatic unfurling of a cellophane pack four feet long, compartmentalized into fifteen or so packets, about a foot in front of your face. They care about their goods about as much as they do your composure. For the quantity you get you pay about ten times what the same spices will cost in any village or town market.

Kusum lit a coconut oil lamp of the kind used to pay homage to the Buddha. She folded the flattened end of the packet over a hacksaw blade and ran it several times back and forth across the edge of the flame until the plastic melted from the heat then fused in the cool air. A perfect serrated seal!

The tout, his fifty percent of the sale duly paid, vanished. He had other fish to fry, and he knew I could make my own way back. After he had left Kusum pointed out that many spices — vanilla, pepper, and cardamom, to name a few — are parasites that feed off something else. Just like touts.

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The Old Song and Dance The 10,000-mile musical arc from North Africa to Japan is a scimitar of seeming non-chords and unrhythm. With Mauritania as the handle and the Maghreb as the hilt, the blade cuts through Persia and India and Indonesia before curving up to a tip in northern Hokkaido.

Arabic music from Morocco to Pakistan sounds like a frieze of Kufic script encircling the dome of a mosque. What registers most is the lilt of the lifting voice and its sadness when in decline. Songs of new love are studies in how many ways musical ornament can be lifted up, and songs of waning love are infinitesimals of descents, just as lost love is of infinitesimals until suddenly you notice it is there.

From Kashmir through Assam is the great tableland of Indian music, the land of the raga, with its bamboo veena flutes and sitars and sarods and tablas crescendoing through time into a radiance of haste blinding the ear on into the night.

From Burma through Thailand and Vietnam the voice takes precedence in child-doll songs of love and faithfulness and sadness and dying. If a voice can ever be said to be porcelain set to music, this is where it sings. In Indonesia the dusk till dawn gamelan turns villages into carillons of bongs as people come and go, children play, and dogs chase each other through the evening dust. Here music and theatre entwine, gamelan accompanying Wayang Kulit's shadowmask theatre that's remarkably like Commedia dell'Arte.

Thence into China and Japan where no known rules apply and the sounds are truly a new planet to the ear. There music has an air of distant past or distant future, but seem not of a century any of us know.

To us, these sounds are like a visit by a stranger from another era transplanted into a New York necktie shop, trying to divine the meaning of such an object without having seen the myriads of men wearing them, much less the city in which they do so, still less the 61

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newsprint describing why such an object is so important, and none at all the four thousand years of garment history which has resulted in such lavish devotion to a thin folded and tapered piece of cloth.

Our regularized twelve-note Western scale is spread out over five lines comprising tones and semitones, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8 rhythms, majors and minors, and instruments and voices trained to these confines. To us raised on it, the rest of the world's music is a necktie shop.

Ironically, the invention of the Western staff came about when an eleventh-century Italian Benedictine named Guido d'Arezzo heard some Brahminic music from India that had come to Italy by way of Persian and Arabic traders. (They also brought algebra and the concept of zero; although we call them "Arabic" numbers, our digits originated in India and imported by way of Indian Kerala Moors.)

Indian music and dance forms could travel so well because there existed a notational system for them based on an ancient Aryan document called Bharata Natya Shastra. Its author is so dimmed by antiquity that no one knows when he lived; suggested dates range from 100 BC to AD 200. The Bharata Natya covers the aesthetics and practice of music, dance, drama, and criticism. It is still regarded as a sacred book in India and to this day the classical dance of South India is called Bharata Natyam.

When Guido d'Arezzo saw the Bharata Natya notational system he devised a Westernized version originally called "the Guidonian hand." Its purpose was to facilitate sight reading by monks in monasteries and by secular priests in castle and countryside. Guido also developed the ancestor of our "do-re-mi-" system of musical intervals. Because "do-re-mi" has eight tones, Guido's original staff consisted of four lines, with the semitones in between the lines. Later, when musicians wanted to add octaves above and below, they added the fifth line to bridge the high "do" with the next higher "re." To this day we can only speculate what Charlemagne's ears heard in the year 800, what congregations heard at the Cathedral School of Chartres in 900, or the laments heard in chapels throughout all Christendom in the year 1000 when the world was supposed to end. But we can recreate almost exactly what was sung at Cluny the year William the Conquerer set sail for England.

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Against our 800 years of musical tradition, Indian music has roots going back 8,000 years. By 6000 BC great civilizations were emerging along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Indus. In what is now Pakistan, two ancient cities named Mohenjo Daro and Harappa developed along the Indus and their trade routes followed the Fertile Crescent to Ur and thence to Alexandria. That is how Chinese jade came to the sarcophagi of Egyptian pharaohs.

That dance and thus by extension music existed at Mohenjo Daro is conveyed to us in the form of a delightful four-and-a-half-inch-tall slender long-legged dancer with one arm entirely covered with bracelets and the other cocked jauntily on her hip, and a haughty face distinctly Dravidian. She wears a three-lobed necklace and has the small, pointed breasts one sees all over South India and Sri Lanka today. To judge from the exquisite modeling of her body, a bronze smith spent a lot of time on her, which says a great deal about the role of art in life then.

The Indus Valley cities were invaded by a warlike tribe starting about 1500 BC. These newcomers were a light-skinned race of people thought to have originated in the territory lying between the Danube and the Volga. Called Aryans, they first settled in Mesopotamia, then migrated through Persia and eventually into India. A Mesopotamian chronicler said of them, "They were an onslaught of people who had never seen a city." A communal grave in Mohenjo Daro contains dozens of huddled skeletons with smashed skulls, from which you might gather an impression of the Aryan way of invading things.

"India" is not a word of Indian origin, nor is the word "Hindu."

These terms don't appear prior to the Aryans. The Indus River was known as "Sindhu" to the Aryans, which was converted to "Indus" by the Persians. The Greeks under Alexander the Great crossed that river, then took the name with them back through Alexandria in Egypt, where the early mapmaker Claudius Ptolemy incorporated it into his Cosmographia whose various editions throughout history brought us the phrase we still use today. Ptolemy was updated several times, especially in the fifteenth century when European ship masters were re-drawing the limits of knowledge.

The Aryans called their new home "Aryavarta" when they wanted to refer to political boundaries, and "Bharat" when they 63

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wanted to refer to their culture. Eventually the word dasa which they used to describe "enemies" came to mean "subjects" and they settled in for good. With that India entered the Vedic period of its history.

Hardly had the Aryans finished leaving their litter of skeletons than they developed the first great epic in South Asian literature, the Rig Veda. Like much ancient literature such as the Gilgamesh tale and Deuteronomy and Leviticus in the Bible, the ancient epic tended to sanctify land grabbing.

All we know about life on the subcontinent for the next thousand years comes from the Rig Veda and its successors, reinforced by the spadework of archaeologists. With the Rig Veda came the arts of singing and dancing. One reason was that there was no written Rig Veda for centuries; it was memorized and publicly recited much in the same way as were Norse and Icelandic epics and Celtic legends.

Music helped the reciter and dance provided entertainment while he wetted his whistle — these recitations, after all, went on for days.

The Rig Veda was followed by the Yajur Veda, Sam Veda, and Atharva Veda, all dealing mainly with behavioral issues, and the Ramayana and Mahabharata, which deal with Aryan imperialism. The Aryans also introduced the caste system whose distant tremors still shake the land today. The word "caste" is a sixteenth-century Portuguese coinage. The original Aryan word varna meant "color", and from light to dark came the four original varnas: brahman (priests), kshatriya (warriors), vaishya (farmers), and shudra (serfs). The darker you were the lower you were. That the Aryans feared dilution of their superiority by intermarriage comes down to us in the Vedic invocation, "O Indra, find out who is an Aryan and who is a dasa, and separate them!"

The brahmins assumed the role in Aryan society that the Franciscans assumed in late medieval and Renaissance Europe: you had to pay them if you wanted the religious observances that would save you. The brahmins thoughtfully placed themselves at the top rung of the social ladder as the arbiters of everyone's behavior. The brahmin attitude about human concourse could teach today's psychologists a few things about the relationship between arrogance and fear. But the varna system also interlocked social standing, economic level, and religion in such a way that society existed 64

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without tensions, and it brought about a division of labor that eliminated the need for slavery.

The massive Aryan displacement in North India was much sparser south of India's dense central forests and highlands, the Deccan. There the Aryans were mainly missionaries and traders.

Hence the Dravidian peoples — and anthracite color — are much less diluted. In North India today it is not uncommon to see the phrase "wheaten skinned" in a newspaper advertisement soliciting a suitable bride — a term you'd never see in the South.

About 500 BC the Aryans were trading up and down the coast and encountered an island southeast of Cape Comorin. At that time the island was peopled totally by aboriginal Yahksas, Nagas, and Veddahs; all except a few remaining pockets of Veddahs have vanished into intermarriage or battlefield burial mounds. Although Lanka's epic poem the Mahavamsa cites a pretty story about an Indian maid carried off by the lion Sinha, falling in love with him, and bearing the Sinhal people, the unromantic truth is that the Aryan stock which comprises about seventy percent of Sri Lanka today came first as traders, then settlers, then missionaries, then emperors. The Dravidians in South India hankered after the same Lankan territory and trade, and to this day the longest-festering social conflict in Sri Lankan is the inability to reconcile the nontheist Buddhist, lighterskinned, easygoing Sinhalese way of life with the polytheist Hindu, dark-skinned, aggressive Tamil way.

The religious differences alone seem almost irreconcilable. Tamil Hinduism evolved over thousands of years; Sinhalese Buddhism was achieved in a single moment of Enlightenment. Hinduism is polytheistic; Buddhism has no god at all (a Buddhist can believe in a god if he or she wishes, but a god doesn't help achieve Enlightenment). Hinduism depends on an elaborate system of castes and sub-castes; Buddhism teaches that all people are equal (but doesn't practice it that way). Hinduism provides many paths to the gods; Buddhism provides the Dhammapada. Hindus venerate the cow; Buddhists eat it. A Hindu kovil is such an exuberant assortment of figures, colors, motifs, and embellishments that it makes the front of Notre Dame seem like a first effort for Decorative Arts 101; a Buddhist dagoba is so serene in its dome on a lotus plinth its 65

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simplicity is surpassed only by the absolutely unadorned mud-andwattle domes that honor Muslim holy men.

Attitudes about religion are the only one source of estrangement in the Sinhal/Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka today. Skin color and and language are two others. The roots go back to when the first Aryan brahmins found their way into Dravidian South India. Being so few, the brahmins held onto their color-based caste system much more fanatically than their brethren in the north. They set themselves in the same superior-minority role that so many South African whites practice today. History is fastened with millennium-long nails, and the arrogance of Aryan brahmins in the Tamil-speaking regions stretching from Madras south to Kerala created a hostility to lightskinned Indians that seethes to this day.

After the Buddha died in India, his teaching was slowly subverted by brahmins worried about losing their exalted status; they turned the Buddha into one of the ten reincarnations of Vishnu, and therefore a mere sect of Hinduism. In Lanka, however, Buddhism was introduced in its more-or-less original form and became the dominant religion immediately upon its arrival with the Indian emperor Asoka's son Mahinda in 247 B.C. Unfortunately, the ancient Dravidian hostility to the Aryan brahmins has carried over all the way into our time. The conflict of brahmanism versus egalitarianism became Hinduism versus Buddhism. The racist "Buddhism and Sinhalese only" laws promulgated by the Bandaranaikes in the 1950s and 1960s poured fuel on embers which had been smoldering 3,500 years; today's Tamil Tigers are the direct result. The Tigers waged a religious race war until they discovered the money to be had in transshipping heroin. Today they are but revisionist brahmins using arrogance and fear to carve out a living for themselves.

Today's music and dance in India present virtually intact aesthetic ideas developed in the Bharata Natya Shastra written roughly 2,000 years ago. The word shastra means "teaching," but the term Bharata Natya translates with more difficulty. The word "bharata" meant "dancer-actor" but is also a personal name, so it is unclear whether we have a single author or a group of them as with the various Homeric storytellers.

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Even though dance and musical performances based on the Bharata Natya tradition continued almost unchanged all the way into our time, the written document itself was lost for at least 1,000 years.

European scholars knew of its existence by way of references in other Sanskrit works. Only in the middle of the last century was a copy found by a British scholar looking for something else. The Sanskrit version was published in 1898, and it came out in English in 1950.

In the Bharata Natya dance is either margi (sacred to the gods) or desi (for the pleasure of humans). Margi is supposed to have come to earthlings by way of the goddess of dance Shiva (who is also the god of destruction and renewal) via his earthling disciple Tandu. Margi is usually considered to be a dance form for males because of its Shaivite origin and the fact that expresses actions and feelings with virile strength. Desi is more delicate and graceful and is said to have been given to humans by Shiva's consort Parvati, who taught it to Usha the daughter of the sage Bana, who passed it on to the women of India.

Desi dance was a specialty of temple consorts called devadasis.

Temple consorts were a revered institution in many places those millennia ago — the Mother Goddess was worshipped venerically as Isis, Aphrodite, Mylitta, Venus, Ceres, and of course Parvati; and described by chroniclers as diverse as Herodotus, Socrates, Plautus, Justin, Eusebius, Apollodorus, and Saint Augustine — the last of whom must have raised some eyebrows in the later Middle Ages as they wondered how, exactly, he had come to know all this.

Far from being considered harlots, devadasis were an important part of sacred worship — the word devadasi means "the god's consort". As such the practice was extensive and highly ritualized.

The seventh-century AD. Chinese traveler Hiuen-Tsang was astonished to find four hundred consorts inhabiting the temple of Multan. The devadasi was considered a woman of such social standing that her presence was sought for and an honor at weddings as a sign of the favor of the gods.

Girls became devadasi is several ways. A firstborn daughter could be pledged to the temple in hopes that the gods would send a son as the next child. Couples also donated daughters in fulfillment of a promise made if a desired event in their lives would occur.

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Sometimes a couple whose marriage had borne no son would give a daughter to the temple with the understanding that the daughter would then acquire the legal status of a son and perform in his stead at funeral rights; the daughter would also be able to inherit the family property. Unmarried daughters, the bane of a Hindu family because they were considered economic handicaps, would get rid of them by means of the temple.

Once installed in the temple at the age of about seven or eight, the girl underwent rites in which she was formally married to a god.

At puberty she was deflowered by the chief priest and made available to worshipers. Her income was turned over to the temple priests.

Daughters born to devadasi were considered especially sacred, and turned into devadasi themselves. She also learned the intricacies of desi dancing, and without the refined sensuality of the temple consort tradition the form might have never been developed; ritual dance traditions were evolved to please gods, not humans, while rural dance traditions evolved to please humans, not gods.

As margi and desi were the evocations of the dance, natya, nritta, and nritya were (and still are) its components.

Natya is the dramatic element, the story line. There are remarkable similarities between natya and Greek tragedy. Both have a purpose more philosophical than entertaining. The dramatic form outlined by Aristotle is made of fable, manners, diction, sentiments, music, and decoration; natya comprises postures, gestures, words, temperaments, music, and decoration. But the differences also are substantial. The Greeks used tragedy to create an antidote to passions through pity and terror. Tragedy in the Greek sense does not exist in Indian drama. Rather, tragedy gives courage and counsel. Greek drama emphasizes the poetry through which the plot is unfolded; in natya furtherance of the plot is mainly by visual action and staging.

Greek drama uses graphic violence as a precursor to catharsis. Natya permits it only when presented as beauty.

Nritta, on the other hand, is "pure" dance, the rhythms and movements of the body. It contributes nothing to sentiment or mood.

It is the hand, foot, and body moving through space. Had Merce Cunningham lived in India, his inventions would be considered nritta.

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suggests mood, a glow of feeling cast over natya's drama. Facial expressions and gestures do everything. Nritya's emotions overlay nritta's motions. The uniting of all these elements into one sensibility is called abhinaya, which derives from the Sanskrit terms abhi ("towards") and ni ("to carry"). A successful "carrying forth" of the drama — exactly as with Western opera — comes about through the combining of body gestures (angik); costume and make-up (aharya); poetry, song, music, and rhythm (vachik); and physical expressions of emotional states (satvik). These are further broken down into thirteen head movements, thirty-six kinds of glances, seven eye movements, nine movements for the eyelids, and seven movements for the eyebrows. The neck has nine gestures and the chin has seven. Hand gestures, number sixty-seven for each hand alone and an additional thirteen for both hands. Thirty of these are pure dance; the rest are nritya movements evoking a mood. The dancer must also master thirty-two movements for each foot.

All this detail is set forth in the Bharata Natya. Yet Bharata's cornucopia of the dance is a dust mote when compared with the penaplain theme of the Bharata, namely that all arts are one art. The Bharata illustrates this with the story of a king who wished to carve sculptures of the gods. He went to a sage to learn how. The sage advised him, "You will have to learn the laws for painting before you can understand the laws of sculpture." The king replied, "Then teach me the laws of painting." The sage answered, "It is not possible to learn the art of painting without learning the art of dance." To which the now-irritated king replied, "So instruct me in the art of dance."

The sage said, "That would be difficult, because you first must know the principles of musical instruments." The exasperated king was now ready to give up, but made one last try: "Then teach me instrumental music!" "I cannot," the sage concluded, "until you have mastered vocal music, for the voice is the mother of all the arts. Now repeat after me: Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, and Ni." And so with the Indian seven-note equivalent of our eight-note do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, the king began.

As Indian musicians consider the voice the most primal of musical instruments, and the voice can sing only one note at a time, to this day they have disdained multi-note harmonies and ensemble 69

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music. They prefer one note at a time, though sometimes these notes are so amazingly fleet that you cannot comprehend voices so agile.

Western attempts to understand the music and dance of the East began two centuries ago. Musical historians of the time, mostly British, had made a fair stab at trying to divine Greek and Egyptian music based on reconstructions of the ancient musical instruments depicted in tombs and on statues. Considerable imagination was involved and to this day any "ancient Greek" music is strictly guesswork.

These historians had ears trained in tones and half-tones, unvarying meters like 4/4 and 3/4, ascending/descending scales both in the same key, and structures as defined and rigid as the sonata and concerto. They found it difficult to comprehend the aesthetic steel behind the cutting blade of the pan-Asian scimitar.

The first attempt to explain Indian music was written by a British High Court judge named William Jones in 1784. Titled "On the Musical Scales of the Hindoos," his essay confronted the problems of trying to translate the common Indian rhythms of seven, eleven, or fifteen beats into something English musicians could play. A later musicologist "regularized" Indian rhythms by converting them all to 6/8. This is akin to "regularizing" the alphabet by cutting out all those rascals that can be pronounced in more than one way, the vowels.

Asian musical scales were an even tougher nut to crack. The idea of a five-line staff tidily divided into full and half tones simply did not exist. The harmonies of perfect fourths, fifths, major and minor thirds, major and minor seconds, and octaves were as foreign to Asian ears as microtones were to Western, at least until people like Steve Reich and Phil Glass came along. This led many musicologists, particularly those in academia, to conclude that Asians had no sense of tune or rhythm and therefore their music was inferior to the West's.

This is what happens when one looks for what a thing isn't rather than what it is.

Ironically, at the same time European dance historians were confronting the problem of devising a notational system to record dance steps, positions, and floor patterns. At the time there was no such system in existence, no dance equivalent of the five-line staff.

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They eventually came up with "orchesography", which recorded body positions and floor patterns with sufficient accuracy that today choreographers can recreate a dance by the famed nineteenth century ballerina Petipa or Diaghilev's creations for the Ballets Russes. The system was successful because it employed no scale of lines. The only standardized referents were a sequence of symbols that conveyed a specific motion. A linguist confronting this notation would conclude it to be the most complex language in existence, which indeed dance is.

Western musicologists never considered the idea of a blank sheet of paper, hence is no surprise that the breakthrough in the notation of Eastern music came from outside academia. A British linguist named Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890) was pursuing research in the psychology of hearing and one day heard Eastern music for the first time. He immediately became interested in the phonics of Asian and African hearing. Applying the logic of the phonic system of language teaching to music, he pointed out that Asian music is not founded on a law of harmony but rather microtones and rhythms that dissolve into each other and re-emerge transfigured into new tones which assume lives of their own before being dissolved thence again; Indian music is amoeba-like rather than symphonic.

Ellis eliminated the Procrustean five-line bed and devised a notational system based on the Western staff being divided into 1,200 "cents" — the twelve Western tones divided into 100 microtones each.

Each 100 "cents" corresponded to one Western semitone. Hence the interval between C and C-sharp could be divided into 100 microtones. Ellis determined that the Indian scale of twenty-two srutis that comprise India's seven do-re-mi (Sa-Re-Ga) notes consists of "cents" values of 22, 70, and 90 — or to put it another way, 22, 70, and 90 percent of the distance between C and C-sharp. Similarly, the seven-tone pelog scale of Indonesian gamelan music consists of microtones corresponding to 165, 250, 120, 150, 270, 150, and 115 cents played in that sequence.

The accuracy of the cents system was borne out when ethnologists began recording Asian music using Thomas Edison's device in which a needle vibrated a groove into a wax-coated cylinder. A study of the waveforms on the cylinder confirmed that 71

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Ellis's system was accurate. Somewhat later the American Charles Seeger invented the oscilloscope, which in its early form recorded sound waves using a heated stylus to melt the coating on a special plastic graph paper. For the first time sound of any kind could be quantified and easily read. Ellis's system passed that test as well.

Asian music has none of the decorous rigidities one finds in concert halls. Music isn't a walk through the graveyards of Beethoven and Stravinsky, it is a walk through village life consecrated as dance.

People come and go, but they don't speak of Michelangelo. Like the lore-tellers of New Guinea using storyboards as signposts on their meandering epics, Asian performers prefer elaborate personal interpretations of simple, familiar themes. Oddly enough, while "classical" musicians live in a five-line straitjacket, Western stage designers have no such set of rules. Hamlet staged in a reproduction of the Globe Theatre or set in a small town in Georgia is still Hamlet, and Wagner's Ring staged in a laserium is still Wagner's Ring. Eastern musicians embrace cycles of repeated patterns with the same gusto as Irish fiddlers. Crescendos, climaxes, and diminuendos hardly exist; the idea is that the music flows always forward a note at a time like bubbles on an eddying stream — back-watering now and then, but on the whole moving on.

The gulf is broad between Indian and Sri Lankan dance today.

The former is a product of a written tradition deriving from a single comprehensive text which has been refined to an almost unimaginably sophisticated expression of the woman in motion. The latter was transmitted male teacher to male student by word of mouth; to this day there is no written syllabus to guide the Sri Lankan dance student. Both use approximately the same methods of training, yet they are so different they might as well have originated on opposite sides of the planet, not sixty miles of oft-sailed water. Indian dance and Sri Lankan dance are a textbook study in what happens to a single art form when it is transmitted in one place by word of pen and in another by word of mouth.

Although Sri Lankan dance indeed originated in the Bharata Natyam, over the years it has shed so much of it that today's dance is a unique art form in the world. No other dance looks quite like it, and 72

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any aspiring young dancer looking for ideas should spend some time in Sri Lanka's villages and academies. The country's foremost dance school is two miles north of Kandy.

A thirteenth-century frieze at the hillside temple of Yapahuwa depicts women dancing in poses reminiscent of Bharata Natyam. Old writings describe a dance that seems to contain faint echoes of Bharata Natyam, which was presented before a Sinhalese king about the time Chartres cathedral was consecrated in 1260. But that's the end of it. Although Sri Lankan dance has flashes of the footwork and facial gestures that embody the nritya expressive dance of Bharata Natyam and the natya storytelling of North India's Kathakali, Sri Lankan dance is almost totally pure nritta — pure form. There is litte story to be told. The various dances are either absolutely pure, that is, they exist solely to demonstrate the beauties of the body in motion, or they distill the essence of animals like the elephant and peacock and cobra via imitative acrobatics, then quickly shed them in a transcendence into the pure body of dancing human.

There are two kinds of Sri Lankan dance: mountain-region Kandyan dance, and low-country/coastal Devil dancing. Both still rely on male dancers, although the Kandyan style often uses women — particularly in exhibitions for tourists. This softens the almost hyperkinetic masculine energy that is the hallmark of Sri Lankan dance in general.

Kandyan dance funnels out into today from the Bharata Natyam style imported 2,200 years years ago into the courts of Anuradhapura and the ethos of Sinhalese Buddhism. For all practical purposes, Anuradhapura flourished for fourteen hundred years, in which time there was relatively little artistic exchange with India. Dance and the other arts developed pretty much on their own. During the two-anda-half-century period when the kingdom was ruled from Polonnaruwa, the influences of Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism added to the already heady Lankan style. Interspersed throughout all this time, the rises and declines of dynasties, good and bad kings, famines and bountiful times, cities rising and cities allowed to become ruins, the fluctuating fortunes of Buddhism, and periodic resurgences of cultural identity — all these affected Lankan dance in one way or another.

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When the Portuguese began forcing conversions to Catholicism soon after their arrival in 1505, the Lankan rulers eventually ended up in Kandy. Kandy was so remote that it was not penetrated until three centuries later by the British. Hence the Kandyan high-country style evolved virtually without foreign influence for at least 2,000 years. When the British finally penetrated into the Kandyan kingdom until 1807, they by then had enough experience with the Sinhalese to know what to leave alone. Moreover, there wasn't any money to be made from the arts, so why bother with them?

In the low country along the coast, however, the Portuguese influence was enormous. Sixteenth-century Catholic art was far more interested in the Devil than the message of Jesus, so it is no surprise that low-country dance began to graft the Catholic pantheon of devils — the cast of eighteen which included Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Beherit, Balaam, Isacaaron, Eazaz, Caron, Zabulon, Nephthali, Elymi, Verrine, Baruch, Carreau, Ginnillion, Jabel, Buffetison, Concupiscence, and Leviathan — onto an already existing set of folk dances designed to exorcise the bad spirits that cause illness.

Kandyan court dance developed without brahmins using art to reinforce their rung on the ladder. The situation is analogous to today's New York fashion brahmins sanctifying their role through a sycophant local press while remaining in near ignorance of the inventiveness of the art-to-wear and quilt-to-wear movements across the rest of the country. In Buddhist Lanka there were no devadasi temples to sanctify the venery of the higher castes. In fact, the manipulation of sex for power simply never developed; even today there is in Sri Lanka virtually no use of sex to sell something. Bold print, yes; bold bosoms, no. Sri Lankan society — be it Buddhist Sinhalese, Tamil Hindu, Moslem, or Catholic — is not by any means a puritanical society. Sex is neither shameful nor tittilating; family comes first.

Because Kandyan dancing developed into an art of pure form.

Since arts of pure form tend to carry expressiveness to the limits of physical ability, it came to be the purview of men. Kandyan dance is a proscenium dance, it almost always takes place on a stage with some form of focused lighting and is presented to a seated audience. Devil dancing is village dance, lighted by the moon and coconut-husk 74

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copra torches; the audiences sits cross-legged on the ground and the dancers' stage is a semicircular woven palm-frond or cadjan-grass mat stretched along poles behind them.

There are two major differences between the two basic Sri Lankan dance styles: Devil dancing employs masks to anthropomorphize invisible beings; Kandyan dance is dance pure and simple. Devil dancing relates stories via spoken narratives; Kandyan dance employs mainly drums and horns.

What does this look like in actual practice?

A Kandyan performance begins with the entrance of three turbaned men, two carrying sinuous four-foot-long S-shaped horns and the third a conch. It isn't so much an entrance as an annunciation.

The horns woe a mournful monotone and the conch pains the ears with a piercing hoooo. Then come ten drummers carrying cylindrical and flat-ended double-cone drums whose leather tympanum are tuned by zigzag leather strips completely encircling the hollow carved frame. These drums can be tuned by maneuvering one had around the drumhead while the other beats, just as with African "talking" drums. They have a wider tonal range than kettledrums.

The drummers slap and beat in absolutely perfect unison. Not once in the performance, with its hundreds of rapidly changing motifs of 3/5, 4/7, 11/13, 16/5 and other beat sequences overlain with doubled doublets (.. ..), triplets, quintuplets, and septuplets — seldom do you hear a beat out of time or someone behind or ahead of the others. It's as if they are all connected by some kind of invisible armature. There are only two tones: staccato slaps and deep-throated booms.

The drummers swing two-foot tassles dangling from their caplets in time to the beats, looking for all the world like propellers on giant whimsical beanies. They wear a sort of halter in reverse that ascends from the waist up rather than the shoulders down. It rises to the base of the pectorals, thus leaving the chest and shoulders bare. At the waist there flares out over their bums a bustle-like short skirtlet of red-trimmed black pleated cloth that ends at the middle of the curve.

Their neckpieces look like gold and red collars from which the rest of the shirt has been removed. Gold rings pinch the muscles of their 75

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upper forearms and biceps. Then, in an obviously scripted floor pattern, one drummer circles until he is offstage while the others follow. The horns exuent holding their instruments high as a kind of superhuman codware rising three feet over their heads.

All Kandyan dance follows a formalized sequence called vannama. The vannama itself is a poetic quatrain which sets out the motif of the dance — Gajanga is the majestic tread of the elephant, Turanga the horse's gallop, Naga the cobra's slither, Hanuma the antics of the macaque, and Asadrusa is homage to the Buddha. Altogether there are eighteen vannamas.

Each dance begins with a tanama, a poetical arrangement of meaningless syllables like "Ta-Na-Tam Ta-Na Ta-Na Ta-Na-Tam Na Na Ta-Na-Tam." These have descended 2,200 years from the "Dha-Din Dhin Dha-Dha Dhin-Dhin Dha-Thin Thin Tha Tha-Dhin" verbal percussion that you hear at Ravi Shankar concerts today.

The tanama sets the rhythm for the dance itself. Each line of the vannama poem is followed by a dance motif in which the performers advance stage front, retreat, step sideways, glide in circles, and move their hands in time with the drums. These precisely choreographed — and incessantly rehearsed — body and floor patterns are accented with leaps and whirls.

Each dance crescendos into a frenzied kastirama (recall that "rama" attached to anything means "godlike"). No words can describe what happens during this finale, but if you can imagine Baryshnikov on speed, you won't be far off.

At this point the audience applauds — rather subdued applause, oddly enough, considering what the dancers have just done. And then a strange thing happens. Instead of going offstage, the dancers begin a miniature version of the dance itself, a kind of codicil to it. All the leaps, whirls, and poses of the original dance are repeated in miniature. Called the adavva, this codicil is, so far as I know, a custom unique to Sri Lankan dance. The entire dance is repeated, but this time with an almost stately reverence. It is as though the adavvga is a prayer of thanks for all they have been enabled to do.

The foregoing is the general vannama structure of all Kandyan dance; each dance itself can vary wildly within the framework.

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Dance I begins with a drummers' entrance of high kick-strut steps.

They fan out stage right and stage left, then kneel into a half-lotus pose with one leg under their bodies and adjust their drums across their knees. The dancers enter and bow three times to the drummers.

They warm up with turning kicks and mudras (hand positions conveying a symbolic meaning) that resemble the mudras of Cambodia and Thailand. All wear a skirtlet-like sarong that descends to the knees and has an open front to facilitate free movement, with black silk pajama pants beneath which clasp tightly to the ankles.

They wear silver epaulettes on their bare shoulders and thick gold necklaces. Their headwear, called a ves, looks like a cross between a high school prom tiara and Cecil B. DeMille's idea of a pharaonic burial mask. Its semicircular front is assembled from silver-plated wood pieces from which tiny silver "bo tree" leaves dangle and a radiant of silver spikes ascends behind. It is edged with silversequined trim.

The entire repertory of the first dance is done ensemble — rotations, simple floor patterns, weaves, face-offs. All movement is in the arms and lower legs; waists and torsos are almost rigid. The pace accelerates and the floor patterns changes into two snake dances writhing in and out of each other. Thus they serpentine in a complex pattern of weaves until they finally go offstage. For this dance there is no adavva codicil.

A single dancer enters in Dance II, on his knees, hands above his head as in prayer, elbows out, one knee moving him forward as the other drags behind. The Cobra Dance, like other dances evoking animals, is a pure dance that only superficially attempts an accurate portrayal of the creature. Only the first few moments of the dance are needed to inform the audience of the theme; thereafter the dancer is on his own. The idea is not that the dancer becomes the animal, but rather that the animal becomes the dancer.

The costume is a gold headdress shaped into a cobra's hood, an elaborate chest shield in four metallic panels, waist skirtlet in black and silver with four pleats in front and ten behind, a greenish-copper sarong split up the front with a red frieze at the bottom, and gold bracelets with flaring shields that cover the backs of the hands down to the knuckles. After circling stage front in the cobra's glide, the 77

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dancer abruptly stands, sheds the animamorph snake as the real snake sheds its skin, and begins a slowly accelerating series of balletlike leaps and leg lifts, arabesques, and something that looks like a pas de chat — a balletic pussyfoot step — danced Thai style. When I say "accelerate" I mean he starts at 60 M.P.H. and goes up till his body speedometer is on the pin. It is incomprehensible how a body can move this fast and still stay in control; I fully expected him to spin out at some point and go flying offstage. A final series of ten great spinning leaps and the drummers slow quickly into a grave dirge of beats as he slows with them, back into his slither, and then offstage.

When the audience applauds, as in all Kandyan dance, the performers never return onstage to acknowledge it. No adavva to this dance, either.

Dance III begins with drums offstage lowly thrumming like raindrops on a tin roof. They abruptly break to a thunderclap of roars, rhythm one-two, one-two-three; one-two, one-two-four; one-two, one-two-five; and on upward. Lord knows how they keep count after one-two-twenty or more. The dancers enter wearing grotesque devil masks twice the size of their torsos. This is the Kandyan interpretation of the village low-country dance. The faces on the mask are grotesque toothy grimaces with stuck-out tongues, piggish snouts, and beady "evil eyes." Large panels carved with a total of eighteen horrible faces flare from the temples like giant elephant ears.

These eighteen devils symbolize the eighteen physical maladies the devil dance can exorcise. They were derived from the eighteen Catholic devils transmitted via the Portuguese. No one knows how many existed before this, as devil dancing, like Kandyan dance, is an unwritten tradition. Below the mask each dancer wears a white chemise that stops at the breastbone, and a vest with a scallop-like cutaway that reveals the latissimus muscles. They wear knee-length red, yellow, and black striped pantaloons over black pajamas clenching at the ankles, and silver anklets hooked to their feet with an clevis device that looks like a stirrup whose wheel is stuck between their toes.

Slow upper body motions lead into a skip-step-kick pattern in circles encircling each other all over the floor. It is reminiscent of the letterforms of the Sinhalese script, which looks like an alphabet of 78

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copulating bubbles. Then into deep reverse backbends that snap forward until the top of the mask touches the floor. I thought immediately of lower back problems later in life. Then into a series of spins so quick they reminded me of a ballerina doing the Black Swan's thirty-two fouettes in Swan Lake. After the applause, the whole was repeated in the stately majesty of the adavva.

Dance IV was a solo of the troupe's largest man. He entered ponderously, scooping his hands up from the floor to over his head, then writhing them in various twists and curls all around the front of him. His chest was covered with the Kandyan dance signature breastplate of a series of half-dollar sized silver medallions strung together horizontally and vertically with beadwork. There was a simple yellow scarf around the forehead and brown pantalon with yellow skirtlet and white pajamas. His steps were the most kathakalilike of all the dances, and it was clear he was relating a story. Later I learned the story was about the mythical elephant Gajanga who has eight long tusks and sixteen trunks and lives in heaven. But then the slow dance ends — and this is quintessentially Kandyan — and the dancer erupts into a frenzy of leaps, spins, waving arms, rhythmic shimmies, and body bends that in no way resembles the jellylike gait of an elephant. Heavenly Gajanga has come into the dancer, who dances Gajanga into the life of the Earth. He ends with his hands in prayer just touching his beauty eye, the universal greeting to the Buddha when standing before a vihara. The adavva was the elephant as elephant again, galumphing offstage in a series of plods.

Dance V was a vaudevillian balancing act of twelve dancers using nine wooden spinners that look like a top on which an elephant has sat. The disks are flat on the bottom, with a pencil-eraser sized pit in the center and truncated conical sides rising up two inches and an inch inward. These disks derive from two ancient sources. One is the style of hat worn by the Anuradhapura nobility, which on old Buddhist temple frescoes resemble a tam o'shanter without the fuzzball at the top. The other is a weapon in the armory of the Sinhala monarchs called the pantheru. This was a disk much like the one the dancers use but with a more blade-like edge. Like a boomerang or frisbee, it had the property of returning to its thrower. The idea was to 79

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throw it at the neck of a victim, cut his throat, and have it return for the next victim — remember Oddjob's top hat in Goldfinger?

This dance is called the Raban after an accompanying instrument that is a combination of single-faced hand drum and a tambourine.

The dancers begin by throwing their pantherus twenty-odd feet into the air and catching them, still spinning, dead center on the tips of their forefingers. Then they throw the disks in high arcs to each other and catch them the same way. When they want to speed up the decelerating disks they move a finger slightly off center then wiggle it at just the right point in the rotation to accelerate it.

Then they set the spinning disk atop a six-foot curved stick with a pointed tip, lift the stick to their tongues, and balance it there. For the finale they pick up a four-pronged stick with one prong in the center and three others splaying equilaterally to the side. As soon as four disks are spinning on these the dancer elevates it and holds it on his tongue while picking up a second four-pronged stick and setting disks spinning on that as well. This he holds in one hand while setting the ninth and last disk spinning on a fingertip of his remaining free hand. They come down in reverse order and throughout all of this not one disk was lost.

My notebook has thirty-odd pages of similar descriptions. There are dozens of Kandyan dances — seventeen devoted to the mythopoetic vannama animals alone. As Balanchine's ballet came out of the story dances of the Caucasus, Kandyan dance came out of the temple and folk dances of long-ago Anuradhapura. My descriptions here are but a twentieth of what one sees in actual performance; there is, after all, just so much dance one can expect of a pen. The best way to fully appreciate the vitality of Kandyan dance is to come to Sri Lanka, see the dance as performed today in the villages. There, performances take place sitting on a cloth under the pale luminophorescence of a waxing moon. The villagers gather, hundreds of them assembling before the flickering shadows of fires, amid singing and the rhythm of drums, the faces of bewondering children, squalling babies, the smell of palm-frond fires and cooking food, dogs racing through the dust, the dozen upon dozen of vividly hued saris becoming an immense tremor of the tribe, faces of friends now mythical beings, bodies now spirits, the secular turning to sacred, 80

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known becoming unknown and all certainties vanishing into the safety of the imaginary.

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Great Walls Some while ago I read that the skies produce over a million lightning bolts each second. I always had trouble with that particular statistic, in part because it seemed like a number somebody pulled out of a hat while trying to sound impressive on a podium, and in part because who, might I ask, has laid awake through so many nights to amass this database, and what was his wife thinking all that time?

Such absence of due diligence on my part existed until I saw a Sri Lankan sky at sunset in May. For weeks we'd had what is called "premonsoon" season. For once I'm so awed by the task of trying to describe something that it seems almost better to simply tell everyone to buy a ticket to Sri Lanka and don't miss a pre-monsoon sunset over Parakramabahu Samudra.

To spread that name out, "Parak" (personal name), "rama" (king), "bahu" (great), and "Samudra" (lake) means "Lake of the Great King Parak". If that seems a grandiose title, don't laugh until you've built a nine-square-mile body of water that has fed half a million people from twenty-eight square miles of rice paddies and mango orchards for over eight hundred years.

If you stay at the government guest house right on the lake you'll see some of the most splendid skies the country has to offer. Call or write far enough ahead of time and you can even stay in the Queen Elizabeth Room (signed photograph even, dated 1954) and dive from the patio directly into the water about ten feet below. Don't worry about the fearsome-looking six-foot monitor lizard you might startle from his sunning ledge as you swim; he's a menace only to frogs and water insects and wants to stay as far away from you as you do from him. More of a nuisance are the overabundant fingerlings which nibble at your body hair like a horde of cantankerous mosquitoes. All this for $7.50 a night. The food is extra, but the $3.00 rice and curry is fabulous and for once doesn't autoclave your tongue.

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Parakramabahu ruled between 1153 and 1186. This was while Europeans were still building lumpishly gloomy Romanesque churches, before Notre Dame and Chartres, when Europe was virtually bereft of man-made lakes, dams, and irrigation canals aside from what the Romans left behind. In a time when the Dutch had barely begun their canal and drainage schemes, Parakramabahu was constructing a city and waterworks scheme so extensive it is still considered the high point of Lanka's reservoir system and one of the wonders of ancient Asia.

The lake in which you dive so cheerfully into water warmer than your skin is merely one of a series of tanks built or linked together by him. But its magnitude gives a measure of the thinking of the man. In the mid-1100s there existed five small lakes on the site.

Parakramabahu and his engineers noted that if they built a great wall eight and a half miles long across the east end of the area between two hilly areas, a reservoir would be created many times larger than the original waters. This in one of the flatter regions of Sri Lanka. The wall, called a "bund" by the Dutch (a name that still hangs on), contained four and a half million cubic yards of earth. A statistician has compiled the all but meaningless fact that 1,000 men using the elephant-and-oxcart construction methods at the time and working three shifts a day would need twelve years to finish it.

Meaningless because such facts don't communicate any sense of the dust that would have been almost always in the in the air, the straining muscles of rice-fed men with pipestem legs, the thigh-high mud when it rained, the cries of the workers when someone got hurt, how the wives and families lived, what the smells of cooking fires were like at night, that the Buddhist monks moving among the people were society's only formal educators, that they taught by firelight because during the day the children worked alongside their fathers tapping the oxen along with sticks while staying warily clear of the lurching, yawing wagons sagging from broken granite and gneiss, that the surveyor's transit leveling the tops of the embankments was a sightline along two pots of water with a string stretched between them, that the clay sealing plug was compacted by elephants shod in leather booties to protect their feet from being shredded by the sharp bedrock foundation stones, and that the bund 84

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top was smoothed into a flat access road by driving herds of sheep or goats along them — a technique that has passed into our own time with the invention of a huge, waterfilled cylindrical earth tamper used in highway construction whose outside surface is made of hundreds of steel knobs which compact and smooth the soil the same way the sheep did, and is called the "sheep's foot roller" for that reason.

Parakramabahu's great wall against the water and his great wall of will in ordering it constructed supplied his new capital city with sufficient water for thirst, fountains, flowers, fruit, mortar, and squat pot toilets which predated those gaping craters in a French railway station by 600 years. All this construction contributed to the ruin of the very kingdom the his lake was supposed to nourish. He simply worked his kingdom to exhaustion, and periodic malaria epidemics finished the job. The next king, Nissanka Malla, raised the Polonnaruwa kingdom to its cultural high point. But the land's resources had been so drained that it was unable to withstand the onslaught of internal dynastic squabbles with Sinhalese pretenders to the South, Tamil invaders from India, a drained economy despite all those full rice paddies, and workers resistant to further exactions after the monumental building effort. The next notable name in Polonnaruwa's history is a pirate named Magha who invaded from South India and ruled heinously until he died in 1255. After that the great wall of the great tank and the great city it watered vanished into jungle (albeit well-watered jungle) not to be returned to civilization until the British found and reconstructed it six hundred years later.

I read the story of this dolefully incandescent civilization and its sunset and stormy darkness while watching May's late afternoon storms. The sun reaches its greatest intensity in late day when the storms begin. Then the sun cools but the storms do not. That statistic about the million flashes of lightning began to take on a new reality as from horizon to horizon immense piles of anvil head cloud were utterly riven by nonstop lightning.

Thunderheads have a life like Polonnaruwa's. They swell up when the air is hot and dry and the sea is warm and wet. The sea air rises and condenses into clouds. The heat of the ascent is so great that the cloud literally explodes into the sky. That's why you see the 85

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gigantic roils as the cloud grows. But then the cloud reaches something it can't penetrate: the icy hard steel of the stratosphere.

There the cloud flattens into an anvil. The high air at that level, where the horsetail cirrus lives, where pilots know things are stable and their passengers are being fed and they can enter heading corrections into the autopilot and leave the only recollection of their passage to radar operators and observers of contrails — that is where the air is least hospitable to the tumultuous nature of the nimbus. The moist heat rising from beneath still continues to push, but eventually the cloud can hold no more. It condenses and begins to fall. The falling rain crashes through the moisture still trying to rise. Lightning is the fiercest when the cloud begins to die. The cloud tears itself apart trying to rise and fall at the same time. In time the cold-inducing fall of the rain wins. It empties the cloud of its heat engine, stopping only when the cloud has no more to give. What is left is the dying shell of the anvil top still high in the sky, being blown to pieces by the earthspanning winds that cycle from the tropics to the poles. The remnants of a storm can live ten times, twenty times, as long as the cloud that created them. Their ruins are as visible as Polonnaruwa's.

A night watching the air over Sri Lanka demonstrates that nature's hath no furies like those which come from its most diaphanous things: the cloud, the galaxy, the judgmental errors of men with the fatal combination of too much power and too many ideas. A Sri Lankan May night makes the most elaborate Fourth of July exhibit pale in everything but hue. For hours without cease the lightning is everywhere. Horizon to horizon, cloud-top across cloudtop, creating molten luminosities and teeth-jolting thunder into sunset's peach-colored light and then into a darkness which doesn't stop trembling until every cloud is dead.

When rain pours from these storms it is as titanic as they. You might as well save yourself the trip to the shower stall, peel down to your undies, grab a bar of soap, and have a free shower courtesy of the sky. It is a warm rain, as warm as the oceans and the lake; it doesn't tense the body. It could be called a caress if there wasn't so much of it. Rather, it is an engulfment. As you stand under it and feel the power of the storm washing your skin, a storm which also has the power to transform an average evening in the tropics into something 86

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approaching sensual incandescence, you cannot feel you are much short of a Beatific Vision.

And this is described modestly in Sri Lanka as a "precursor."

When the main event, the monsoon itself comes, what then? Sri Lankan fisherman call it, "Great Wall". After Parakramabahu's bund — and mindful of the desolate majesty of the more famous wall in China, useful only for tourist posters — I began to form an unpleasant impression of great walls in general.

That is, until I saw a wild elephant family quiver behind a wall of scrub and thorn bush fifteen feet away from me, a great wall of gray hide which had seen me and could either amble away or charge. I was on sandy open ground with the elephants in front of me and another wall of scrub and bramble behind, which would have snagged and trapped me in full flight yet would mean nothing to an elephant whose entire life is spent toughening that gray hide on scrub and bramble. There was nowhere for me to go. It was like being in a lover's closet when her husband opens the door.

I was in Yala National Park, one of Sri Lanka's five nature major preserves. (There are many smaller ones in this nature-loving country.) It was not where I had predicted myself to be for the arrival of the monsoon. I had wanted to be up in Polonnaruwa where storms fly through the acreage like centuries through kingdoms. I wanted to comfortably enjoying a cup of tea on the veranda of the Guest House, feeding the fish the leftovers of my rice and curry instead of my hair, when the great wall of the monsoon roared in. I wanted to see what happened to the lake and how the boatmen pulled in their nets when the wall came on.

I'd been up there three times already, impatiently waiting for the pre-monsoon to end and the real thing to arrive. But the monsoon was being contrarily late this year and I had other things on my itinerary.

One of which was Yala Park, 200 miles away on the southeast corner of the island. The area is so dry it's more like the savanna landscapes of Kenya than Sri Lanka. If you've had enough of Africa, consider Yala Park. The prices can't be beat — $10 a night for a double.

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There are two places to stay. The first you come to is a large fiftyfour-room complex with garish outside lighting at night and not much of a view. The second is a little further along the sandy dirt road. It is rustic and has with an absolutely stunning view of a long, pointy, dune-ribboned headlands to the left; nothing but sea horizon in front (mind the fast break if you want to body surf — that sand is hard); and on the left a cluster of rocks so perfectly smooth you can sense the wind's endlessness without consulting a weather report or wind rose.

Tucked in the lee side of the rocks an itinerant fishing community of about two-hundred fifty men, women, kids, dogs, and boats were on their annual five-month campout seeking the local fish. They were ray fishers from Chilaw, halfway around the island to the West. When the west wind silts up their side of the Chilaw coast, they pile boats and possessions and kids into huge diesel-smoking trucks which don't stop if they get into a fender-bender. There are very few road police and no roadside telephones in Sri Lanka, and by the time the other driver has turned and given chase the fishermen are long gone in the maze of frantic driving.

They come to the limpid tranquility of the southeast's Yala waters in December. They set up light housekeeping in fifty-odd cadjanfrond huts leaning against each other like a parade of drunk angles, in front of which are their rocklike fiberglass boats and lashed-wood dugouts. They stake down several hundred square feet of cadjan mat on which to dry the sliced-up rays.

There wasn't a cat in sight. This mystified me since I had been to many fishing villages and had seen dockyard cats lying around like an uncontrolled population of furry amoebas. Then I heard their dogs at night. I don't know when they slept, but it certainly wasn't from dusk till dawn.

In all my time in Sri Lanka, I never met a more truculent group than those Chilaw fishers. They were so uncommunicative to we passers-through at the beachfront hotel I wondered what kinds of dialogues they ever had with their wives. I gathered that their dogs were such howling hellebores all night long because the men were too granite-jawed to shut them up.

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But could those men ever sing by the firelight! Their roisterous choruses and rhythmic hands roared out like a victory party of drunken patriots until finally, about ten-thirty, they all went to bed.

The entire scene reminded me of a promotional leader for a B movie about a latter-day pirate colony.

But a fisherman's heart is not where he puts his money. That's into arrack and singing. Rather, it's in his back. Under that skin he's made of metal. His back rises at first light, gets his boat to sea, spreads the nets, lives with the wind and the sunrise and the hourless days, hauls the net in, curses its weight because rays live half-buried in the sandy sea floor, takes out his knife and kills it, wipes his knife against the outer part of his thigh, turns, sets heading for a place over the horizon which he guides to by swell and sun lines, and when he gets there calls for his sons and they squish their feet six inches at a time into the sand until the boat hull has been shoved above high tide.

Until tomorrow, that's where it stays. Then the men drag the rays weighing from fifty to two-hundred fifty pounds thirty feet across the sand and deposit them on the cadjan mat where they begin to flense the flesh free. Mantas and stings, plus others I didn't know but which were so ghastly-looking that if indeed it is true that you are what you eat, I didn't want any part of that diet.

Pedants may fault the use of the word "flense" to describe the cutting up of this flesh because the word is supposed to be used only in relation to whaling. But given the ray's gristly blubberiness and thick mass plus the fact that the knives are set on five-foot poles and employ blades shaped like oversized hatchets with an upward curl at one end to jerk a recalcitrant bone to bits, the word probably isn't that far off. As I saw them push these into the sometimes foot-thick quivering flesh, run them along the crescent-shaped muscle line where the ray's fin joins the ribcage and offal, pry the flesh off with a lunge, then hack it into strips for drying on the mat, it made me glad my fate wasn't to be around when the executioners set to work at Agincourt. The offal stank so bad even the dogs weren't up to it; it went back into its original sea. At night the men party, sing, and make more of themselves on their wives. The children go hunting sea urchins and mollusks on the rocks which they pry off with little thin89

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bladed knives with the same shapes as their fathers', and sleep outside on the sand.

Imagine what happens to that man when the Great Wall comes in and he is so far out to sea everything looks the same everywhere except for the sun, and now suddenly it is gone. No compass. No satellite photos. No LORAN. He has only himself and his sons, and they'd better listen to him when he starts talking about wind and wave direction and the currents and the sea.

I suppose it would be a pretty conceit at this point by saying while the fishermen were sea-made truculence their wives were as contradictorily chatty. Not so. They had dried ray to salt and dinners to prepare.

Considering their cooking there probably wasn't that much to chat about anyway. Rice, chilis, and lentils are delivered once a week on a delivery van. That's the extent of the dry provisions. As to foraging, locally there is a delightfully tasty local berry named pula which is sunshine yellow, about the size of a small olive, which children love because it tastes like dates. Unfortunately, the local sloth bear (the only bear in Sri Lanka) also loves it. Despite its name, if you cross one they are anything but slow, not to mention better shinniers.

There are clumps of lemon grass not far. This is sandy soil so in the weeks after the monsoon mushrooms are an option. Chickens cackle even through the seashore sounds, so there's an egg for everyone at supper. One of the men took a day off because he took a sting-ray spine in his leg and by way of compensation promised to trap a boar.

Private ownership of guns is extremely restricted in Sri Lanka so meat comes the hard way. I never saw a true hunter until I saw a man go into a 100-pound boar with one knife, three dogs, and a son. Tell that to your NRA hero with his AK-47 Assault Deer Rifle Appropriate Also For Schoolyards.

But supper, sigh, in this fishing hamlet, is ray. If Julia Childs can make something out of monkfish, perhaps there is hope for the lowly ray. Greasy, gristly, more disagreeably bony than a night at a Ribs Palace, not even Sri Lanka's supply of curry can do much with it. The fisher's wife has already spent half a day drying by rotation in the sun the produce of her husband's night, laying it out to collect sand and dog pee on the palm-frond mat, and now she is faced with making it 90

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somehow palatable with an unlikely combination of wild grass, dates, and Green Revolution rice which raises production statistics but tastes like wallpaper.

So monosyllables mold life as the wind does sky. Yet those fishers, so unsympathetic to tourists, have dozens of words for each move of the unsympathizing sea, which to my eye swirls as aimlessly and unpredictably as square dancers. A prow heading past the surf is the beginning of words; its sliding back up on the sand is the end of them. A good day is six rays. A good night is no nets to mend. A good son scrunches his feet into the outriggers and slides it another six inches onshore, and with a great lunge at the end, gets seven. A bad son only manages four, so he gets the job of drawing water at the nearest source, a mile away, glumly trudging with a plastic jerrycan in each hand. Their boats are so no-nonsense they don't even bother to coil the ropes. Faded hulls. Chipped fiberglass. Kids bailing with coconut shells. Hands like rhinoceros hide. I wouldn't tack alongside one wearing Topsiders and whites in a boat with spick and span royal blue rigging covers and ask, “Anything biting?"

So what do you do when a six-month-old elephant that stands waist high whacks you in the balls with its trunk? While it's waiting to be fed, is impatient, and trying to get your attention? In front of two dozen schoolchildren who aren't exactly neophytes when it comes to male anatomy.

When an elephant orphanage erupts with childhood laughter in what is otherwise a model of decorum, you know your efforts to hide your purpling face, hands over your crotch, and astonishment at the power of even a baby elephant's trunk, are illusions. It was my fault. I didn't note him rocking back and forth against his three-foot tether and eyeing me in frustration.

That was my first close-up experience with the strength of an elephant. I was there to see the newest tyke, all of six months old and recently rescued from a gem miner's pit. The little ones occasionally tumble in and can't be pulled out despite all the trunk power of the elders. Sometimes they are too far down. The gem pits run to 20 feet and if you don't like mud, a loincloth hardly larger than a hanky, heat, sweat-rancid air, and claustrophobia, gem mining isn't for you.

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When the miners discover one of the little guys their first reaction is to head for the trees. A bull elephant here runs to ten or more feet, toenails to eye level, and its trunk can extend up to fifteen. That's five meters, and even if the fellow can't yank you off the tree, he can shake you out. It's not encouraging to remember that the Kandyan kings during Colonial times often used elephants as executioners. They first pierced you with their tusks, then stomped the life out of you, then gave a victorious five-minute rag-doll shake just to make sure. If you hear a bull elephant growl with a sound like recorded whale song, jump off a cliff, it's quicker. That's his "suspicious" call; the next thing you'll hear is the bellow of a full charge to the accompaniment of splintering trees. And if you think the bulls present problems to your composure, an elephant cow is only slightly smaller and yet her enraged yowl can be heard half a mile away. I'm told you haven't heard anything in life so heart-stopping as a she-elephant when you are between her and her calf, and I don't want to find out the hard way.

The miners report orphaned elephants to an office at the Colombo Zoo which contacts a group of expert baby-elephant rescuers in Pinnawela, six kilometers off the Colombo-Kandy road a few kilometers after you leave the dingy, dusty, noisy, hot, raspingly over-scootered crossroads market town of Kegalla, which rubs your nose in it by never seeming to end.

The elephant rescue team goes out with winches attached to fourwheel-drive Mitsubishi, a flatbed truck with high stakes, ropes, rice balls sweetened with treacle because it's probably starving, and soft sheets to wrap around its belly. They hire a couple of elephant handlers to be there with two large bulls to keep at bay the wild ones in case they hear the tyke's screams and come running. Tame elephants can calm wild ones. The mahout-to-elephant vocabulary is "Hyaah" to mean "move that way" (which he indicates with his prod), "Haydaah" to mean "lift your leg" (the mahout climbs aboard up a raised knee, over the shoulder, and straddles the neck), "Hulaah" to mean "roll over in the water to get your bath", and "Huryaah" to mean "get back up again." Strong emphasis on the "H"'s, which is most unSinhala.

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They try to get the elephants to trumpet, which calms the orphan — somewhat. I'm glad I'm not one of the men who go down into the pit to rig the little one to the winch. The rice balls help, but that little trunk can double you over or hurl you against one of the timbered walls, which can break a rib or leave a large bruise. Hence the men work fast. They blindfold it, loop the sheet around it, attach its top ring to the winch, and up the little one goes, squalling for dear life.

If there is a stream nearby which the truck can reach they take the orphan there for its first bath. The tyke needs it after several days in a mudhole. They scrub it with coconut husks as the bigger elephants sidle alongside to keep it from making any escape attempts. They've had to take off the blindfold and swaddle and if the little one gets away the herd won't accept it. It'll have human smell and elephants hate that. It probably has to do with their experiences with poachers, and clowns like a British administrator of the last century named Major T.W. Rogers who killed 1,400 elephants before he was struck by lightning while sitting on the porch of a rest house in Haputale. Too bad God is so patient.

Rogers not only killed that many, he chose the top two castes. Sri Lankans have a rating system for elephants in which there are altogether twelve castes, now ten thanks to Major Rogers. It is a complicated system based on the shape of the cuticles around the toenails, the mottling of the forehead, and other arcana which are supposed to indicate lineage (high mountain or low mountain, scrub like Yala or deep forest, tusk size, etc.), which it is believed indicates the facility for capture and ability to work.

Sri Lankans are made of very different stuff than Major T.W. Rogers. Instead of shooting rogues, the Park Rangers capture them and truck them to the distant far reaches of Yala or another national park, where the only humans they'll ever see are the Rangers. In one of the most touching stories from the lexicon of elephant lore, in June of 1991 a mother elephant fell into a gem pit trying to rescue her baby.

Now, your newspaper might not have picked up this wire report, but here's how it played in Sri Lanka: She Elephant Thanks Villagers For Saving Her Life 93

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A wild she elephant, whom villagers in the Wasgamuwa area rescued from a pit together with her calf, did not forget to 'thank' them for their kindness.

The two elephants had fallen into a deep and narrow pit along the channel cut to take water from Watagala amuna to the Weeragolla paddy tract.

This wild elephant had destroyed crops and houses in the area and was a threat to life as well.

As the calf had fallen into the pit, the mother had attempted to haul it out and in the process had herself fallen in.

The Deputy in Charge of the Wild Life Park at Wasgamuwa, W.P.G. Pathirana, and the Officer in Charge of the Hettipola police, M.N. Fernando, with the assistance of the villagers cut the sides of the pit and rescued the two animals.

For nearly fifteen minutes the elephant stood with trunk upturned before she returned to the jungle with her calf.

Sri Lanka's first wildlife sanctuary was also the world's first. The edicts of Buddhist leaders — and indeed the nature of the people themselves — give the highest sanctity to living things. That's why one rarely sees an emaciated cat, mangy dog or a cow with its ribs showing through. Animal abandonment virtually does not exist. The island's life is rich; Sri Lankans want to keep it that way. The first wildlife preserve was established by King Devanampiya Tissa, in whose reign Buddhism was introduced in the year 247 B.C. Tissa came upon a wild sambhur or great elk browsing unafraid in a thicket and thought to himself, "It is unseemly to kill so innocent a creature."

Instead of unleashing an arrow from his bow, Tissa plucked a note on its string and the stag fled. It turned into the Indian Emperor Asoka's son Mahinda in disguise, bearing the message of the Buddha and the dhamma.

The name Tissa is otherwise associated with benevolence and receptivity. Some four and a half centuries after Devanampiya, another Tissa surnamed Voharika was the first ruler in the world to forbid physical injury as punishment for a crime.

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Animals fared equally well as humans under Nessanka Malla, the king who succeeded Parakramabahu. He had a decree inscribed onto stone slabs all over the Polonnaruwa kingdom that banned the killing of animals within seven gaw (thirty-nine kilometers) of the city. He also set aside thanakalle or "forbidden forests" as wilderness areas and watersheds. Some still exist within their original boundaries.

Modern-day Sri Lankans think not only of the forests — the country has dozens of sanctuaries, large and small, but also of the sea.

Sri Lanka has declared its two-hundred-mile offshore sea zone as a sanctuary for Blue Whales. It was the first country to do so. It is impossible not to compare these facts with the mindless brutality towards animals seen in India and a few other Asian nations and ask why. One reason, assuredly, is Theravada Buddhism, which is why it figures so prominently in this book.

However, there are greedy men no matter what the flag or faith.

After the British, the next ranking elephant enemy is the poacher.

Along with the dope dealers of the West Coast beaches and group tour operators who specialize in package visits for pederasts (little boys included) I can think of no other class of Sri Lankan who should be turned to the other end of a gun than elephant poachers.

It is absolutely ghastly to see a detusked elephant rotting in a field, its tough hide like a lung that deflated over a skeleton. When I asked why elephant experts don't use the kind of tranquilizer guns employed to tag polar bears, it turns out that with elephants the lethal dose is so close to the stun dose that they'd probably kill more by accident than the poachers do by design. Secondly, a bull lying trunk and muzzle on the ground is particularly susceptible to earthbased parasites and viruses, particularly a form of pneumonia quite virulent with them. And finally, elephants have a sensitive psychology. The effect of waking up to find his great tusks removed might turn a bull into a rogue. Virility symbols are so deep that detusking a wild elephant could be tantamount to emasculation. In addition, he would be completely at the mercy of competing males, which would be even more an impulse turn into a rogue. Tame elephants have close friendships with their mahouts and the small clans of which they are a part; they can be controlled. But rogue wild 95

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males can be enormously destructive to farmers and fields alike — they've been known to flatten entire villages.

Armed with this knowledge, when I came face that great grey wall of three elephants on a casual but foolish stroll at twilight in Yala, I don't think I've ever been so terrified about nature in my life.

Ironically my first impulse was to laugh. I'd walked to within fifteen feet of three elephants whose only camouflage was gray. I recalled those silly fatigue camouflages soldiers wear that any child can spot a mile away. Nothing looks as phony as a clothes designer's imitation nature. The massive but simple grey of an elephant doesn't loom until it's too late.

Elephants have several traits. One is to stay calm until they sort things out. No wild flights of panic as with birds or water buffalo.

They are also inquisitive. They had heard and then seen me coming, they saw my path to be meandering without particular heading.

Perhaps they were just waiting me out. When I turned their way they probably chuckled at the behavior of this buffoon. But I also know they hate human smell and I was upwind and two days without a bath. That unnerved me. On the other hand my adrenaline system was pumping so hard the smell of my fear must have been acrid for yards. I realized the best defense is no offense. I stood stock still, hands at my side, waiting them out.

Then they simply, quietly moved away. I'm not really sure in the late light that I in fact saw them move at all, but the trees trembled slightly and the wall was gone. I didn't even hear footfalls — but that was probably because the fishing village dogs half a mile away had started their nightly croon. Which I used as a homing beacon down to and along the beach with more than all due haste. In fact I ran, along the water's edge where the sand was firmest, probably putting myself in greater danger of a heart attack than an elephant attack.

Earlier that day I'd made arrangements for a guide the next morning to see the inner depths of the park. It is quite large as it is and much of it is permanently sealed off from human presence except the Rangers. That's in part because the Tamil Tigers occasionally use the other end as a base for their slaughter patrols. If a half-mile 96

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meander near the beaches can turn into such a thrill, imagine what blindly penetrating deeper into the region would do.

His English wasn't a whole lot better than my Sinhala, but he sure could spot animals! Crocodiles by the dozens, sighted by their rollerlog backs and red crescent eyes in the lakes. Peacocks everywhere, wild boar in herds, water buffalo whose speed when startled shocked me — they were as fast as rhinoceros despite those water-lazed muscles. Spoonbills, ibises as common as the crocodiles, a rare serpent eagle, and in what must be the high point of my bird-loving life, a pair of black-crested ibises which the guide assured me are the only known mating pair in Sri Lanka. And to top it all with humility, a bunny who seemed quite content amid his skyscraper-sized neighbors.

When I told my guide about the elephant incident he rolled his eyes and told me the elephants were the least of the danger, they see strangers all the time. It was the vipers I might have stepped on. He took me to a pond-side, searched a few minutes through the binoculars, then motioned me to focus on a muddy slip. A banded snake was calmly waiting out the death of a smaller snake in its jaws, working the poison in. The jaw clench grew tighter as the prey moved slower. Then the viper began to swallow it down. "No good," said the guide, "Very no good." I didn't want to ask how long it took.

Two days later it came, the event I had hoped to see at Parakramabahu Samudra. The fishers had named it well. Out of the southwest, as brilliant and white and majestic as any weather I had ever seen, the sky abruptly became filled with it, one immeasurable cloud swelling over the horizon like an immense tremor of the sea.

Just before it arrived it was titanic. True to the fishers' words, I had never seen anything so large move as a single thing. It was a roll cloud. As a boy I had watched dust storms come in like this, roiling their grit across the semi-deserts of Eastern Washington. But this, this indeed was the largest thing I'd ever seen the sky do. The huge mass of air rolling in from the ocean was pushing the wet cloud-forming area before it so fast it simply bulldozed over the landscape a great wall of water horizon to horizon and stratosphere high.

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It is more than the eye can grasp. It is terrifying. Then it sweeps past and the rains begin. It rains. And it rains and it rains and it rains.

For months it rains, bringing a whole year's worth of new life to the western half of Sri Lanka. Millions of people and a half an island of animals, plants, mosses, lichens, birds, insects, trees, flowers, springs, pools, waterfalls, rivers, elephants, crocodiles, snakes, reservoirs, paddies, mango orchards. The island becomes an emerald and all life and history spring again from it. It is as majestic as Parakramabahu's great wall of stone that created a city which then came to be destroyed.

When the 1991 monsoon came it flooded 35,000 homes to sea and left 150,000 people wondering where their next meal was to come from. I cried to the Creator my gratitude that the elephant wall I had seen had been more benign. Otherwise the above would never have been said.

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The Flower Sermon Once the Buddha gave a sermon. A large crowd had gathered. The Buddha held up a lotus. Only one member of the audience, Kasyapa, understood that this was the sermon. The Buddha nodded to Kasyapa, then preached a traditional sermon for the others. It was about escaping from the net of ideas.

A week before the January poya full moon day, I mentioned to Serath that I planned to spend the day at the Gangarama Vihara about a kilometer away, where I went to meditate. I'd become such a part of the daily scenery there I thought I could celebrate poya there without distracting too much the attentions of the devout. Devout Buddhists pass the entire day of each month's poya at their vihara.

It's a little like Easter in Italy. They begin worship at six in the morning, listen to discourses on the Dhamma by the bhikkhus, then feast on dana, a lunch which is their last meal for the day. This dana reminds them a little of what life is like for the bhikkhus, who eat nothing between noon and the next morning. At sunset the worshipers begin a three-hour service of chants, prayers, and sermons accompanied by the clanging of the vihara bell. On poya day the valleys are alive with bells.

I had semi-adopted a puppy which had been born or abandoned there. He greeted me with a cheerful yowlp each time I arrived and nestled into my lap the minute I sat down to meditate before the white statue of the Buddha in front of the dagoba. The other regular worshipers began to call him my Buddha Pup because they'd never seen a dog meditate before. I felt his devotions had more to do with the contents of the paper bags I brought each day to distribute to the vihara's contingent of strays and that the phrase Rice & Curry Pup might have been a bit closer to the mark.

On the other hand, there is a cycle of 547 stories called the Jatakas which are about the Buddha's reincarnations in various forms before 99

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turning up as the Enlightened One. Some of these reincarnations were as animals. Since a Buddha is supposed to turn up approximately every 5,000 years and will reincarnate many times on the way, who knows what might be contentedly snoozing in my lap.

SeJayasekararath told me to hold my poya day plans for another full moon, because he had something else in mind.

Two days before January poya, Serath, Jayasakara, Kumar, and myself drove eighty miles down back roads to the Makandura vihara near Negombo by the sea. This was Serath's birthplace. He wanted to visit his mother, now in her eighties. He had arranged things that we would stay three days at his mother's villa in a fruit and spice grove next to a huge expanse of rice paddies. He said, "I want you to see poya day the way I did as a boy."

Backroads Sri Lanka is where you really have fun in this country.

We were in the part of the island of which George Bernard Shaw said, "Ceylon is the cradle of the human race; everything you see is original."

I was scribbling so fast I thought my ballpoint would fuse-colors, reflections on water or in windows, smells, sky, shapes, the sense of presence, sounds of voices, the drape of cloth, the effects of motion, the feeling of the air, how people move, the sense of purpose in things people do, faces, flowers, birds, fields, the glitter from stone quarries, hills, trucks, oxcarts, warehouse-sized piles of coconuts being readied for the oil press, brick kilns, newly planted groves of the shrublike tree that pepper creepers prefer, ripening rice, fire and curry smells, dagobas, onion-domed muslim temples with muezzin calls over the loudspeakers five times a day, and row after row of roadside stands called "boutiques" whose entire stock in trade is a case of Coke or Fanta plus half a dozen fruit bars, three boxes of Rinso, and a shelf of Nestle's powdered milk.

We came down from the highlands passing thousands of rivulets and groves of bamboo and anthuriums, paths leading down to pools and clothes-washing rocks, quarries in which women and young girls were breaking up wastebasket-sized chunks of granite with sledgehammers. I asked where their men were.

"Building houses."

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There were so many paths leading off into the forests that it seemed one could traverse the length and width of Sri Lanka without ever following a road. We passed lichen-covered basalt that looked like it had psoriasis and an emaciated old man with an umbrella, shading both himself and the head of his grazing ox. Broadleaf ti plants lined the watercourses. The land was leveling and we drove past the udder-full cows of spring. Then began paddies whose iridescent green two months ago was fading to flax as the heads grew fat and gold. There was still some green in the leaves, which meant two months more until harvest. The hotter the air became as we decended onto the coastal plains, the riper the rice (and the greater the number of coconuts per palm). Different species have different greens. Out among the paddies were rain shelters roofed with corrugated metal held down against the wind by discarded tires. Two puppies chased each other through a ripening paddy, then emerged coated with mud and got into a chewing match with each other.

Trellises of bamboo festooned with rags did duty as scarecrows.

Windweathered doorways filled with tired cats. The road was littered with coconut husks that had fallen off oxcarts on their way to the rope-making sheds. Samalnaliya (butterflies) hovered by the hundreds along streamsides filled with honeysuckle. A girl bent into a stream lined with long-stemmed asters. She scrubbed her waistlength hair, then flung it suddenly backward over her head to toss the excess water out in a great arc of drops. Something smelling deliciously potatoey wafted through the car, far more invigorating than the charring flesh of a barbecue. Vans with loudspeakers slowed traffic at every crossroads, hustling lottery tickets, proclaiming political platforms, announcing a sale just up the road. Their mixmatched melange blended into the background sounds of traffic, men hyooping and heyaaahing their oxen along, barking dogs, fragments of conversation vanishing away as we passed through crowds carrying market day produce home in blankets balanced on top of their heads. People drank colas through straws so small they're like sucking through a hair. Crow beaks are more pointed than those of America or Europe, and wings lighter colored almost to brown; they seem to want to be at once pigeon and peregrine. Buddha 101

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shrines everywhere, pure white except for their painted eyes, staring out from banana groves and coconut plantations.

A broken wagon mouldering to ruin came and vanished from view. Both wheels had collapsed off their axles and splayed brokenspoked on the ground. The yoke disappeared into a thicket of grass.

Roof stakes jutted like the skeleton of a recently unearthed mammoth.

We veered into the oncoming lane to avoid three elephants carrying ten-foot lengths of log a foot in diameter with their trunks.

Their back legs were hobbled with chain so they couldn't suddenly decide they liked things better on the other side of the road. I wondered what Mussorgsky would have done with them in Pictures At An Exhibition.

"We're in the Coconut Triangle," Sarath pointed out. Indeed we were because for miles we had been passing huge groves of them, all planted decades ago in neat, straight lines. The undergrowth was grazed to golf-green height by herds of cattle and goats.

"It takes five years before they get the first coconuts," Sarath explained. "Then they fruit for about a hundred years. After that they're cut down for firewood."

The coconuts were at least thirty feet up. "Why don't they just wait for the coconuts to fall?"

"By then they're too ripe. The oil breaks down, becomes gummy."

I wondered uneasily just how much broken-down coconut oil had found its way into my digestive tract via the fabulous homemade candies I had been feasting on since the day I arrived. For the sweettoothed, a walk through the candy-stall section of a Sri Lankan market is like letting an art lover loose in the Uffizi on a day when the guards are on strike.

Serath occupied the next three kilometers relating a story that has been made into a movie several times in Sri Lanka's cinema history. It is about a coconut cutter who lived alone and was the fastest cutter for leagues around. Like all cutters, he carried a 30-foot length of bamboo with a hook-shaped knife lashed to the top. His eyesight was so good he could slip the knife in between the clusters of coconuts and snip off only the ones that were perfectly ripe. He passed many years this way, famed far and wide and equally well paid. But he began to notice he occasionally missed the coconut he was after and 102

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instead brought down one of lesser ripeness. Then it became whole clusters by accident, the green ones included. Over time it became worse until one day he could barely make out the difference between a coconut palm and an arica palm, whose walnut-sized fruit are good only for chewing with betel leaf and ash. His friends were reluctant to talk when he asked why this should be.

Then one day he asked his bhikkhu. Bhikkhus follow the Eightfold Path, one Path of which is Right Speech. Right Speech is composed of four parts: abstaining from false speech, abstaining from slanderous speech, abstaining from harsh speech, and abstaining from idle chatter. The bhikkhu told him, "You have the eye-cloud disease." Now, never in his life had the coconut cutter accepted alms from anyone; when he was sick he simply waited until he got well.

He told the bhikkhu that he wished to leave the world and meditate upon the Dhamma in a cave he had played in as a child. The bhikkhu promised him that he and the other bhikkhus would lower to him the remains of their meals each day in a bucket on a rope. The cutter agreed to that. For years he meditated until one day the bucket came back up with the food still in it. The bhikkhus planted ivy creepers so their vines would grow down and cover the cave. As many of the bare cliffs in Sri Lanka are partly covered by great cascades of creepers, no one knows where the cutter's resting place is today.

It was late afternoon. We passed through a town in which half the shops were shuttered. "Muslim shops," Kumar told me, "They close up when they muezzin calls for prayer. If you really need something, wait ten minutes and they'll be back."

Sri Lanka's hill country and east coast are dotted with Muslim towns. You know you're passing through one when most of the men wear white crocheted skullcaps. Their distant ancestors were Moorish traders who began to frequent the coasts of what they called Serendib in the tenth and eleventh centuries, searching for pearls and gems.

Some historians believe Marco Polo en route to Italy happened upon Serendib as a passenger on a Moor's dhoni .

When the Portuguese arrived in the early 1500s their two avowed purposes were control of the spice trade and extinction of every Muslim they encountered. They summarily sank any Moorish ship in 103

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sight, and burned the Muslim districts in the towns they passed through ashore. Muslim leaders appealed to the more compassionate Buddhist kings of Lanka and were granted certain privileges over inland and overseas trade. They served their kings so well they were permitted to settle in their own villages. Today Muslims are the backbone of Sri Lankan mercantile and gemstone trade communities.

Muslim women in Sri Lanka aren't subject to the same rigid purdah of Arab countries and only via minor stylistic differences in the drape of their saris do you know the woman shop attendant you're speaking with is Muslim. Young Muslim girls wear a distinctive school uniform which covers all but their face and ankles and whose head cover looks like a halo that's been fluted into a pie crust.

Compared with the average American shopping mall, a Sri Lankan street makes the inventiveness of the American casual wear industry seem tepid by compare.

We slowed to a crawl ten feet behind a groaning truck with a two-inch-thick column of black diesel smoke coming out the stack.

There was no tailgate and inside I could see hundred-kilo bags of rice, several tires, rust-red heaps of coir fibers headed for a rope factory, palm fronds, coils of barbed wire, and a dozen plastic jerrycans marked "IVI Agricultural Chemicals, Produce of Taiwan, Danger: Poison." Suicide by Insecticide Ingestion is a common coroner's verdict in a countryside where the pressure of an unwanted pregnancy, alcoholic mate, or the moneylender's threats are too much any longer to bear. When we finally passed the truck there were five men sitting abreast in the cab, singing songs, pounding the dash, and passing a bottle of arrack.

Piles of rock on the roadside awaited the sledgehammer-bearing women of the pothole patrol. Squatting women waited alongside steaming two-foot-diameter woks set on a triangle of stones over palm-frond fires. Jayasakara pulled the van over, announced "Snack time!" and we hopped out. The woman rolled back a towel kept wet with water from a roadside ditch and took out three beautiful ears of maize still in their husks. These went into the wok as she put on more wood and raked out some coals, upon which she set a small basin of water. We went across the street to a coconut vendor sitting in a little hut of palm mat lashed to bamboo. He was surrounded by piles of 104

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golden orange/yellow fruit. He picked up one, lopped off the top with a curved-bladed knife about eight inches long that had been forged from an old leaf spring from a truck. Then he punched through into the interior with four quick chops. Liquid spurted out.

He handed it to me and I tipped it up and drank it empty. It was slightly sweet, slightly coconutty, and refreshing as spring on an Arctic island. I wiped my mouth as he decapitated another for Kumar. Thambili not only tastes good, it's sterile.

By now the wok was boiling and the woman fished out the maize with her bare hands. She husked and silked it and handed me one. It was so hot I could hardly hold it. She took a ladle and dipped it into the little pot of water and poured it over the ears. Sri Lankan cooks almost never use crystal salt but make a brine instead. This improved the maize no end as it wasn't the sweet corn one finds in supermarket America; it chewed like dry Grape Nuts and tasted like barley.

An oxcart passed us, piled to its arched palm-mat roof with pottery bedded on straw. From down the road came horrible grinding screeches and the sound of ripping metal from the a graveyard of old buses and worn out tires whose sign announces it to be Chakrahan Metal Crushers, Ltd. No one inside wore earmuffs.

Next door was a shack of half-rotten old posts and discarded planks and a thatch roof being turned threadbare by the annual visits of birds. Swallows had daubed mud nests around the eaves to compensate in some way for the denuding habits of their colleagues.

Two grindstones made of light gritty stone from a nearby quarry lay at angles against the shack's wall, announcing that this was the gama's knife-grinder. Inside, half hidden in the shadows, a man worked among several grinding wheels that rested on cradles. Each stone had a wooden pedal protruding from one side. The knifegrinder worked, intent to his fingers, sitting slope-backed on a small stool. One foot spun a pedal jutting from the side of a stone, the other foot was braced in the dirt. Both he and his equipment were grimy with grit where the water in the stone's trough had mixed a gruel of metal filings and worn stone then flayed it off the edge as the stone spun. The stones were all out of round so his fingers bobbed up and down as he whetted the long blade of a scythe.

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Along the walls were rows of his work-shears made of a Ushaped loop of iron whose ends had been beaten into the shape of blades, kitchen knives with curved blades and horn handles, a pigkilling knife with a wedge-like double edge for the jugular, adze blades, axes, mattocks, wheelwright's spokeshaves, plow tips. In a small bucket were his fine stones, the glistening smooth slates to sharpen needles, pieces of granite for the last careful honing of chisels and knives. Along a shelf above him were his knife-making tools.

Raw blades were still rough and rusty, dented with the marks of the forger's hammer. The grinder would smooth and sharpen each over many hours at the stone. Among the unhewn blades were scattered his rasps to shape, files to smooth, pincers to cut.

Looped on a peg in the rear of the shop was a coil of wire pounded from the best iron mixed with tin, uniform, thin, flexible, and quenched many times in hot oil as it was being shaped. As he was forging it, he had hammered hundreds of sharp barbs along its surface, creating a column of serrations all pointing in the same direction. He uses this cutter when the corner of a quarry is too tight for a regular saw, when stone is too brittle or fissured to chisel loose, or when he needs a stone cut to an odd size or shape. He uses this cutter to cut a groove into the stone. When it is deep enough he floods the groove with coconut oil and lights it. When the oil stops burning he floods the groove with water and the stone cracks free. In medieval Europe the stones for cathedrals and castles were broken out of a quarry by driving wood wedges into cracks then flooding them with water. In ancient Lanka there were few cracks in the quarries' massive gneisses and schists, so stonecutters learned the burning oil method. Given the nature of the caste system in Sri Lanka, this man in the shadows of his shed connects so directly with the foundation stones of the great cities of 2,000 years ago that he and each of his ancestors, receding into the furthest reaches of his greatgreat-great-great-gret-great-great-great-great grandchildren's' grandchildren's' grandchildren, all share the same last name.

On Sri Lankan roads an eighty-mile trip takes three to four hours. We passed the slender columns and leafy limb sprays of a rubber plantation, also planted in neat rows. They looked like nature's 106

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inspiration for the Grand Mosque in Cordoba with its simple columns and profusely busybody arches. A cemetary loomed and then passed.

It seemed incongruous after my many months in the highlands and Ancient Cities parts of the island, where the Buddhist dead are cremated and the Muslims are buried under shallow mounds of dirt that blow away with the wind. We were finally in low country, I realized, the outer edges of the Christian colonial time. There were many more churches and cemetaries as we neared the coast until finally, near the fishing town of Negombo we entered "Little Italy,", so Catholic they have an Easter passion play on the island of Duwa just offshore. Next door to one grandiose Italiante church was a serenely simple dagoba and shrine under a bo tree.

An hour and a half later the sun was getting low and we stopped for dinner at Pennala, a bus junction teeming with market-day people, long-haul truck drivers, bhikkhus in saffron shading themselves with umbrellas, beggars, and armed soldiers.

Tourists are rare in towns like Pennala. When we stopped for supper the fiery sambol came already mixed into the meal, not alongside in a separate dish as in the tourist restaurants.

We ordered egg hoppers-a pancake cooked in a hemispherical pan with an egg dropped in the middle; the result is a bowl-shaped crispy pancake you break apart and dip into a curry sauce that could debarnacle a battleship. Forty people looked on wondering what I was going to do with the tumbler full of hot water the waiter brought.

They'd probably seen or heard stories of tourists picking these up and drinking them, only to find it not only hot but salty as well.

Unfortunately for the onlookers, I'd been through that one and instead dipped my hands into it, washed my fingers clean, and dried them on my napkin. The napkin, by the way, was a foot-square section of cut-up newspaper. I didn't bother to consider the probity of cleaning off road dust by replacing it with printer's ink.

Thirty minutes later with our mouths still contentedly stinging, we hit the road only to be stopped within a kilometer by a roadblock of soldiers and police with AK-47s at the ready. They were keenly interested in jerrycans. The Tamil Tigers had had some reverses lately and now the Tigers were so desperate for diesel fuel they were paying the kind of money that attracts smugglers. Nobody spoke a 107

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word of English as they went through the van, even into the engine compartment. Then at the very end the captain saluted me smartly and said in perfect English, "Enjoy your stay in Sri Lanka, sir."

Finally we drove off the highway onto a dirt track. It passed a concrete rice winnowing pad now filled with children playing between flattened rows of rice. Jayasakara explained that the rice was drying after being boiled. "If you husk rice without boiling it, the sheath comes off with the husk and you get white rice. Many city people like white rice because it looks better with the colors of curry sauces. But the farmers believe white rice has no nutrition, so they boil it and dry it in the sun before husking to get brown rice."

Five miles later and countless intersections festooned with Fanta and macaroon boutiques, we came to a gate leading to a white lowroofed house centered in a large grove. Sarath unlocked the gate while cautioning me to watch out for vipers wherever I walked. "The cobras, if they rise and the hood goes open, just back slowly away.

But the vipers, they'll chase you. You have to beat them with a stick to get them away." This took the edge off my interest in seeing cashew trees for the first time. Cashew fruit looks like a persimmon with a pert black Twenties-style hair bob of the type worn by the Parisian tarts in Atget's photographs. Inside the cashew's bob is the nut. The fruit beneath makes a fine-what else?-curry.

The extended-family psychology of Sri Lankan society enables the elderly to gather their age well. There are few extravagances of modern medical technology available, but there are loving relatives.

Serath's mother was over eighty, didn't look over sixty, and had three live-in grandnephews and nieces to help her pass her days. In the soft dim light of the villa the creases on her face moved like Picasso painting paisleys. Serath paid his respects with an anjali. After he had arisen his mother immediately assigned us all a task. The bhikkhus from the Makandura Vihara were coming by the next day for dana, their pre-noon meal which would also be their last food of the day.

She had planned rice cakes and jakfruit curry, and for dessert, buffalo milk yoghurt that curdle overnight in an urn sealed with a cloth snugged over its lip and tied with twine. She handed me a large ketta knife and told me where to find the jak tree. "And mind the vipers," she added, "our mongoose died last year."

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Jakfruits grow as crusty splotchy appendages which hang from their tree's trunk like basketballs of pollen. I lopped one down with no trouble, but my attempts to hack through the crust almost got me a sliced finger. I took it back. Mrs. Herath laughed, then took me out to the back of the house near the cistern. There a thick iron spearpoint had been affixed to a pole implanted in the earth at a rakish angle.

Piles of coconuts and coconut halves lay all around. She held the jak to her abdomen and ran it straight onto the spear. It split in two sticky sweet-smelling pieces. She demonstrated how to pull out the fruit sacs and remove their seeds. The fruit of the jak looks like lfe on the inside of a scrotum. Removing the seeds by squeezing the fruit at one end until the seed popped out gave me thoughts I'd rather not rethink.

Serath joined us and translated as his mother spoke about family matters. Serath was the oldest son and therefore heir to the villa, but he could not inherit the paddy lands which began at the end of the grove surrounding the villa. Paddy land passes exclusively to those children, male or female, who stay in their native village. He also hadn't visited in a year, so had to be brought up to date on the labyrinthine tapestry of family thinking in Sri Lanka.

The most pressing issue of the day was whether a marriage being arranged for a cross-cousin of Serath's named Piyaratne should be virilocal or uxorilocal. In virilocal marriage the husband is the superior caste and the spouse therefore resides at his house.

However, Piyaratne's was from the old salagama cinnamon-peeler caste and his wife would be govigama-her family had owned paddy lands beyond anyone's memory. Ordinarily a marriage between a higher-caste female and a lower-caste male is uxorilocal-the husband will reside at woman's house and be low-status there. A proverb about uxorilocal marriages enjoins the man to have "constantly ready a walking stick and a torch, that he may be prepared at any time of the day or night to quit the house on being ordered." In-laws are inlaws.

The problem was that Piyaratne was a prosperous self-made man-a not uncommon situation among members of the salagama caste, who two centuries ago had to find new lines of work as the 109

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cinnamon trade fell off in Sri Lanka due to pressure from plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia. Piyaratna's father Nanhamy desired to arrange his marriage with Mr. Ukkubanda's daughter, Leelawathie.

However, another son-in-law of Nanhamy named Kulabanda, who was jealous of Piyaratne's success, opposed the marriage on the grounds that Nanhamy and Ukkubanda were cousins, each being the respective son of two sisters. However, Nanhamy averred that it was in fact Kalubanda's brother-in-law who was married to Nanhamy's sister, and therefore Ukkubanda would therefore be Piyaratne's brother-in-law or male cross-cousin. That being the case, Ukkubanda's daughter would be Piyaratne's niece. If it is correct for a maternal uncle to marry his niece, the Piyaratne cannot marry Kalubanda's daughter when she comes of age (she was ten at the time of this proposed marriage). Nanhamy countered that it is only on account of Kalubanda's marriage that Piyaratne is Leelawathie's maternal uncle. If the relationship is instead traced through Leelawathie's mother, who is cross-cousin to Nanhamy's wife, then Leelawathie is Piyaratne's cross-cousin and therefore the marriage is permissible.

This went on for over an hour as I emasculated innumerable jak seeds. The marriage sounded like a Graham Greene novel in which he is from Alaska and she is from Patagonia and the marriage ends in frigidity. But I listened carefully as Serath's mother slipped further into family relationships as she simultaneously slipped further into Sinhala-grandfathers, grandmothers, maternal and paternal uncles, fathers' elder brothers, fathers' younger brothers, mothers' elder sisters, mothers' younger sisters, paternal aunts, maternal aunts, cross-cousins, elder brothers, younger brothers, sons-in-law, nephews, nieces, grandsons, granddaughters, aka elder sister, naghi younger sister, nanda beloved elderly aunt, bapaa beloved elderly uncle, siya grandfather, chi grandmother, ata father (apatchi in Kandy, Serath reminded her), ama mother, baba baby child, puta child closer in age, malee younger brother, loku aga older brother, padyaka younger sister, lokuwaka oldest sister, kodiaka next oldest sister, kodinangi smallest sister.

I mentally left Sri Lanka, where time is the measure of continuity, and joined the Western equivalent to the Sri Lankan family, the verb, 110

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the motion word, where time is the measure of motion. To Be stretches its tendrils into the furthest reaches of moment and meaning, distances of time as instant as now and longer than lifespans, joining these with the Western I, whose core state is meaning, nuance, flavor, slant, assurance, the nearly infinite reachings of the self- I am, I was, I will be, I shall be, I have been, I shall have been, I have to have been that I may be that I might be that I could would should be, that I have been and am being, being been BE. Slips time and state, obligation, despair, from a past so distant it can't be reconstructed and into a future so distant it cannot be foreseen and yet there is, TO BE, the archetype of to have, to do, to discover, to receive, to take, to partake, to walk, hear, dare, pick, sooth, lull, dream, invent, wish, sigh, each full of color and figure and daring and choice and capture and even wish: would that I might have been, would that I could should would have been, that I should have been, that I could have been, I might have been, had to have been, have to have been, had been, have been, was, am, am being, will be, will be being, will have been, will have been being, will have had to be being As we drifted toward sleep I recalled a girl standing by a stream brushing her teeth with a leaf wrapped around a finger.

"Sarath?"

"Yes, Douglas."

"Thanks for the flower sermon."

He laughed.

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President's Day at the Temple of the Tooth If you want to see urban renewal Sri Lankan style, tell the mayor the President is coming.

The previously exasperating unemployment problem suddenly vanishes. A platoon of beggars earns a princely dollar a day sweeping clean every street the President is likely to see. The curbs get a new coat of black-and-yellow "No Parking" stripes spaced two feet apart by women in ragged sarongs who just last week were sitting along Tourist Row, the walk alongside Lake Kandy, selling their entire stock in trade of a dozen mangoes or a kerchief of jasmine flowers to lay before the Buddha.

Men paint new white lines down the middle of the road by hand.

They bend from the waist, paint pot in one hand and brush in the other, painting by thumbnail-and-eyeball only. The centerline marker is a 150-foot-long string held up by three tripods of sticks stacked against each other parade-ground style. These sticks also double as traffic cones. When they've painted one length the men gather the sticks into bundles and move to the next. The supervisor runs ahead a hundred feet or more, and waves each man to the right or left as he gauges where the centerline should be. There is no blaze of highintensity halogen lights flooding the scene, no highway Hollywood of flashing yellow lights, no "SLOW TO 25" signs, no grim-faced men in Da-Glo vests. In fact, there's nothing. Not even kerosene lamps. The painters wear light-colored sarongs and assume drivers will use their wits and their headlights. And given the traffic volume of mopeds, motorized rickshaws, Ceylon Transport Board (CTB) buses, bicycles, private minibuses so crammed with people sardines seem to have the good life, blind men on canes, women carrying marketplace produce on their heads, children in starched white shirts or skirts (pre-teen 113

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boys are permitted blue shorts) heading home from school, elephants and their handlers, oxcarts whose plaited-frond roofs look like a long house in Borneo, dogs, cats, and monkeys — given all this, nobody can go much over 20 miles an hour anyway. The workers paint twelve hours a day. No overtime.

Potholes are filled in and then repaved by sweating men in loincloths who splay sand by the handful over the patch, brush it smooth by hand, then tar it over using ladles and a coir-fiber mop.

Their molten tar supply is a decapitated oil barrel on a three-wheeled cart, filled to spitting with benzene and bubbling tar, heated by white coals from coconut-trunk embers in a sheetmetal fire pit beneath. A man in a blackened, spattered sarong guides away the traffic. His ankle-length sarong marks him as the supervisor. The repair is smoothed by a giant two-foot-wide four-foot-diameter inch-thick iron roller with a long poles sticking out from its axle, which join into two iron handles on the other end. Two men maneuver it ponderously over the sticky mass as strains from the "Great Wheeled Cart" passage from Pictures at an Exhibition materialize in my head. I'd seen pictures of a device like this in the old photos of Paris by Atget; I never realized as I marveled at those old photos years ago that one day I would actually see such a thing.

Buildings along the route of the entourage, from the frumpishly colonial Queens Hotel down to the lowliest fruit-candy seller's stall, are getting new coats of paint. Their owners grumble about this latest edict from the mayor. Only the President's parade route is effected, they complain to one another, why single out us?

All central Kandy is like this. It's as though the day-in-day-out food gathering of an anthill is suddenly flooded by a hose. Already, a week ahead of time, the mayor, Chief of Police, local Army caserne commander, and representatives of the President's guards have met and toured all routes in and out of town. They've made a thorough inspection of the entire area surrounding the place where the President will speak, the Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth, which is the most sacred Buddhist shrine of the Theravada sect.

The Temple itself is a large chuckablock of buildings built at different times starting in 1590, yet all possessing the quality of massiveness combined with splendor. It is incongruous to see dainty 114

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little foot-by-foot-and-a-half colorstriped Buddhist flags pertly fluttering from the great wad of creme-colored shapes. The Temple, like Lake Kandy, is surrounded by a crenellated chest-high parapet wall whose arches about four feet apart make it look like some great saw whose teeth are three feet thick.

The Dalada (pronounced "DaladAH") is a large complex with perhaps fifty buildings. Except for the dome-shaped dagobas containing relics of the Buddha, royalty, or holy men, every building in the entire complex is roofed identically: a steeply sloping pitch of perhaps forty-five degrees down to about halfway to the edge, then creasing outward abruptly to a pitch of perhaps twenty-five degrees.

All are covered with the same brownish-ash colored barrel-shaped tiles about the same size that you find in Italy or Spain.

The Sacred Tooth of the Buddha lies inside. By "inside" is meant "inside the most sacred inner casket of seven gold caskets each containing the other, these inside a sacred reliquary, this inside a sacred sanctuary which is guarded by stern looking Buddhist monks inside and armed soldiers outside, all of which is inside the Dalada Maligawa temple complex and grounds itself, which is inside a moat which is inside the the sawtooth parapet wall enclosure inside the heart of the City of Kandy which is the spiritual center of Sri Lanka; and all this is merely the inner sanctum of the Theravada sect of Buddhism which stretches from Sri Lanka to Burma to Thailand and to Cambodia to Laos and thence to the world.

One tooth.

Here the President will come. He is to speak, award honors to exemplary children, praise local politicians, give alms to beggars before a multitude, unveil a statue, then take off his shoes and socks, turn, enter the Temple, and be one of the few people ever invited to see what is inside that innermost of the seven gold caskets. He will be accompanied by the Dalada Maligawa's mahathera, or abbot.

Spiritually speaking, it is as though only on Easter Sunday were the doors of St. Peter's to open, and only then to the Pope and Italy's President.

How the tooth came to lie in that innermost casket is a story in itself.

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There are four ways to preserve the relics of a person. The whole idea is to get rid of anything that will spoil, then make the best use of what's left. The first is to shear the hair, clip the nails, then boil the remains until well done — say two days. The second is to place the remains on a catafalque in the open air and let the vultures go to work. Not exactly edifying, and there's still some boiling to be done because vultures go mainly for the soft parts. Then there is burial in the earth for ten or twelve years, where, at least, the worms are out of sight. With the Catholic faith, the matter was automatically taken care of, since by the time the hierarchy got through the elaborate process of certifying miracles and conferring sainthood, bones were the only thing that was left.

But the way of ancient and modern India was cremation. When they prepared the Buddha for suttee, the hair and fingernails were divided among disciples, as were the Buddha's few worldly possessions such as his begging bowl. The body was placed in a shroud on a wooden trestle under which were twigs and logs. In the end, all that remained were the Buddha's bones.

As to the bones, I could not find a definitive catalogue of where they were dispersed. Perhaps one exists in Pali, the 2600-year-old language used to record the life of the Buddha. Most the larger bones were sawn up, since the purpose of the white-domed dagoba is that it contains relics of the Buddha or holy men. Sri Lanka is peppered with thousands of them, and so are Burma and Thailand. Then, too, one hair makes a relic.

From the time of Buddha's parinibbana in the fifth century B.C. until the fourth century A.D., his left eyetooth was a revered treasure of the Kalinga kings in northeastern India. Very early on the possession of the tooth came to be considered as conferring royalty, and in fact, without the tooth there was no royalty. Hence it was the object of fierce warfare almost up to the time of the coming of the British in 1795.

One king, Guhasiva, saw his throne about to fall to non-Buddhist warriors. He gave the sacred tooth to his daughter Hemamala, who escaped with it concealed in her hair. She and her husband Dantakamura made their way to Sri Lanka dressed as pilgrims. They eventually arrived at the palace of King Sirimeghavanna at 116

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Anuradhapura, where he received it with great reverence and had a new temple built solely for the relic.

By the eleventh century the Sri Lankan people and their kings also had come to believe that the possession of the tooth conferred royalty. Without it you were no king. Hence war upon war was fought for its possession. Where housed the relic, there housed the capital.

The tooth arrived in Kandy in 1590, a safe haven from the Portuguese who were converting the lowlands to Christianity by the Christian sword. It is difficult to find references to Christ carrying a sword in the Bible, but that didn't deter the Portuguese. They didn't quite go to the extremes of Cortez and Pizarro, but neither were they exactly into sweet talk. King Wimala Dharma Suriya constructed a small twostory shrine for the tooth. Three-quarters of a century later King Narendra Singha took this temple down and built a newer and larger two-story temple. Today it is the Inner Temple where the Sacred Tooth lies.

Over the years other buildings were put up, great and small.

Shrines, assembly halls, prayer halls for the resident monks, kitchens, storage sheds, dormitories, and so on. Except for its architecture the Dalada Maligawa might as well be a twelfth-century mountain monastery in the Alps or Pyrenees. Great crowds of Sri Lankans — and a few towering tourists — surge in and out of the narrow causeway entrance to tour the grounds and worship and gawk and take pictures with their children. As the tooth itself is only very rarely exhibited to the public, the monks have thoughtfully supplied other wonders — a seated Buddha carved from a single solid amber-tinged emerald two inches by three, and another sitting Buddha from rock crystal. There are exhuberantly painted) ceilings, ivory-and-silver doors, massively carved stone columns, painted images of the sun and the moon (the moon has a hare bounding across it, the Sri Lankan version of the Old Woman in the Moon), lacquerwork, woodcarvings, and periodic thrummings from drums and the chants of monks. In the library on the second floor of the octagonal oratory facing the grand esplanade leading away into the city of Kandy, there is a collection of ola-leaf manuscripts whose hand painted wooden 117

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board covers are a treasure trove of decorative imagery so unusual and exotic the room should be a pilgrimage entirely unto itself to graphic designers and artists.

This President's visit was doubly meaningful because out in the esplanade, on the side next to Lake Kandy, was a veiled statue. No one but a few knew what it was. It was emplaced by the crane still wrapped in its shroud. The President was to unveil it at the end of the ceremonies.

Five days before January 2, workers began to build an eighteeninch-high twenty-foot-broad platform the entire length of the esplanade. The esplanade itself is somewhat wider than a football field and over three football fields long, lined with straight walkways bordered by grass. As you face the temple there are on your left fourteen small wooden stalls about the size of a card table, open on all sides, and roofed. Each stall's counter is filled with jasmine and lotus flowers. People buy the jasmine blossoms by the handful in a plastic bag, but carry the lotus as if it is growing from their palms — as, in a sense, it is.

Five days before the toll of the great bell within the temple, the men started the platform by laying out three long rows of squat wood posts about fifteen inches high and six inches in diameter. They placed them about three feet apart. A mortise notch had been cut through the top of each post, to a depth of four or five inches. Three rows of these aligned in parallel, to a length of nine hundred feet.

They snapped wood planks into the mortices — a perfect fit — and then fit cross-braces with still other posts and planks in between them, so the whole structure soon looked like the underside of a causeway before the engineers put down the decking and pavement.

That was the first day.

Day Four on the countdown saw them planking the entire structure with a gorgeous foot-wide two-inch-thick slab of wood I couldn't get the name of. I walked on the finished part: solid as concrete, but with a nicer smell.

Day Three saw them laying carpets the whole length. The same day another crew took heavy steel poles from a truck and dropped them to the ground with a heavy ringing thud alongside a row of posterns on the edges of the esplanade. The men strung and bound 118

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heavy cables lengthwise atop the still-lying poles, then clamped cross-wires about eighteen inches apart to the cables.

On Day Two they tied sixteen-inch-by-three-foot pieces of batik between these cross-wires. THOUSANDS of batiks! More colors and painted patterns than one could imagine to exist! Primary colors of yellow and red and green and blue. Secondary colors of colors merged together — browns and pinks and maroons and fuchsias and tangerines. Tertiary colors mixed of two secondaries, like wedgwood, orchid, quail's egg, putty, taupe, the color of the bottom of a raincloud made equally of the sky above and the earth below, not gray because there is reflected the green of the earth in a raincloud's mix of blue and mist, and cold gray contains no warm green.

And these were merely the base colors. Over these had been lain patterns when the batiks were made. The sinha, of course!, the national lion symbol of Sri Lanka whose shadowy mane flows back through recorded time into time unknown, when the princess of a king of Vanga in north India was carried away by a lion, fell in love with him, and from their union came the Sinhal people.

And the paisley, of course! The abstracted shape of the mango, the national fruit of Sri Lanka, eaten in every way shape and form, from not-yet-ripe slices dipped in curry all the way to pulp near to spoiling, spooned off the seed onto ice cream.

Plus the usual things found on batiks — the writhing vegetative forms, the abstracted ocean waves, rice in the fields, palms against the sea, bhodisatvas, bedappled mango leaves.

While the workers were stringing up this assemblage no one was permitted on the esplanade. Then they began raising it. Pole One nearest the temple went up, hefted aloft by a dozen straining men, those further back pushing with bamboo poles on which a bamboo crosspiece had been lashed to a U-shaped notch at the top. The higher it rose the more the batiks that rose with it, so instead of becoming easier it was the other way around. Finally with a great lunge, chunk down into the postern it went. I thought the men would cheer, but no, they simply went on to Number Two. Up and chunk in the same way.

Now the first cross cable was stretched, sagging a foot or two in the middle, the batiks beginning to flutter in the wind.

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Then Number Three and Four, then Five and Six, and on and on. I left for a walk through the streets of Kandy. As far as the shopkeepers and lottery ticket sellers and beggars and Muslims at prayer in the Temple were concerned, it was just another day. I picked up my favorite snack, tiny little harissi — dried and salted smelts you can nibble like potato chips. No oil and they taste much better, plus provide calcium and protein besides. However, they are so salty you soon have a craving for ice cream, so I stopped in a Muslim ice cream parlor for a dish. The Middle East came pouring from a radio, a woman singing seemingly without taking a breath a song which, if Arabic music could be flowed onto paper the way it sounds, would look exactly like the Kufic script of the Qur'an.

Muslim ice cream is right up there with Ben & Jerry's. Different flavor combinations, though, like lime and pistachio, orange and mango, papaya and pineapple. Only fruit flavors and crushed fruit, no further stagecraft like chocolate or maraschino cherries necessary.

I took the back way home, up over the hill through the Udawattakele Forest Preserve. I needed to let the gentle mono-hue textures of nature give my eyes a break. Early on I had found a hidden back trail that came out just above my room, longer by a mile from downtown Kandy not to mention the good climb, but what a commute!

Later, at last dusk about 6:30, I went to see the results of the last three days' handiwork. It took my breath away! It would take away the breath of a Gabriel! Over the esplanade there floated a vast canopy of undulating color billowing softly in great waves with the wind. It was like being inside the womb in which the world was conceived. The esplanade was filled with a meandering humanity of saris and western dress and beggars and Muslims in white skullcaps and street hawkers and lotus sellers and seventy-pound grannies and children. The colors of these feet upon the earth rivaled the colors of the great diaphanous batik cloud floating over their existence. I looked at the faces, the myriad Sri Lankan shades of brown, and observed that though there was that fundamental constant of brown, no two faces had exactly the same shade. I realized that one of God's greatest gifts to humans, along with heartbeats and brains, was melanin.

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At the other end of the esplanade a group of men were setting up folding chairs. Nearby a crew was affixing loudspeakers to poles using a cherry picker mounted on roaring diesel truck. As I neared I noticed the men setting up the chairs (a) all had hair so closely cropped they were next to bald, (b) young, and (c) wearing identical khaki shortsleeved shirts and shorts that ended above the knee. I looked more closely: the work crew was surrounded by meanlooking soldiers, a dozen of them, with shotguns at the ready. I don't know what those young men did, but setting up chairs at the Dalada Maligawa was undoubtedly the first outing they'd had in quite a while.

Indeed, the police presence had been expanding dramatically over the past few days. I first noticed it four days before the President's visit. Serath and Jayasekera and I had gone up to visit the Aluvihara, a second century B.C. monastery which had been built in front of some rock caves used by hermits far back into antiquity.

About 40 B.C. the Aluvihara monks began to commit the Tripitaka, the "Three Baskets" of Buddhist canonical literature, to writing. They used the leaf of the ola palm that had been made into a form of paper with the texture and ink-taking qualities of papyrus.

But instead of on scrolls, the Tripitaka is recorded on leaves about two inches wide and eighteen inches long. The language is ancient Pali, a direct descendent of Prakrit, the language the Buddha spoke. One of the reasons why the Pali and Sinhal alphabets are so rounded and without straight lines (they look like copulating bubbles) is that the writing instruments the ancient bhikkhus used would tear the olaleaf if they tried to draw straight lines. Hence the curling fluidities of an alphabet begun 2,150 years ago. It took 500 monks decades to set down the complete Tripitaka, and from that master copy all others on the island and overseas have been derived.

There are, thankfully, many copies of that original manuscript. In 1848 the British were pursuing a notoriously rapacious rebel leader, and he and his band decided to hole up at Aluvihara. In the fight, the library, the ola-leaf Tripitaka, and most of the monastery was destroyed. The monks first rebuilt the temple, then the monastery, and then began re-inscribing the entire Tripitaka onto new tablets.

They're still at it. This time, however, they are writing it in Sinhala 121

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because, who knows, 2,200 years in the future there may be no more monks who can read Pali. After all, three centuries ago the use of Pali almost vanished during a period when the Sangha fell out of royal favor and the fervor of its practice declined. Hence it may be that one day today's Sinhala will be looked upon as gratefully by the Buddhists of then as the Buddhists of today look gratefully on the Pali scribes of Aluvihara. The Buddha is said to reincarnate approximately every 5,000 years, and 1956 was the 2,500th anniversary of his parinibbana. In A.D. 4,000 there may well be monks at this and other Theravada Buddhist temples reading ancient Sinhala alongside an even more ancient Pali, knowing they have but a few more centuries yet to wait.

This was our frame of mind as we headed back to Kandy and hit the first checkpoint nine miles out. A line of soldiers, AK-47s held across their chests. Two officers. Two machine guns partly out of sight on each side. A mobile radio unit. The Tamil Tigers would just love to get a bomb off on President's day. The Army had other plans.

There are police checkpoints fairly often on Sri Lankan roads.

They are after things like contraband logs cut without a permit; truck haulers have to show the permit or they lose their load. They are also on the lookout for loads of illicit kasippu — white- lightning arrack distilled out on the farms, which, I'm told, can double as paint remover. At such checkpoints they look at Westerner passengers and wave your car through.

Not this time. The line of soldiers didn't budge. An officer came over to my window as Sarath and Jayasekera fished for their ID cards for the officer at the other window.

"Passport please, sir."

I handed it over. Ordinarily I don't bring my passport with me on extended field trips like these. I carry a folded-up photocopy which I've had notarized by an in-country notary public; the real passport is in a safe somewhere. But I hadn't gotten around to that yet, so Blessings Be, I had it on me.

He looked at it. He looked at me. Having lived for a time in California I'm used to the unblinking power stare straight into the eyes. It's an immediate index of false self-esteem which I respond to by crossing my eyes slightly and staring at the bridge of my nose 122

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while taking forever to reply. But this time I stared eye into eye, since I knew he was also checking me out for the jerkinesses or bloodshots of drugs.

"Thank you, sir, we hope you understand and will have a nice stay in Sri Lanka."

Four more of these before we got to Kandy. I assumed every other route into Kandy was similarly beseiged.

Now, four days later on the esplanade of the Dalada Maligawa, the police and army presence was no less. The officers had imported walkie-talkies from Japan. Soldiers in groups of three or four just sort of wandered around keeping their eyes open. The khaki-clad Kandy Police had rerouted all traffic away from the Dalada Veediya which runs alongside the Dalada Maligawa and is the main route from Kandy to the north. The southbound detour was a kilometer out of town. Later as I passed it on my way home there was a kilometerlong string of traffic waiting for the soldiers at the detour to wave them into the side road one at a time. The idea of single-file traffic is inconceivable to the Sri Lankan driver. Driving is a blend of accelerator and horn, and drivers are habituated to passing in blithe twos and threes abreast around blind curves in the driving rain. I'd love to have been in one of the cars out near the end, scribbling additions to my supply of Sinhala pejoratives.

Next day I got up early to get into Kandy in time for a good seat. I wore a tie out of respect for the people and the occasion. However, I wasn't the only one who had thought of arriving early with a thermos of tea and a good book. The front two-thirds of the seats were already taken. So I contented myself with a chair with a decent view (regretting I hadn't brought binoculars, but this was no time to go back), and took up light housekeeping near the jasmine-sellers' stands.

The esplanade was filled with people, many gazing and speculating at the still-shrouded statue. Children were nibbling on sweets, dressed to the nines, and it was clear this entire event was a gigantic family outing in a country which lives mostly outdoors. Two blind men in tattered tee-shirts and loincloths came by, tapping their canes and singing a dolorous out-of-tune beggar's song. They held 123

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out cups for alms; one cup was a Coca-Cola can from which the top had been removed. The beggar could hear the coins as they clanked in, but the opening was too narrow for a pilferer to get into.

A balloon seller came by, twisting his multicolored tubes into sausages like those at American county fairs and European fetes and kermesses. Ice cream sellers were having their best day of the high season. Their hampers of half a dozen flavors were held waist-high by a belt and a broad sash that went around the backs of their necks.

This was no apparatus of niceties: there was no place for a water basin to swizzle off the last flavor, so whether you wanted it or not, you knew where the previous customer's tastes ran. The cones in their paper wrappers were held in little bamboo-strip racks on each side. Scoop in right hand, cone in left, change in a pouch slung from the neck, they worked the crowd like a politician who's losing.

Kandy is blessed with almost constant breezes, so even on a hot day you rarely stifle. It was even more pleasant under the batik canopy. Many people wore light colors or whites to keep even cooler.

As is true all over Sri Lanka, the trees were filled with birdsong, kews and kukruches and kya-kya-kyas and thrwrrrrts in long trills. I listened to the people song around me the same way I listened to the birds.

Some people fall in love with a language the way they do a woman.

The ear wanders over locutions like fingers over a first love. When first I heard French it sounded like a swift stream over a bed of steppingstones. Spanish sounded like acres of shattering glass. Dutch sounded like a frog gargling with asphalt. And now I was listening to Sinhala, of which I knew but a few words. It is a language of consonants as French is of vowels. Soft licorice consonants, a timewind of utterances that sounds like women sewing. It's as if to say that to the Sinhalese, sound transcendence doesn't come by sound rising and falling, as we Westerners are transcended by the risings and fallings of opera. Rather, the transcendence comes by the voice being propelled forward as cloth is propelled past the needle. Just as the monks in the Dalada Maligawa were chanting their quintichrome scale of sounds in the ancient Pali tongue, each tone but a silk thread apart from the next, out here in the esplanade families spoke a linear linguistic procession, as love proceeds into lineage, affection into marriage into life giving life giving life giving life after life.

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All this time loudspeakers lining the esplanade had been broadcasting the chanting of the monks inside the temple. Sometimes I was aware of it, a drone bridging centuries; other times it was subliminal, working on me invisibly as I chatted with my neighbors or simply looked around. Although within each art form there are many variants and styles, Sri Lankans believe all "high" art (meaning a conscious attempt rather than spontaneous fun) is divided into nritta (pure form), natya (storytelling drama), and nritya (personal expressiveness). These three fundamentals are most clearly defined in the Kandyan dance, but the threads of the theory are found in theatre music, and the visual arts as well. But here, the sound of the monks was no principle of art, it was a sigh out over centuries uniting the first footprint a man named Vijaya made as he stepped off a boat onto the sands of "Tampabanni" at the very moment the Buddha passed into parinibbana, and the President's imminent arrival today.

Theravada in not only the purest form of Buddhism, it is also the most stable. While Zen has gone through its perigrinations across time and geography such that a Zen master of six hundred years ago visiting us today might find little familiar in the zazen at the Zendo in New York City, a Theravadan Buddhist visiting from two millennia in the past would feel right at home with what happens after the bell rings in a Sri Lankan vihara today. He would even be able to converse in an unchanged tongue. Part of this is strict adherence to the ancient Pali texts of the Dhammapada and Tripitaka, both over 2000 years old.

But more important is the natural conservatism of the people themselves. It isn't the conservatism of America and Europe, which is but a synonym for greed. Sri Lankans are conservative in the sense that Theravadan stability is the fundamental constant of society from which all else flows, and, along with the constant of the bond of the family, nothing will ever be allowed to endanger them. Any social accretion that would alter this unity is simply ignored to death. When the Portuguese converted by killing, the coastal Sri Lankans adopted Catholicism yet practiced it like Buddhism, and the family rock remained. Television doesn't dominate the living room as in many other countries. The Sri Lankans are an outdoors people anyway, but many is the night I have watched a little TV with the Heraths, and 125

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they come and go from the living room with little concern whether they watch the rest of the program or not.

By now the esplanade was filled with the ennui that passes while awaiting the main event. Faces were being fanned and children fidgeted. Conversation was fitful and even the ice cream sellers were experiencing slack trade.

Finally in the distance there was the roar of jeeps (Mitsubishis, actually) and the soldiers lining the route snapped to attention. A collective sigh of relief went up from the crowd. Then down the Lewella grade they came, headlights blazing, first the military escort in front then the motorcycle officers alongside, and in the center one lone white Toyota Hiace van. No stretch limos, no Secret Service sunglasses, no press handlers with bushel baskets of excuses. The President. Period.

I thought the esplanade would erupt into cheers as "Prem" got out of the car. He wore the official "national" dress of the Sri Lankan governing elite: a long-sleeved white Nehru-style shirt cut square at the hips, and a white sarong from the waist to the ankles. Instead of cheers there was an almost utter silence. The effect was uncanny, as though this was all on TV and somebody had turned off the sound. I suddenly noticed in the silence that even the monks' chants had stopped. I understood the significance of this one man coming to his people alone in a simple Toyota van, not in a vast self-congratulatory parade.

Prem was escorted to a podium by the Mayoress of Kandy, two generals, and the mahatheras of the Asgiri and Malwatta monasteries nearby, administrators of the Dalada Malagawa. The Mayoress of Kandy, Chandra Mahaulpotha, made a mercifully brief introduction, then Prem stepped to the microphones. Above and to his right, a cherry-picker held a television crew from Rupavahini, the national television network.

His were the measured tones of the planed-smooth politician. I didn't understand much of it, which is probably for the better, since that allowed me to delve into his character via the tonalities of his sounds. There was the grave voice of a man with a lot of problems on his hands, and yet an assurance of diction that gave the feeling he knew what he was doing. The crowd erupted into laughter a number 126

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of times, so humor was part of him. He knew how to pause dramatically to let his words sink in. Finally he sang the first few words of the Sri Lankan national anthem and the entire esplanade was suddenly a vast flood of song. I remembered coming back from the Naula farm with the Heraths and how someone would sing out a phrase and the whole car would join in. As this immense crowd sang out in unison I looked up at the great undulating batik cloud overhead, as united in its thousands of swatches of color as the crowd below was united in a single song. Though there will be slow waves of change and political monsoons, social theories and economic comings and goings, the Sri Lankan sensibility is a unity despite its myriads of color.

When Prem unveiled the statue, it was of Hemamala and Dantakamura. Her hair was piled high where the sacred tooth was hidden. He held in front of him the sacred trident they used as a pilgrim's staff. They had arrived with it in the late 300s. It might as well have been yesterday.

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Painting the Buddha’s Eyes Buddhist iconography is both simple and complex. Its simplicity comes from the fact that it divides into three phases separated each by roughly six centuries: simple, colossal, and profuse.

Its complexity comes from the fact that by now it is a rich blend of the spirit of the Buddha Gotama's original teachings with Mahayana and Tantric influences, gods from the Hindu pantheon, folk deities, and legends from the 547 literary tales describing the Gotama Buddha's past lives called Jatakas.

For the first two or three centuries after his last breath and passage into parinibbana in 544 B.C.,* Buddhist monks paid homage to the Bodhi tree under which he had attained Enlightenment and whose cuttings were the source of many sacred commemorative Bodhi trees all over Asia. *This is the traditional date. Modern scholars have revised that to 483 B.C., or possibly even more recently than that.

Eventually more permanent monuments began to be constructed.

The first were architectural, notably the stupa. The earliest stupas were simple mounds of earth with a wood pole sticking out the top.

This has been interpreted as a symbolic representation of Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain at the center of the universe as described in South Asian legends which long predate Buddhism. Over the next three centuries the stupa acquired more and more symbolic meanings and in ancient Lanka became formalized as the dagobas one sees all over the island today. The original mound of earth came to be called the "paddy heap" design because its shape was the same as a pile of rice grains poured onto the ground. Very few of these are left; one is at Kelaniya just outside Colombo, and another in Anuradhapura.

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Over time six dagoba shapes evolved: the paddy heap, the "bubble" which one sees at Ruwanweli in Anuradhapura and at Kirivehara in Polonnaruwa, the elongated "bell" shape of the Thuparama at Anuradhapura and thousands of other dagobas in Sri Lanka, and three shapes for which there now exist no examples: the "water pot", "lotus", and "amalaka bell".

The conical spire of the dagoba represents the umbrella which early worshippers affixed atop the poles of their stupas to protect them from the shrine from sun and rain. The umbrella is an ancient symbol of royalty. The paddy heap stupa was also enclosed in a ring of stones to keep the earth from washing away. These became stylized into a spire of concentric rings called the kotkarella and a three-tiered masonry base called a pesavalalu. The terraces of the pesavalalu are piled thick with flower offerings on full-moon poya days.

Buried at the center of every dagoba is a chamber which contains a relic of the Buddha or an especially renowned holy man, plus treasures donated by lay people. Often these treasures take the form of gold or bejeweled statues of the Buddha, pious inscriptions on gold sheets, and so on. The pyx in which they are enclosed is a thick square slab of stone into which boxlike chambers (usually nine) have been cut, the whole being a miniature model of the universe as described in ancient Buddhist and Brahminic texts. As the dagoba is made of solid brick, these enclosed treasures are considered art never again to be seen by the eye.

The first sculptural images carved to remind monks of the Buddha were pairs of footprints cut shallowly into stone at the monks' retreats. As dagobas evolved into their present form, these pairs of footprints came to be included in the overall iconography of the shrine. Sometimes they are carved into the lowest tier of the pesavalalu; most often they are set into the immense flat plain of stone slabs which serves as an ambulatory for multitudes of the faithful during poya and other religious festivals. Along the slab-cut stone walkway circling the Ruwanweli Seya in Anuradhapura one finds several of these abstracted footprints, completely unadorned by any texture but the plain surface of cut stone. It is a breathtaking experience to stand atop one of these and realize your footprints have been added to those of visiting pilgrims who walked here as far back 130

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as 2,200 years ago. Sri Lanka is full of reminders that there is a single invisible thread binding the past with the present and the future, in which every human being is part of a continuity.

Over time statuary began to be carved. The first were simple, unadorned images of the Buddha seated in meditation — a reminder that he had achieved Enlightenment seated in meditation under the Bodhi tree near Gaya, about two hundred miles from Varanasi (the Anglicized name is Benares) in India. Some of these early carvings of the Buddha in seated samadhi meditation bring tears to one's eyes with their depiction of serenity combined with beauty.

Most of the ancient statues were rather small — three to five feet tall. Virtually from the beginning they depicted mudras — positions of the hands which indicated a particular meaning. The dhyana mudra with both hands crossed in the lap is most often used to indicate samadhi meditation; one famed samadhi statue in Anuradhapura is so serene it comforted Jawaharlal Nehru for seventeen years during his imprisonment by the British.

An often-used mudra is vitarka (teaching or discourse): the right hand is upraised and the thumb and forefinger encircled, with the other three fingers pointing straight up — signifying "Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha". Another mudra is abhaya: one hand is raised palm out, signifying "peace" (some interpret this mudra as meaning "fear not").

Two mudras are used only with seated Buddhas. Bhumisparsha ("earth-touching") has the back of the hand facing the viewer with the fingers touching the ground; this is reputed to have been used by the Buddha while being tormented by the demon Mara as he was seated beneath the Bodhi tree prior to Enlightenment. In this mudra the future Buddha calls upon the Earth to witness that he has met the requirements for Buddhahood; at this, Mara's troupe of demons and temptress daughters went away. The varada ("wish-granting") mudra rests the Buddha's right hand on his knee with the palm facing the viewer; it may be interpreted as a gesture of blessing.

The next innovation was the standing Buddha, at first about human size, carved of stone or built up from brick. Most often these depict the vitarka and abhaya mudras, but there are five known examples of an unexplained mudra in which the Buddha's arms are 131

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crossed over one another on his chest. Some scholars believe this is simply the very human gesture meaning "the Buddha is tired."

The human-sized sculptures were free-standing, but then kings and monks began to colossalize them by cutting larger and larger versions out of the solid rock of cliff faces. Soon they reached forty feet or more in height, often with absolutely exquisite modeling of the Buddha's robe.

The image at Aukana in north-central Sri Lanka is a study in the beauty and the iconography of the colossal standing Buddha. The image is 42-1/2 feet high and was carved in the fifth century A.D. "Aukana" means "to eat the sun", and the statue faces due east. The statue seems to have been carved at the same time the great Kalawewa Reservoir was being built by King Dhatusena, perhaps as a permanent protector of his great reservoir. Consider for a moment what combination of religious sophistication and stonecutting skills it took to carve a free-standing 42-1/2 foot statue with exquisitely flowing robes out of solid rock in the middle to late 400s — the same era when Rome fell, Christianity was being riven with schisms, and Northern Europe was still semi-barbaric.

It is carved in the "thrice-bent" pose, meaning that one shoulder is cocked a little higher than the other, the waist is bent slightly to one side, and one leg is relaxed and a bit bent at the knee while the other is upright. Many large outdoor Buddhas are carved this way, in part so to indicate a sense of relaxation, but also for the purely practical reason that the flow of rains would be more even down the body and wear the stone uniformly. The rains that drip from the nose fall precisely between the Buddha's feet. In the Aukana statue, the Buddha's right hand is raised in the abhaya mudra, and the left curled in toward the body. Some say this gesture means, "comes from within"; others aver he is merely holding his robe. Surmounting the head is a five-petalled flower called the sarispota, which symbolizes the panca bala or Five Powers of confidence, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom.

The next development was the reclining Buddha. This form lends itself well to colossal sizes. Some are indeed immense. The largest, at Polonnaruwa, is 46 feet long and carved from a serpentine schist whose striations make it look like a gigantic marble cake shaped of 132

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spun crystals. The statue's feet are parallel, and there is a look of utter serenity on the face, which indicates he is meditating in repose. If a reclining Buddha's feet are slightly offset it symbolizes the moment of the Buddha's passage into parinibbana. Life is as impermanent as the position of the Buddha's feet.

Not all locations possessed such marvelous expanses of unfissured stone, so reclining (and some large standing) Buddhas were often made by mortaring piles of brick into the rough shape of the eventual Buddha, plastering it thickly in six to ten applications, carving the plaster to the exact shape, and finally, painting it.

An ancient canon called the Sariputra, specifies the exact proportions to be used in scaling a Buddha statue up or down. The name of this canon means "Instructions for Image Makers" in Sanskrit. The original dates from the Fifth Century A.D. but probably preserves a far older oral tradition. It was used rigorously in Sri Lanka up until the late 1900s and prescribes the following: The height of the face shall be the height of three noses, with the nose in the center.

The neck shall be the same length as the hair from forehead to crown.

The length, standing or reclining, shall be the length of nine faces.

The trunk shall be the length of three faces.

The thigh and the shank shall each be two faces.

There is a charming but unverified legend that these proportions arose when a disciple of the Buddha, wishing to make an image of him, could not do so very accurately. The Buddha told him to trace his shadow on the ground and use that.

Early statues have a "Bump of Wisdom" at the top of Buddha's crown, which is said to symbolize the thatch of hair remaining after he sheared his own locks at the Great Renunciation when he left his princely life behind and went into the world searching for wisdom.

By the time of the Aukana colossus this had become a five-petalled siraspota flower.

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For some reason the people in southern Sri Lanka have taken the most liberties with Buddhist imagery; some begin to resemble comic books. In the popular statuary there the sarispota has evolved into a stylized flame spirally painted in the five colors of the Buddha's aureole. Tourists liken it to a multihued ice-cream cone.

In Sri Lanka, Buddhist iconography adapted modest amounts of imagery based on local deities, Hindu, Mahayana, and some Tantric motifs into temple architecture. But by and large its complexity tended to develop more along the lines of increasingly complex artistic embellishment as motifs were added by one era of artists onto the ideas of the preceding generation. The Christian parallel is the difference between a totally unadorned twelfth century Carthusian chapel and Westminster Abbey.

The visual richness of Buddhist art reached its apogee in the rock caves at Dambulla, in the center of Sri Lanka. With over 360 statues of the Buddha and 11,000 square feet of painted wall and ceiling, it makes the Sistine Chapel look like a mere sketch. The painted images on the ceiling alone number into the thousands, and the walls add many many more. Every possible manifestation of Buddhist iconography is represented. As Dambulla represents a single line of Buddhist iconography from the First Century B.C. through the Eighteenth Century, and depicts every known manifestation of iconography, it is an absolute must-see for anyone visiting Sri Lanka today.

As Buddhist art became more complex, so also did the conventions surrounding its creation. One rule which seems to have arisen in the nineteenth century was that painting the Buddha's eyes — a ritual named Netra Mangalaya — was the last act in decorating a new image, and there was a special pirit (chanting a cycle of phrases from the Dhamma) that accompanied the act. What's more, certain artists specialized in the task, and they alone must be employed.

Hence, when Sarath told me that a Buddha image was to have its eyes painted at the Makandura Vihara near Negombo, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

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I awoke spontaneously at four-thirty. The room was so dark I could see the glowing hands on my wristwatch at arm's length. I got dressed as quietly as I could and made my way past the dog, growling so lowly I knew he was terrified that I might growl back.

Out the door, down the path, onto the road bordered with paddies on one side and a lotus-filled lake on the other. Above, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn were strung along the ecliptic from Taurus through Virgo. The Southern Cross was up, forty degrees south of Scorpio, and near it the faint glow of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster of a quarter-million stars each brighter than the sun yet so faint with distance I couldn't see it by looking directly but instead had to glimpse it from the corners of my eyes.

Looming in faint whites amid the dawn-still air and a luminophorescent horizon-low moon, the vihara was Buddhism at its most mystic. The temple complex grounds were spacious even by the standards of the generous rural Buddhist faithful. A large three-tiered arch opened onto two acres of sandy promenade which felt deliciously cool on my bare feet in the predawn — although sensory tranquility probably takes a little more meditative will-power at noon in the middle of July.

Ahead was the image house, its great doors still closed. I could hear the bhikkhus stirring in the pansala (monks' quarters) behind, washing themselves, sneezing, speaking lowly. I wanted to find an inconspicuous place where I could observe yet not be a distracting center of attention when the people arrived. Light-skinned foreigners are rare enough in places like Makandura, but later the chief bhikkhu told me I was only the third foreigner ever to have visited his temple; the other two were scholars looking over the monks' collection of olaleaf manuscripts.

To the immediate right was the dagoba, the bosomy structure containing a relic of the Buddha. This dagoba was built in 1945 to commemorate the end of World War II. The Japanese had tried to take Sri Lanka but the British Navy based in Trincomalee drove them away, losing the aircraft carrier Hermes in the process. The funds came from a wealthy widow who, just before her death, had all her jewels demounted from their gold and the gold melted down into a statue of 135

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the Buddha. This went into the central relic chamber of the dagoba.

The jewels paid for its construction.

Dagobas always contain such valuables — and often a relic of the Buddha or holy man as well. They are constructed of solid brick which is then plastered into a smooth dome. The Makandura dagoba was thirty feet high and fifteen feet around at the base, built atop a four-foot-thick twenty-foot-in-diameter octagonal foundation decorated with elephant heads with their tusks facing out, and a frieze of cherub-like spirit figures holding up a plinth of plaster lotus blossoms whose petals curved up and out as they tapered to a tip.

The relic chamber sealed forever inside was a metal box about a foot on each side painted with images of the Buddha. One need not see them to know the images are there, any more than, upon seeing a white feather floating on the water, one need see the egret to know that it has been there.

This dagoba was a mere thirty feet high. The great solid dagobas of Anuradhapura built 2,000 to 1,500 years ago are 300 feet in diameter and 400 feet high — the third and fourth largest solid structures on earth after the first two pyramids at Giza.

Next to the dagoba was the sacred Bodhi tree, this one at least 100 years old, shading an area a quarter of the size of a football field. It was planted as a cutting from the Bodhi tree at Anuradhapura, which is itself nearly 2,200 years old, and was grown from a cutting of the original Bodhi tree under which the Buddha achieved Enlightenment three centuries before that.

In front of the tree was a small vihara veneration shrine with a two-foot pure white seated Buddha behind glass-panelled doors.

Ironically, in every temple I have ever visited, the tiny shrine before the Bodhi tree attracts more worshippers than the profusely decorated "image house" — a much larger building which contains at a minimum images of the Buddha in the meditation, standing, and reclining forms. At Makandura there is also an eighty-foot-long ambulatory with dozens of life-size statues illustrating events in the Buddha's life, plus wall paintings depicting lotuses by the hundreds and even more imagery from Buddhist legends. The overall effect reminded me of what the Church of Notre Dame in Poitiers must have looked like at the height of its glory in the thirteenth century.

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Given the profusion of imagery in the image house I could understand why most people choose to worship before the small vihara under the Bodhi tree. For the same reason, in every Catholic church in Europe, there are more candles in the side chapels than at the main altar.

Then they rise to place jasmine and lotus flowers inside the glass doors, and light a lamp made of a little earthen saucer with a wick out one end, filled with coconut oil. Then they recite phrases from the Dhamma. Meditating near one of these little viharas, especially on poya day when billowing clouds of incense float out of the tiny enclosure along with the coconut-oil scent, is olfactory heaven.

Surrounding the base of this particular Bodhi tree was a square enclosure containing twenty-eight identical Buddha statues, all painted pure white except for the pupils of the eyes. Each was seated in samadhi meditation inside individual glass-fronted shrines. These miniature viharas have been donated by the villagers over the years since the dagoba was built.

The builders thought out the square enclosure so well that rain falling on its roof drains into a funnel connected to a pipe perforated with holes which runs directly beneath the periphery of the square of shrines, thus returning the rain to its intended recipient, the Bodhi tree. I thought of the great webwork of rice-watering tanks and irrigation flumes spread by the thousands all across Sri Lanka and the country's 2,000-year history of water management, and realized that here in this rain diverter at Makandura is life in Sri Lanka as described by the proverb, "As the great is small the small is great."

The stars were beginning to fade although there was not yet the loom of light that hinted the day. People arrived in ones and twos. Soon, without it quite seeming to happen, there was a crowd of dozens.

Streamers bearing Buddha flags and foot-long strips of yellow raffia radiated from the entrance of the assembly hall out to every tree in the garden. The entrance to the still-locked image house was decorated with arches of palm frond lashed to posts of bamboo. The fronds hung down like a raffia bridal veil.

Everyone wore white — saris for the women, skirts and socks for the girls, shorts for the boys, and for the men sarongs surmounted by 137

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a cape that looked like the fondest dream of an archbishop. Seventyfive percent of the people were women and girls, and of the males, not one was a teenager.

Now, as the first birds began to sing, there came from the refectory the long low opening chant of homage to the Buddha: Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma-Sambuddhassa.

Homage to Him, the Blessed One, the Worthy One, the Fully Enlightened One. Buddham saranam gacchami.

Dhammam saranam gacchami.

Sangham saranam gacchami.

To the Buddha I go for refuge. To the Sangha I go for refuge.

Then the Five Precepts for the guidance of the laity: Panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami.

Adinnadana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami.

Kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami.

Musavada veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami.

Sura-meraya-majja-pamadatthana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami.

I undertake the rule to abstain from killing.

I undertake the rule to abstain from taking what is not given.

I undertake the rule to abstain from wrong conduct in sexual desires.

I undertake the rule to abstain from false speech.

I undertake the rule to abstain from intoxicants.

Then the Ten Precepts for the guidance of novice monks, of which the first five are as above — except for the third rule, which is changed to complete celibacy — followed by: 138

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I undertake the rule to abstain from eating beyond the time.* I undertake the rule to abstain from dancing, singing, music, and seeing entertainments.

I undertake the rule to abstain from wearing garlands, smartening with perfumes, and beautifying with cosmetics.

I undertake the rule to abstain from high seats and luxurious beds.

I undertake the rule to abstain from accepting gold and silver.** * Bhikkhus traditionally eat one or two meals a day, which must be completed before noon. ** Bhikkhus cannot receive monetary alms personally, but in the present day they may be given small amounts of money by their supporters for personal needs.

They chanted the Homage to the Triple Gem, the Flower Offering, the Offering of Light, the Offering of Perfume, the Offering of Incense, Recitation at the Bodhi Tree, Homage to the Three Symbols, and the Dedication of Good Kamma: May beings who dwell in space, on Earth, Devas and Nagas of wondrous delight, Rejoice now with this merit made, And long protect the Teaching.

Thence through the Recollection of the Unattractiveness of the Body, the Recollection of Death, the Recollection on No-Self, and the Recollection on Loving Kindness: May I be free of enmity.

May I be free from hurtfulness.

May I be free of troubles of mind and body.

May I be able to protect my happiness.

Whatever beings there are, 139

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May they be free from enmity.

May they be free from hurtfulness.

May they be free from troubles of mind and body.

May they be able to protect their happiness.

Whatever beings there are They are the owners of their kamma, Heirs to their kamma, Born of their kamma, Related to their kamma, Abide and are supported by their kamma.

Whatever kamma they do, Whether good or evil, Of that they will be heirs.

Onward through the predawn, birds making lace in the sky above the slow wave of the bhikkhu's pirit of the Recollection on Equanimity, the Mindfulness of Breathing, the Recollecting the Ten Perfecting Qualities, the Recollection of Dependent Origination, the Peaceful Victory Verses, the Discourse on Blessings, the Discourse on Jewels, the Discourse on Loving Kindness, and finally, in a long exhaling sigh like our last breath on Earth: Sabbe Satta Sukhita Hontu!

May All Beings Be Happy!

The image house bell rang thrice as its great carved wooden doors opened. Coconut oil lamps flickered dimly inside and I could see faintly the red robes of the great reclining Buddha within.

A woman unwrapped a paper that covered a dish full of sweet cakes made with rice and coconut milk and went to the bo tree vihara to offer them to the Buddha. She opened the vihara doors and lay the food before the statue, then lit an incense stick and stuck it in a sandfilled cup. A little dog navigated the cloth canyons above him, bewildered by all the activity. Women knelt in the sand, lifted their 140

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hands to their foreheads in the anjali, then sat sidesaddle-style so their feet would not point at anyone and render them unclean. The older ones had swept their hair straight back into a tight bun; the girls wore long braids.

A man emerged from the image house with a cloth-covered tray.

He walked among the people, who reached out to touch its edge with their fingertips. The peace after the end of the chants was replaced by crows, songbirds, nightingales, distant roosters.

Then an elderly bhikkhu stood before the image house entrance in his robes the color of yellow mixed with orange. He uttered a few words and the people responded like altar boys at a mass. The invocation was the reverse of our lilted uplift at the end of a phrase; he began with a low first syllable then rose into the monotone of the rest of the phrase. Sounds of leaves trembled from the Bodhi tree.

Three cormorants thrust up in their steep climb of flight, wings whistling furiously and their necks craned out. The bhikkhu then turned to the opened image house doors and shouted "Sabbe Satta Sukhita Hontu!" — May All Beings Be Happy!

With that, the newly-painted but eyeless Buddha, about four feet tall and made of plaster, was borne out from the image house on a platform resting on the shoulders of six of the temple's laymen.

Carefully they lowered it to the ground facing the assembled audience, which by now numbered in the hundreds.

At this, a man, who had hitherto been totally anonymous within the crowd, rose, went to the Buddha, prostrated himself before the statue, turned and sat facing the crowd. The man who had come from the image house came and knelt alongside him, holding on the tray the cloth everyone in the crowd had touched. The bhikkhu came before them and placed a bowl filled with milk and a tray with betel leaf and ash in front of the two.

The artist, still facing the crowd with his back to the Buddha, drew a small box from under his robes, and then a mirror. From the box he took an artist's paintbrush and a small pot of black paint.

Then, holding the mirror and painting over his shoulder because it would be presumptuous to gaze directly on the Buddha while creating his eyes, with half a dozen strokes each he painted the Buddha's eyes.

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Immediately the other man placed the cloth over the artist's head so his face was hidden from view.

The artist said some phrases I couldn't hear, then leaned forward and washed his face in the milk and rubbed his eyes with the betel leaf and ash. Only then, thus purified, did he lift the cloth away and look upon the crowd.

I looked at the Buddha's eyes. It was uncanny — the artist had managed to capture perfectly the serenity of looking into eternity without a worldly thing distracting the vision, in twelve strokes with a paintbrush. Now I knew why it was such a specialized profession.

The people sat quietly while the bhikkhu repeated the invocation,"Sabbe Satta Sukhita Hontu!" From the garden surrounding the vihara came jasmine and hibiscus and gardenia smells. Some women were so moved they dabbed their eyes dry with the hems of their saris.

Then the bhikkhu delivered a sermon facing them. Off to one side, beyond the crenellated concrete wall of the inner sanctuary, a little boy in a white shirt and blue shorts looked on, afraid to come in because he was late. The bhikkhu ended the sermon, rang the bell thrice, and the six laymen shouldered the platform and returned it to the image house. It disappeared within and the bell rang three times again. The crowd sat with their heads bowed in silent worship. From the Bodhi tree came the sharp kewing cry of the Seven Sisters, and beyond them the fields were alive with the caws of crows.

The bell rang again, only once this time. The people bowed a last time, rose, greeted one other, smiled, began to talk excitedly. Some laughed. Children looked out from behind their mothers' saris. They all moved toward the assembly hall for the ritual feast.

The ritual feast was the one enjoyed at all special temple events; if in the morning the feast is called heeldane, and if before noon, davaldane.

The man who had placed the towel over the artist's head now used it to wash the feet of the temple's thera and the other two bhikkhus in residence. A casket of the temple's most precious relics was brought from the monks' living quarters (which doubled as the treasury house) on the head of a layman. It was blessed, then placed on a dais at the head of the hall on a simple white cloth. The casket was offered 142

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Buddha puja, a small portion of the foods everyone was about to enjoy, plus narcissus, frangipani, hibiscus, marigold, gardenia, gentian — more colors than even the Buddha's five. The hall smelled of cumin, ginger, garlic, coriander, nutmeg, and the oddly musky rice travelers find only in Sri Lanka.

The monks sat on low seats, also covered with a white cloth. The thera dedicated the food to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha with a ritual formula named Sanghika Karanava. They began. The first food was offered to the thera and his bhikkhus. Then curries were served to the monks on plates; the people ate theirs from packets made of banana leaves which, moist from the heat and steam of the food, now acted as smooth plates. Everyone ate with their fingers, mixing all the ingredients into a mass. Then came the sweets, the fruit, the pudding and buffalo milk yoghurt called curd.

The final event was the presenting of gifts to the thera and his bhikkhus. The thera received an atapirikara, a wrapped package which is given to a young monk upon ordination — no other gifts are allowed. The package looked like a pillow surmounted by a helmet, wrapped all around with brown paper and tied with string. It contained three sets of robes, a sash, a begging bowl, a razor, a needle, thread, and a water strainer.

The other monks received a new robe and small gifts of use to them. One of the bhikkhus had broken the thermos he used to take water with him on his rounds to instruct the pansala's children; he received a new one. Another received a special pillow to support his aging back as he read before retiring. They received toothpaste, soap, milk powder, sweet cakes, and other foods that wouldn't spoil. All these were given, each by each, by people as they finished eating and made ready to depart.

At the end the thera gave a short sermon on the dana, the practice of almsgiving. He conferred blessings on each mother and each head of the extended family — great uncles and grandfathers and cousins of in-laws' sisters. Whomever the most senior. It is surprising how often Sri Lankans refer to someone not by their name but by their family relationship to the speaker ("My brother's wife's sister said....").

It was 8:00 A.M. The sun was already warm on the paddies surrounding on all sides. The people were beginning to get anxious to 143

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be on with their day. It was the middle of the growing season. They had to weed the paddies today. They would throw the weeds off to the edge, where children would collect them into rough-woven sacks, to be taken home that night for the cows. Sky-high and cloud perfect, a flock of birds winged out from the eaves of the image house into the day of thin blue.

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Sacred River The Buddha's left eyetooth is the central icon of Theravada Buddhism all over Asia. The Tooth's symbolism is at once so complex and apocryphal, mystical and earthly, as to defy interpretation. It unites spirit and faith, kingdom and people, and the Buddha and time, into one single thing.

The Tooth resides at Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy. Dalada means "tooth" and Maligawa means "palace". The monks at Sri Dalada Maligawa guard it rigorously. The Tooth itself is rarely shown to the public, at most for a few days at a time, and then only for a few hours each day. Most of the time, all the public sees is the outermost of the Tooth's seven dagoba-shaped gold chambers. This outermost dagoba is swathed in gold chains encrusted with jewels. The entire assemblage may be viewed only from outside its glass-enclosed reliquary chamber, alongside which, standing protectively, are two burly monks.

One those occasions when the Tooth itself is publicly shown, it is an occasion of great veneration by Buddhists all over Asia. The Tooth went on public display between March First and Tenth, 1991, between 12:30 and 5:00 P.M., to celebrate the 400th anniversary of its arrival in Kandy.

***** During the hot sunny days of the beginning of March, the river began. Like all rivers, it began with rain. The rain fell in thousands of human droplets, droplets of the belief which is willing suspension of disbelief, falling toward the mountain kingdom river of Sri Dalada Maligawa, next to Lake Kandy.

The myriad-peopled rain fell hardly noticed among the streams and eddies and currents of the avenues and markets and side streets 145

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of Kandy, the shop owners and hawkers and women in saris, the workmen in knotted sarongs sweating under the equatorial sear of the sun, the butterflies and kingfishers and ravens in the trees bordering the lake, the dappled uplifted vowels of querying children, the twootles from the horns of the ice-cream sellers, reedy hwonks from the purveyors of wood flutes, expostulatory claims of candy vendors.

By the tens of thousands the droplets fell. They slid in from the Buddha cloud of Asia, pirouetting toward the Katunayake Airport runway so serenely that to them there might as well have not existed an Earth below, lost as they were into the wonder of their descent through sunset golds and gossamer cloud tops and the turns and sideslips and chandelles of their air-controller descent until suddenly they were over great forests of coconut palms being guided by a pilot into the touch of wheels onto a piece of concrete two kilometers long.

Air Lanka, Thai Airways, Air Malaysia, Garuda the sacred bird of Indonesia, Maldives International, Indian Airlines, KAL, JAL, KLM, Pakistan International, Royal Nepal, Swissair—arriving on carriers any travel agent would be in ticket-writing paradise to book if only he or she wasn't stuck with package tour contracts with their brochures of the hired models lazing by the poolside at the four-star hotel which specializes in Spaghetti Bolognese and cheeseburgers next to the chlorinated swimming pool a hundred yards from a sapphire blue fish-filled coral-floored Indian Ocean that doesn't end until it reaches Antarctica.

Thus the rain came to Kandy, composed of a myriad colors of skin and a thousand colors of cloth. Their Sacred River flowed toward Sri Dalada Maligawa in three streams.

The first, the longest, and the most beauteous, started at the far end of Lake Kandy, where a concrete berm separates a pond of lotuses whose ripple-less waters lie a few feet above the lake itself.

The berm rivulets its excess flow through a few troughs cut into a concrete causeway which doubles as the preferred shortcut for workers on their way to their jobs at the Hotel Suisse or the Malwatta Temple or the Young Men's Buddhist Association or the thousands of downtown shops in Kandy. The River here wasn't yet of people, it 146

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was the catchbasin for the vendors' vehicles. Out on a flat field at the north end of the lake, in a special area cordoned off and guarded all day by police, was Maringham the Flute Maker's pathetically dented Toyota which testified to (a) a lot of visits to careless farming fairs, and (b) a lot of arrack on the way. Near him were the unadorned jeeps and Mitsubishis and Hiaces of the balloon men and the coconut sellers and the mango hawkers—unadorned because no itinerant seller desires to announce his auto's contents to the slinky soil-eyed lockpickers who habituate parking lots at farmers' fairs and religious gatherings.

To the south of this watershed of vendors, the North River had already formed the night before, on the west shore of Lake Kandy, where pilgrims had camped overnight, sleeping on the cold concrete that fronts the old Queen's Bath House which is now a cultural center.

In the dim light of predawn, before the birds have begun to sing, they look like dozens of limpets wrapped in blankets. They wanted to be first in line, and they are.

Now, as the middle-bright stars fade into the pale gray of predawn and the first crows began to call, the tour buses begin to arrive, drop off their passengers, then return to the special parking row reserved for them above the Buddhist Publication Society offices at the north end of the lake. Later, by nine in the morning, dozens of them will be lined up in a curving row like an immense freshly painted blue and green and white and red and lemon-hued snake with a thousand different letterforms for scales.

The new arrivals dutifully queue behind the now-awake overnighters. Even in the brightening light—all stars but Antares in Scorpio and Vega in Lyra and the planets have now disappeared— one can see the emerging brilliant colors of the saris. Clearly, this is an occasion for wearing one's best. The basic cyans, magentas, and yellows are almost always overprinted with florals. They are but pastels in the predawn now, half hue upon half hue upon half hue, but just wait until the direct overhead brilliant pure white sun of noon. By then the North River will stretch a mile, a stream of color so varied and brilliant under the too-bright sky that a walk along it sends the retina into such ecstatic shock it is soon grateful for the 147

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calm greens of the giant trees bordering the lake above the people stream numbering now into the thousands.

Dawn comes. After the far dim pastels of predawn, the quivering starlight to faint traceries of blue to the gray of the stars' deaths to the peach of cloud tops to the azure of the horizon, thence to the orange and apricot of just before sunrise against the distant hilltop paintbrush of trees, finally the sun comes, a blinding bright glimpse of the being which says, "Come warm with me." Zephyrs nudge paper scraps and wisps of hair, faint messangers of the afternoon breezes which will coat this dawn's beauty with dust as subtly and unnoticed as the way myths wear their needles thin sewing gods from humans.

Children whine and laugh in approximately equal portions.

Adults wait patiently. The temple doors will not open until 12:30.

Nearly everyone has brought a breakfast wrapped with string in newspapers which they now unfold and flatten on the ground.

Inside, rice and curry with various condiments lay on beds of plastic wrap of the type grocers use to hold heavier items like tinned fish.

They eat with their fingers, mooshing the food together so it is an even blend, then consuming the morsels from their first four fingers.

They eat seated on newspapers or plastic sheets sold by already hoarse vendors, seated around the trees where the shade is the best, seated amid the purple horn-shaped morning glories. They shoo away the chameleons patiently awaiting what is left over, and they carefully avoid the lines of ants which form their own river from anthill to whatever food source ants seem instinctively to find in their inch-wide world.

Then the breakfasters unscrew the tops from thermoses and pour hot water into little plastic bowls, rub their fingers together until clean, and shake them dry. Mothers breast-feed their little ones, gracefully curving their osaris around their necks and over the nuzzling child to provide some modesty to the occasion. The osari or "sari fall", the long strip of the sari's end which ordinarily goes over the left shoulder then falls to the ground from which it wafts beautifully in the wind, beauty which is not for beauty alone.

A flock of cormorants clusters in a tree, one or another jostling for position. A few egrets wing low over the water with their legs 148

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stretched out behind them as graceful as a burin furrowing copper when in the hands of a good engraver. A line of gladioli blooms a ruby wave of hue, on top of which dragonflies whisk down on their almost invisible wings. How can anything biological, be it a dragonfly wing or jellyfish—be transparent? What blood flows therein? And what other living things are even further transparent, so we do not even suspect their existence?

There is little to do until the gates of the Dalada Maligawa open hours hence, so they play board games, watch the pelicans on the lake, meditate, laugh, gossip, read comic books, drink Fantas and Elephant Brand Lime Crush, sing. Even before the loudspeakers open up with their salvos of history lessons and invocations from the dhamma, the North River has begun to sing. Not the lilting, rhythmic, Sri Lankan handclap songs of love and life and the harvest, but the rhythmless gliding sounds of faith's vocal ballet, sung in panpipe-sound voices as specific to the song's occasion as the giggles of children gobbling treats. Songs making permanence out of an impermanent world, the sight of flower petals, dewdrops, dragonfly wings, the indigo of the iris, the leaf dying inward from its edge, ribbons falling behind during the play of a child, a husband whose cough is growing worse, a distant golden cloud with no discernible dangers yet which will be filled with lightning by dusk. As long as there is Lankan song, there will be no Lankan death. Life must end to begin, love must give to get, and the music of these is like water slipping over smooth stones. It's as if Mahler painted his Fourth Symphony across the sky and called it the weather.

The South River begins on the embankment at the lower end of Lake Kandy, where there is a thick dam with a wide road and walkways on top, which harkens to the 2,200-year-old hydraulic engineering genius of the Lankan people. The dam is so thick and its slope angled at such a gradient that no matter how high the water's rise or how violent the storm, it will hold.

Resting with their backs against the sawtoothed parapet wall which is Lake Kandy's most distinguished adornment, the mango sellers started before dawn by peeling and slicing their fruits with machetes and mixing pots of red and yellow curry, each with its own 149

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respective tang of fruit and fire. They will dip the mango slices into whichever color of pot the customer prefers. The yellow powder is a mild mix of the owner's closely guarded curry recipe plus tamarind and turmeric, which aside from its flavor has the additional virtue of lending a nice color to the lips. The red is a mash of pure chili with an explosive fire any supernova would envy.

The mango sellers are up so early because they must turn hundreds of long, flat, red chilis into paste and have the mash lurking in the pot before the first customers arrive. They grind the chilis on a flat stone plate using a ten-pound handleless stone roller that a fledgling M.A. candidate in Anthropology might send home to his professor in the misguided belief that he has discovered an artifact from the Late Neolithic Period. In fact, chili mashers may be bought from itinerant hawkers all over Sri Lanka at two hundred rupees (five dollars) for both roller and plate.

Even before dawn, as the blue of the sky thickens out of the pastels of rose and orange above the heaven-high cirrus which is the weeks-away precursor of the monsoon, under this ink touched with blue and green the ice cream sellers have already shouldered their painted boxes with the names of their wares on the side—"Fruit-Nut, Rum-Raisin, Mango, Pineapple, Papaya." The ice-cream business is slow at dawn, but the vendors know where they want to be at 8:30 A.M., when the heat ascends into the nineties like a young duck ascends out of a small pond. One vendor has his eye on the shady spot under the giant shady ficus tree where the traffic police will halt and then herd people across the Anagarika Dharmapala Mawatha—a street named after a revered Buddhist revivalist from the last part of the last century.

Another ice cream box sways its way toward the shaded pavement where the India-manufactured TATA buses and Japanese minivans disgorge passengers on the south shore of Lake Kandy, where people wishing to continue onward will be waiting passively in line.

But the most astute of all the ice cream sellers want to be near the lotus and jasmine sellers' stands lined up like clapboard reliquaries on the esplanade before the Dalada Maligawa. There the pilgrims buy lotus blossoms freshly pried by a small knife from a bud into a flower 150

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offering. Lord knows what bakshish their owners must pay for the license to run those stands—along with the understanding there will be no further permits issued—but there are only fourteen of them and Sri Lanka is a petty monopolists' paradise.

The ice-cream vendors advertise by tootling little rubber-bulbed horns of the type used on bicycles. The light concerto of a dozen of these at noon on a hot day conveys the impression of a traffic jam on a bicycle path in Holland.

The soft-drink sellers, on the other hand, advertise xylophone style, raking their bottle openers against the sides of their windrows of Fanta and Sprite and Club Soda lined up by the crateful in the shadeless sun and proclaimed by scrawled signs with the words "Cool Drinks" in Sinhala and English.

The sleazy jewelry sellers somehow manage to nasalize the beautiful Sinhala word for "bracelet"—walaulu—into a linguistic porridge that comes out "bzllaloo." Their wares were about as trustworthy as their pronunciation, although you'd never guess that by the prices they quote.

Downstream on this river, to the south of the Queen's Bath, is the second group of overnighters. These are mostly men, as the other group is mostly women. Perhaps a common understanding, since the concrete walkway directly in front of the Queen's Bath where the women sleep is in a low-lying windless and semiprivate cul de sac, while the men to the south of them sleep on the walkway alongside Lake Kandy in the direct wind and beneath thousands of crows which rest overnight in the trees and leave before dawn to wing north to the rice paddies to the other side of the Mahaweli River two miles to the north.

Unlike those in the cul de sac, who slept under light blankets, the men here slept on sheets of plastic. They used ultra-long sarongs to completely envelop themselves, head to toe and then some. As each man awakes, he doubles the sarong over into a garment of normal length, wraps it around his waist using a double fold and a thick knot, puts on a shirt taken from a knapsack that also served as his pillow, and is ready for the day.

Here, too, a river of people waits. They are attracted by the shade of the giant trees bordering the lake and the beautiful view of Harem 151

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Island, where Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, the last king of Kandy, kept his consorts. That was in 1807. The British came in 1815 and turned it into a munitions depot. Today it is a flower-floored, palm-skied haven for both the eye and the cormorants.

The lake is filled with schools of fish and six-foot monitor lizards patrolling the banks for insects and frogs. The Lake's three resident pelicans—giants even by pelican standards—dive from overhanging tree limbs straight into the water with their wings folded back, to emerge with a gulp in which a fishtail disappears so quickly that you hardly have a chance to see it. However, judging from the size of those pelicans the fishtails are no illusion.

Most of the people in the South River are more interested in the excitement of downtown Kandy than the pelicans. Downtown Kandy, where there is an endless supply of visual attractions to occupy the hours: an exuberant variety of trucks and buses and cars and mopeds and bicycles coming down the road from Katugastota and points north cheerfully ignoring the signs that say "Drive Dead Slow" nailed to every other tree; careening two-person-one-driver Bajaj triwheel mini taxis that look like a cross between a rickshaw and a golf cart as interpreted by a suburban teenager; the fussy architecture and colonial pomp of the Queen's Hotel, wherein one can hear the most tedious conversations in all of Kandy ("I'm into real estate, myself...." "...Texas! Y'all from Texas!?..."); an influx of beggars the likes of which Kandy hasn't seen in years; traffic police randomly stopping cars and checking documents; tourists wandering around wondering why all these people are lined up; frowning mothers towing frowning children; and of course the mango sellers, pineapple sellers, candy sellers, balloon sellers, palm readers, horoscope casters, and sniggering teenagers who aren't about to be part of any of this. The lumpy clatter of a cart with a segment missing from one of its wheels announces the arrival of "Nandy" Nandasena, the Candy Seller, extolling in a wheezy voice his wares of coarse sugar cubes in various flavors, sesame seed snacks glutinous enough to double as denture paste, and jaggery, a crystallized coconut juice that tastes like rumflavored sugar and is hard enough to chip teeth.

A Western woman tourist arrives wearing a halter and shorts. For a moment she stands out garishly in the line of demure sari-clad Sri 152

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Lankans. But she has done her homework and now pulls a batik sarong from her handbag and fastens it around her waist with a tuck and a knot. She turns instantly from just another tasteless leggy foreigner into someone different enough to inspire one to inquire how she came to know of this event.

The chastely clad Sri Lankan women lined up by dozens, with their black hair flowing free or braided down to their waist and knotted there with colored ribbons, are gems in the two confluences which now meet each other at the traffic crossing in front of the Queen's Bath. They are on the Lake Kandy side of the Dalada Veediya. The Dalada Maligawa is across the street—a street they must cross in parallel rows at the signal of a traffic policeman whose job is in part to make certain neither line gets the better of the other. He has the most unenviable job of the day, for not only must he regulate the flow of these two streams across the Mawatha, halting everyone when the lines into the temple clog up, he also has to keep his eyes out for traffic from downtown Kandy, halt everyone to let the trucks and buses and cars pass, then regulate the people flow again. While the authorities have set up a detour for incoming vehicles, the only available byroad is too narrow for two-way traffic. So they gave this officer a whistle and left him regulate his own traffic. Buddhism, after all, is a way of mind in which people are expected to solve their own problems.

And too, the policeman has to keep his eye out for saffron-robed bhikkhus, for they have head of the line privileges. The policeman consoles himself with the fact that at least the monasteries with many bhikkhus and samaneras (novices) line themselves up in a neat row which makes it easier to file them across. It is an odd sight to see such a crossing, each bhikkhu with a slightly different color of robe ranging from saffron to orange to light brown, which from a distance looks like a decorator's daubs of different palettes of warm hues on a wall to see which one works best. The only difference is that these daubs all have shaven heads—freshly shaven for this occasion. One line crosses, arranged by age from the most venerable mahathera (aged at least eighty and probably the abbot) to the youngest samara who can't be more than ten. Families occasionally "donate" an excess child to the Sangha, which must come as quite a jolt to a ten-year-old.

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The West River is the least interesting of the three. It stretches along the esplanade down to Senanayake Veediya, and thence through the shop lined streets to the outer reaches of commercial Kandy leading from the city toward Katugastota. There were no overnighters, as this river's path is along the esplanade leading to the Dalada Maligawa— an unseemly place to wrap a blanket around oneself and sleep fitfully against a wall. Besides, the police would have any such disrespectful interloper out of there within two minutes.

It has all the external realities of the other two lines: A candy seller announces his wares by shaking a gourd filled with beans; elderly men in white shirts and neckties drape palmistry and horoscope charts over their arms and announce they also offer puzzle games for kids; donut sellers balance square glass-sided display cases on a towel wrapped around their heads; whistle vendors warble like parakeets free for the first time. There are pillow sellers and purveyors of used umbrellas. Nut and sweets sellers are as hyperactive as a flock of swallows after a storm. Balloon sellers dzzdzz on raspy kazoos.

The West River is widely considered the line-jumper's line, since it is so much closer to the Dalada entrance, there is no beautiful lakeside view, and most of the people have waited in the direct sun virtually from dawn. Indeed, at one point there comes a frantic whootle of tin whistles as eight "Salmodalada" volunteers (young people from high schools who have given their time to dispense emergency aid to those stricken by the conditions) come running at top speed, cot in hand, to where a woman has fainted in the heat and press of the crowd. In moments they carefully arrange her onto the cot and, whistles whootling again, run her to a shaded tent where nurses revive her and give her cool water mixed with Jeevanee, a mix of basic electrolytes and glucose. Though intended for cholera victims and infants with diarrhea, it works just as well for heat prostration.

Since the line hasn't yet started to move, in half an hour the woman is back in her old place, grimly stifling again to hold her place in line.

Not one person in the West River reads spiritual literature or sings a hymn, as though there are few gods to be derived from the city-bred line-jumping life, the tedium and annoyances, the things 154

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that go wrong, the jewelry-shop touts whose speech patterns bear a striking resemblance to those of a mad scientist, the monosyllable conversations of a marriage grown fitful, rucksack tourists whose primary concern is how cheaply they can get by, a spiritual tract writer's chronicles of holy men who never were, businessmen whose arrogance leads to a great deal of presence but not much of a future— in short, all the mixed messages about life centered on oneself.

Hence their reliance on ornament. Their colors are more vivid and varied than sunrise on a planet in the center of of an asterism that sees a thousand sunrises a day. Purple, gold, silver, cerise, blue, green, opal, pink. Malachite, colle, azurite, plomb, lapis, eggyolk, vermillion, amidon. Prints, solids, patterns of paisley. An elephant whose red and gold caprison is garnished with polished brass medallions. Toddler girls in pinks and flounces. The rolled-up sleeves of teenage boys.

Girls in brown skirts wearing red and white sashes that announce "Red Cross" in three languages. Two hues of red that proclaim the only difference between scarlet and crimson is the amount of black each contains. A brilliant sapphire sari with a chemise of pure white embroidered with harvest-hued rice sheaves. Green and yellow pleats, white polkadots on royal blue, a gold sari trimmed with lesser sheens of bronze and copper, a braid plaited to below the waist and tied there with an orange ribbon. Widows wearing pure white—the color of both mourning and pilgrimage. Red dresses with vestlets of black. Schoolgirls in crisply ironed pleated skirts and rounded collars and striped ties. A Nehru-style jacket whose sleeve ends, pocket tops, and lapel tips are edged in most a un-Nehru lavender velvet. Batik blouses on young girls whose boyfriends sport tee-shirts emblazoned "BOSS". A sari of red and white angled stripes with an osari of brilliant orange. A silver-embroidered silver-silk dress and a necklace of opalescent silver moonstones. A sari of printed orchids next to three policemen in khaki and guns.

Events, too, have colors. Young men tap their cigarettes on their knuckles. Women fill water jars at a public spout, alongside elephants giving themselves—and everyone nearby—a bath. A candy seller announces his wares with by shaking a gourd filled with beans. Men drape palmistry and horoscope charts over their arms and announce they also offer puzzle games for kids. Donut sellers balance their foot155

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square glass sided display cabinets on a towel wrapped around their heads. Whistle sellers burble their wares with sounds like a parakeet let loose for the first time. Pillow sellers also purvey used umbrellas.

Nut and sweets sellers sound like swallows at a blooming of gnats.

Slithering queues of crows kew across a teetering sky.

All three rivers wait before the great pastel yellow edifice of the Tooth for the door to open for them, but it is not yet the time.

***** On March 1, 1991, at 12:30 P.M. precise, the pastel yellow doors of Sri Dalada Maligawa opened and the river flowed forward. Joined at last of its confluences it swirled through the complex Lankan architecture of Sri Dalada Maligawa's silver-lined chambers, up stairs, past columns, around corners, past jewels and jade and gold and tribute the equal to, or exceeding, anything described in the Mahavamsa, until suddenly it appeared. The Sacred Tooth, the central icon of the Theravada faith, the single object whose very existence has been the adhesive of people and faith and royalty and rice; Lanka and Burma and Thailand and Asia; the strength and independence of the Sinhalese people and their Lankan land, for eighteen hundred years.

Each person had but a few seconds to view the Tooth. For this they had waited years just for the event to be announced, then weeks of preparations and travel and lodging, then up to twelve hours in the roaring heat of March in Kandy, for those few seconds.

The Tooth was six feet away with only a waist-high veil separating them, presided over by five bhikkhus under a goldcolumned embroidered canopy. The Tooth was in a dagoba-shaped glass bell about twelve inches in diameter and fifteen inches high, set on a gold and bejeweled base surmounted by an eight-inch gold stupa. Inside, the Tooth was encircled by a cloth-lined gold wire rising about eight inches from the base.

The Buddha's Tooth is one-and-a-quarter inches long, curved upward like a tusk, and a quarter inch in diameter at the base, tapering slightly to a rounded tip. The Portuguese claim they burned the real 156

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tooth in an elaborate ceremony in Goa in 1560. The Sangha maintains that the Portuguese were fooled by a fake and that the real tooth is encapsulated inside this artifact for its own protection. Those who know do not say, and those who say do not know.

In that sunny exiting river in March, a little leaf of a girl was carried by me, carried by the eddies and swirls of the sacred river cascading at last into the sea of the world. She was a in her mother's arms, bewondering the presence of this fabulous panoply of objects and colors and myriads of people. Her eyes were the dark opals that are the eyes of Sri Lankan children, children who entirely of themselves are a reason for the world to heed the message first written in Pali two millennia ago and recited without change today: May the rains fall in time, May the harvest be bountiful, May the world be prosperous, May the rulers be righteous.

But for her curious look at me, the little girl might have gone unnoticed amid the myriadness of the river, a river of people and rain and histories and pools, ideas and roar and fate and the sea, the spiderspeckled sunshafts of Lake Kandy beyond the temple, the now near-silent murmurs of people who've just witnessed the greatest event of their lives.

The leaf slid away from me, so langorous in her mother's arms there might as well have not existed an Earth beneath, flashing eyes of dark gossamer as she slipped away into the great flow of people.

She vanished there, mingling her brilliant eyes and cinnamon skin and three-tiered flounced dress into the roar of the sacred river.

Of what purpose is the leaf's budding in the spring, its uncurling in the sun, its yielding up of air to the life of the Earth, its gift of wonder over leafhoppers and ants, and one day its end? The leaf barely knows of its own existence, much less that of the splendid worlds of twig, branch, root, tree, copse, grove, forest, of continents filled with such forests, of seas which become continents from the gift 157

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of the leaf's muds, of the atmosphere of the Earth which is replenished by such seas, and thence in a single line to all life itself?

Of what is the leaf unless the river is forever?

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No Pause that Refreshes "I don't think I've ever spent such a special three hours in my life,” the woman before me said. Just special! The children! They were so sweet, and their little voices, they were just like chimes. Special little chimes!"

We were at the end of the paved road. Below, the dirt access tracks to the tea plantation fanned out among the horizontal contours of the tea ranges, and vertically down the steep gullies to the tea pickers' barracks-like "line rooms".

The woman was waiting for her driver. I had just arrived with Father V., a Tamil Jesuit priest wearing inconspicuous Western clothes and not a sarong. He was teaching me a few phrases in Tamil, comparing them with the words I knew in Sinhala.

The woman turned to regard the deep-flowing hills molded with the glossy deep green of tea plants, curve after curve high above us and deep into the valleys below where the forests and paddies began.

Oddly enough, for a birder's paradise like Sri Lanka, there was hardly a song to be heard, and most of those consisted of caws coming faintly uphill from the line rooms hidden from sight in the hollows and groves below. Later I learned that a tea plantation doesn't support a varied insect population.

"Just special! The manager had them sing for us. Twenty little girls and ten little boys. Just dolls! Dressed in white shirts and little red ties—the girls, too!"

It was nearing 6:00. The sun was low and Father V. and I were waiting for dusk. That was half an hour away, so we chatted while she waited for her driver to pick her up for the trip into Nuwara Eliya.

I inquired, "What time was this?"

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"Oh, I don't know exactly. I never wear my watch when I travel to places like this. I keep it in my pocket so the, well, you know, they won't get it. But I guess it was about noon or one o'clock."

"Gee," I said, "I wonder why they weren't in school at that hour?"

The question didn't have a chance to register, because around one of the tea rows came a group of twenty pickers, all women, ranging in age from teens to seventies. They wore vividly colored scarves wrapped like turbans over their heads. The ends draped over the sides of their heads and upper shoulders like an Arab kaafti. The rest of their garments consisted of a multicolored sari draped over both shoulders Indian style, a chemise that left the upper arms and midriffs bare, and a coarse, ragged, burlap sarong protecting the lower half of the sari from the sharp snags of the pruned tea branches. Many of the women’s noses were pierced on both sides at the base of the nostrils, through which they had attached gold pins in the shape of quarter-inch blossoms. That the blossoms were not lotuses coupled with the vivid colors of their saris marked them as Hindus.

"Oh, I must...I must get a picture of them!" the voice gushed.

"Look, you can speak a little of their language, can't you? Can you ask them if it's OK to pose for me?"

I told her these women spoke Tamil while my smattering of the local language was Sinhala, and the two resemble each other about like German and English.

"No problem, we'll just motion with our hands. They'll get the idea."

Indeed they would, for tourists are one of the few forms of contact tea workers have with the outside world, and tips from tourists snapping photos are one of their chief sources of extracurricular income.

As we threaded through the waist-high tea rows toward them I told the woman, "You know, they're not paid well here, so you might want to make a little gift."

"Oh, I'm used to that! I always carry around change with me. I bought a roll of rupees when I cashed my American Express. Funny, they didn't have coins in rolls, so they counted them out for me one by one! One hundred in all! I'm down to thirty-five now."

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"That ought to be about right. That's more than any of them earns in a day, less than a dollar."

"Yes, but they get free housing, medical care, and education. I read it in the tour guide. And besides, I decided before I came here that my policy was only one rupee per tip."

A rupee is worth two and a half cents. In the State Department they call people who think this way "policy dweebs."

Mrs. Dweeb busied herself arranging the pickers into a convincing "happy workers on the tea estate" pose. They assumed smiles and held them until the shutter clicked. Many had the widegapped bucktoothed smile immediately marking them as low-caste plantation or "Tea Tamil" women.

I'd read about the life of the Tea Tamils during British rule from the early part of the last century up until Independence in 1947.

When the British tea planters were rebuffed in their attempts to induce the Kandyan Sinhalese to give up their farms and work for subsistence wages on the tea estates, they turned to low-caste and untouchable Tamils from the rural backwaters of South India. As there were recurring outbreaks of famine in South India at the time, British promises of steady work and free food attracted thousands of Tamils who had no idea of the implications of indentured servitude.

The British implemented a social system that rendered plantation workers stateless and all but name and cut them off from associating with other segments of Ceylonese society. Not that they would have much chance to associate anyway, as they worked dawn to dusk seven days a week on isolated estates miles from the nearest towns.

The British were hardly alone in this mentality. The French had sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil, the Americans coffee and bananas in Central America, the British tea in Malaysia, Assam, and Darjeeling. All these relied on semi-slave labor kept in line by ignorance, fear, malnutrition, childbirth, racism, sexism, and exhaustion. Quite a legacy from the people who believe they created representative government. Not to mention their colleagues across the Channel who regard France as the summit of civilization, and across the pond in America where all men are said to be created equal. Perhaps it's the dharma of all this that makes London the most 161

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insufferably tedious city on Earth and will involve America in wars supporting inequality until its resources run out.

In Britain the same plantation tactics were applied to the industrial sector, but that was in a country with good novelists and a strong press. The Labor Movement resulted. In Ceylon, the tea plantations were miles from nowhere. They didn't even receive newspapers, much less attract reporters. The Tea Tamils were born on the plantation, died on the plantation, and worked twelve to eighteen hours every day on the plantation. There was no education to speak of. The pay was little above starvation level. Moneylenders quickly moved in, charging thirty-percent interest rates. Beyond work, there were two other fixed constants in life: hunger and fear. Today, six generations later, those roots run straight down into the core. I had heard that the life of the tea workers was unspeakable. And I certainly knew it was glossed over in travel literature and official government pronouncements. So I came to see for myself.

I asked the woman if she wanted me to take a picture of her standing with the workers. She looked at me glacially. "I'm not one of those people who has to be in the middle of everything," she said.

Then she proceeded to stand in the middle of the workers and gave each a rupee. They barely hid their disappointment; five rupees is the generally conceded minimum. I vowed to supplement such a pittance with a ten-buck note (Kandytown sophisticate for a ten rupee bill, worth a U.S. quarter) for each of them later on.

In a way I was happy to have Mrs. Dweeb around. She was perfect cover for Father V. and I. We were waiting for last light so we could make our way unseen down to the tea workers' line rooms.

I had met him in Kandy while researching the significance of Asian Liberation Theology among the Catholic Sinhalese. I wish the theologians had chosen another name for their theory, because my experience everywhere I've been in the world is that the word "Liberation" means gun-toting bullies who want to be boss without running for office or soiling their knuckles.

Father V. greeted me that day as I entered his library high on a Kandy hill road. He seemed curiously unaffected by my compliments on the huge cage of parakeets outside—at least thirty of them, each with a hollowed-out coconut husk lashed to the ceiling for a nesting 162

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place. To judge from the size of the pile of meal remnants the birds pecked at, I had little doubt where the leftover rice from everyone's lunch found its way.

Father V. heard me out about doing a book on the life in Sri Lanka as it is actually lived by the people, and my desire to get to the bottom of rumors I'd been hearing about conditions among the workers on a tea estate. Then he requested to be called "Father V." from that point on.

He pulled down the book An Asian Theology of Liberation by the Jesuit priest Aloysius Pieris, and then a bound volume of newsletters entitled "Voice of the Voiceless" that stretched back eleven years.

"Voice of the Voiceless" was my introduction to the untold story of life on the plantation. I read the entire sheaf of quarterly issues from 1980 to the present at one sitting, then came back with my laptop the next day to copy passages verbatim. Father V. began to regard me as more than a parakeet fancier. Now, two weeks later, we were headed down to live clandestinely among the workers in their line rooms for several days. He, being both a priest and a Tamil, could set people at ease who would be terrified had I shown up alone. Even so there were thought-provoking risks. If we were caught and they found my notebook, I would almost certainly be declared persona non grata and expelled from the country. That in turn would mean the end of my Sri Lanka book. But Father V., I worried about what I'd gotten him into. He changed the subject every time I brought up what might happen to him. I got the impression that a rifle-butt beating would be the least of his problems.

We had concocted a story that I was researching for an article on alcoholism among low-paid workers all over Sri Lanka and that I was interested only in different drinking patterns between men and women plantation workers. But both of us knew that if a kangany—an estate manager—got wind of our presence, he wouldn't care what I was researching. The tea plantations are owned and managed by the Sri Lankan government, in whose interests it is to keep labor costs as low as possible in order to keep cash income from tea as high as possible. Through a vicious cycle of the British legacy, today's indifference to the Tea Tamils' plight, the workers' six-generation ingrained mentality as lowest-of-the-low caste, the treatment of 163

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plantation labor today is virtually unchanged from colonial days. In addition, with tea being the second highest source of foreign exchange after textiles, messing with life on the tea plantations is tantamount to messing with national security. When I asked the priest why the plantation managers were so insistent about keeping the workers' line rooms out of sight he replied, "What does the U.S. Forestry Service do alongside highways in the woods?"

"They leave the timber untouched where people can see it, then issue lumber companies permits to clear-cut everything that's out of view."

"My point."

Write the Sri Lanka State Plantations Corporation or the Tea Propaganda Board or the Janatha Estates Development Board, and you get pamphlets with information like the following: When the two commonest beverages in the world are compared, there is overwhelming evidence that in every respect, tea is far superior to coffee.

Tea has been drunk in China for over 4,000 years. China has the highest tea consumption in the world. While tea has no harmful effects, it has numerous beneficial advantages, which most people are unaware of.

Both beverages have a mild stimulating effects due to the presence of the common alkaloid, caffeine, which apart from its other effects relieves fatigue and tension. They contain different aromatic compounds which give tea its distinctive flavor and aroma. While coffee can become habit-forming, tea is not. The nutrients in tea have outstanding health-giving properties. Its carbohydrate content is only 4.5 percent. It has one to two percent protein and there is little or no fat. Tea has many minerals of value— potassium, calcium, manganese, and iron; plus the trace minerals zinc, copper, silicone, and fluorine.

Aside from caffeine, tea contains the alkaloids theobromine and theophylline. But the most important constituent of tea are the polyphenols (15 percent), which have major beneficial effects. The polyphenols have a moderating effect on the caffeine in tea, and, 164

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because of the way caffeine is slowly released, tea does not act in the harmful way of caffeine in coffee, even if six or eight cups are taken per day.

The polyphenols also bring about a decrease in blood cholesterol level and reduces the fatty deposits on the inner walls of the arteries. When vitamin C is taken with tea, the reduction is even greater. On the other hand, coffee, because of its caffeine content, inhibits the actions of Vitamins B1 and B2. Coffee increases the cholesterol and fat levels in the blood and gives rise to heart disease.... and: Modern science has rediscovered an ancient miracle drink that cures everything from heart disease to tooth decay—ordinary tea.

According to reports presented to members of the Chinese Society of Medicine recently, a few piping hot cups of tea will do more for most folks than expensive drugs and medical treatments. "Tea is a remarkable, powerful, and effective medicine," says Professor Lou Fuging at Zhejiang Medical University. "My research shows that it can prevent arteriosclerosis." Professor Lou said his work revealed that the incidence of arteriosclerosis for people who take tea as their daily drink is 50 percent less than those who do not.

When he prescribed this miracle beverage for 160 heart disease victims, he found that 80 percent showed marked improvement. Tea also has been shown to have an alleviating effect on radiation sickness. Chinese doctors have reduced the side effects of people receiving radiation treatment for cancer. More than 90 percent of people who drank tea after undergoing radiation therapy reported they had less nausea.... and: ... Tea bushes grow to thirty feet high unless they are constantly trimmed back to the meter or so which is the easiest height to pluck.

The pickers are expert at choosing only the top two leaves and bud 165

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between them, which produce the best flavor. After the leaves are transported to the processing "shed" (in fact a large four-storied building) they are withered on hessian-fiber mats or blown dry with drafts of warm air. This reduces their moisture content to about sixty-five percent. The leaves are then crushed in metalflanged grinders. This initiates a fermentation process which is complete within a few hours. The fermentation must be stopped at precisely the point where the crushed leaf is flavorful but not acidic.

The fermentation is halted by "firing" in a 190°F oven, which reduces the moisture content to about two percent.

The many varieties of teas are graded by size, from "dust" to "leaf" tea; and by quality, from "flowery" to "pekoe" to "souchong". Teas are further categorized as low-, mid- or high-grown. Generally, the higher tea is grown, the better its quality....

With this air of unreality pouring through my head, we began our descent. Mrs. Dweeb had departed to my silent vow to forever expunge the word "special" from my vocabulary.

The tea rows unreeled past us in a descent so steep it reminded me of an altimeter in a plane headed straight down. Luckily there was a low moon because the dry stream bed was full of ankle-twisting loose round stones.

I recalled the day Father V. sat down and spoke slowly over my shoulder as he watched me recording his relation of Tea Tamil history on my laptop.

Soon after their conquest of the Kandyan kingdom in 1815, the British explored the High Country south and southeast of Kandy to see what might be done with it. The altitude and rain were perfect for coffee, so large tracts of virgin forest were cut down for coffee plantations. As it was too expensive to try to move the huge ebony, teak, mahogany, silkwood, ironwood, and other logs, the British East India Company officials did the only sensible thing: they burned them. The first coffee was planted under Governor Barnes and by 1820 coffee was a large export crop.

Labor, however, wasn't as easily acquired as clear-cut land. At first the British looked to local sources, but the Kandy District farmers were engaged in their own agriculture, had little appetite for British 166

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theories about free movement of labor and capital, and moreover, were so hostile to the British they cheerfully participated in two uprisings, in 1817 and 1848. The British then looked to the povertystricken low-caste villages of Tamil Nadu, the southeastern province of India from Madras to Cape Comorin. These villagers were ideal coffee fodder. After twenty-five centuries of brahmins they had been ingrained with such a low sense of self-esteem that if one of them entered a Hindu temple, saw a Hindu service, or gazed upon a brahmin, the punishment was death. Moreover, they were poor, illiterate, superstitious, malnourished, and spoke a patois of Tamil few Ceylonese Tamils could understand. In short, perfect slaves in all but name.

Coffee was a seasonal crop. The Tamil Nadu workers would cross the Palk Straits, walk 200 miles through rugged, malarial arid zones and jungle to the coffee highlands, pick the crop, and make their way back to Tamil Nadu. But in the 1870s the coffee industry collapsed because of a leaf blight fungus which killed virtually every plant on the island. The industrious British turned to tea. Tea, however, is a perennial rather than seasonal bearer, which required a permanent labor force. A permanent labor force meant families and that meant housing. The British did the only sensible thing: they built the line rooms.

Today's line rooms are little changed from British times. Ten to twenty rooms are clustered in several rows of low-roofed buildings with half a dozen latrines at one end. Each barracks-like building is divided into four to six ten-by-twelve-foot "family rooms" in which are packed families ranging from a young couple to a family of six or seven. There is room enough for only a small table, a chair or two, a corner lipa fire pit for cooking, and a bed. In many, running water is available when it rains; other times young girls carry earthen or aluminum water pots on their hips to and from the public pumps, which were installed all over Sri Lanka courtesy of International Monetary Fund financing many years ago.

When the privies clog up, a frequent event during the monsoons, everyone uses the fields. There are few fruit trees or private garden plots; tea, after all, comes first. When a worker dies he or she is buried 167

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among the bushes they spent their lives plucking. When the burial mound is finally washed away, so are the memories.

The British, many of them retired military men, meanwhile built palatial country homes for themselves so the comforts of Sussex wouldn't seem quite so far away. They surrounded these with gardens of flowers and groves of fruit trees. The place where all this is captured in its most loving detail—down to the bay windows, wood beams, race track, and golf course—is Nuwara Eliya.

The itinerant life of coffee pickers meant that social problems went home with the workers. But when the workers became permanent residents the British plantation owners found themselves confronting the sick, the senile, and the elderly unable to work any longer. So they did the only sensible thing: they told their kanganies to get rid of them. The kanganies took their duties so seriously they drove these paupers into cities like Colombo and dropped them, destitute and unable to speak a word of Sinhala, on a street corner. If this sounds barbaric, it's helpful to recall what Ronald Reagan did to the institutionalized insane in the 1980s.

The Colombo municipal government began to notice the steady increase of beggars and did what all good municipal administrations do: they appointed a commission to look into the matter. One February night in 1906 the entire city was cordoned off and the streets systematically searched quarter by quarter. By 3:00 A.M. the chief medical officer W. Marshall Phillip had all he needed to conduct the first Census of the Vagrants of Colombo. Of 675 vagrants, all but twelve were abandoned plantation Tamils. The good city fathers could have saved themselves the operation's expense by simply consulting one Frances L. Daniel. He was the City Coroner.

While it was one thing for useless vagrants to die out of sight in alleys and under bridges, it was quite another to countenance the periodic outbreaks of cholera and tuberculosis that plagued the city, transmitted by paupers excreting and coughing on the streets. The Salvation Army and Friends in Need couldn't possibly cope with a problem of this magnitude, so the British colonial administration did the only sensible thing: they (a) constructed a Detention Center where vagrants swept off the streets could be quarantined, (b) built a hospital at Ragama (a pejorative that translates to "Toddy Town") 168

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where the terminally afflicted could die out of public view, and (c) repatriated those not in imminent danger of death back to India, where, by now two or more generations removed from their forebears' home villages, they hadn't the faintest idea where to go or what to do.

By now Father V. and I were navigating only by the moon. We must have come down five or six hundred feet, yet even at that the nearest non-plantation village at the bottom of the gully twinkled very faintly far down into the valley. I heard voices ahead. Father V. pulled on my elbow in a signal to stop. I cupped my hands to my ears. The voices were all men and children. I looked at my watch: 6:35 and the women hadn't arrived yet. They must have been picking on one of the upper tracts, two miles away and a thousand feet above. Father V. whispered that we shouldn't approach the line rooms until the women arrived. By now the men would be well into their homemade kasippu (arrack) and unpredictable. I made notes by the light of the moon, writing in Dutch. I had learned that language while living in Holland for three years, and still use it whenever I don't want anyone to know what I am saying. The chances of our running afoul a Dutchreading plantation manager were slim.

After Independence in February, 1948, the Sri Lankan social classes which had most identified and cooperated with the British took the reins of power. They could be relied up not to make any major changes; indeed, they retained English as the language of government and spoke it exclusively among themselves. This new governing elite realized that, given the large number of Tea Tamils and the fact that they had a union of sorts which was more powerful in numbers than any other union in the country, they were an obviously unstable voting block. So when plans for universal franchise were implemented, the Tamils were excluded on the grounds that they were South Indian and therefore "stateless".

Through intentionally exclusionary ordinances such as a requirement for a "Certificate of Permanent Settlement", fewer than 100,000 Tea Tamils gained the right to vote out of a population of about 685,000.

The Sinhalese leadership further frustrated a Tea Tamil voting bloc by revising electoral registers in such a way that a substantial 169

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number of workers were thrown off the roles. Nonetheless, in the 1947 election the Tea Estate workers won six out of the seven seats allotted to their party, the Ceylon Indian Congress.

The horrified government retaliated by further restricting the franchise and adding a "Proof of Domicile" requirement to the Certificate of Permanent Settlement. And who was to certify this Proof of Domicile? Why, those prudent fellows the plantation kangenies—after all, weren't they the ones most likely to know?

In addition, the Tamils also had to show proof of Ceylonese citizenship. To make this difficult if not impossible to obtain, the Citizenship Acts of 1948 and 1949 created a class of "stateless persons" and the Parliamentary Elections Act of 1949 mandated that no one who wasn't a citizen could vote. Independence won the Tea Tamils neither citizenship nor state; they were in effect locked out of the government.

In 1964 and 1974 pacts were made with India that provided for the "repatriation" (a euphemism for forced deportation) of 600,000 Tea Tamils back to India—an India where they wouldn't even have tea picking for income. In 1972 the tea plantations were further destabilized during the most militant phase of Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike's political career. At the time she was still smarting from an attempted overthrow of her regime by a group of educated young people who couldn't get jobs because of the flight of businesses out of the country in response to her socialist administration. The Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) were somewhere to the left of Chairman Mao and had tried to take power with an odd assortment of slogans reinforced with pipe bombs.

Mrs. Bandaranaike's response was virulently anti-Tamil and antiWest. She accelerated state control of every part of the economy, which included nationalizing the tea plantations. The former colonials decided life was really better in Sussex after all—not to mention Australia. They were replaced by government bureaucrats who were almost to a man Sinhalese in a period of Bandaranaikeinspired Sinhalese racism. In the north the "old" Tamils whose blood lines ran back 2,000 years saw their share of government vanish. The demand for a separate Tamil state called Eelam ("Precious Land") 170

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began as a whisper during Mrs. Bandaranaike's 1970-77 government and is an intractable battle cry today.

The new plantation bosses had never seen a tea plantation. They also had plenty of relatives who could use a job, especially a job that had the virtue of adding to the family coffers without burdening anyone unduly with work. Government bureaucrats made decisions in Colombo and rarely visited the plantations they administered.

Their pay and promotions were related to their connections rather than their efficiency.

In addition, local politicians now had their hands in the plantation voting bloc till, and in Sri Lanka local politicians have a reputation for ruthlessness that makes a Republican fundraising tract seem positively brimming with virtue. These pols served their masters well. In the 1982 election the Nuwera Eliya voting district numbered 652,114 people of voting age, of whom only 289,890 were eligible to vote. The rest, 362,224 Tea Tamils, were not "citizens", even though they had lived there three to four generations and were the workhorses behind Sri Lanka's foreign exchange income.

Down on the plantation, nationalization had a far more direct effect: it meant the end of subsidized food. Ration coupons were abolished. Tea Tamils suddenly had to pay as much as ten times what they previously paid for sugar, flour, and rice. The price of kerosene to light the line rooms went out of sight. Subsistence became starvation. When the food ran out by the 20th or 22nd of the month, the men were forced to go to the moneylenders and their thirty percent interest.

I was mulling over these historical tidbits as Father V. parted the cloth door at one end of the line room and we walked in. A more fetid, musty odor I don't think I have ever smelled. It literally contained generations of diaperless children, kerosene lamps, earth floors, molds, damp, smoldering cooking fires, unwashed clothes, and the sickly smell of drinking. The thrice-breathed air of a seedy pool hall was an alpine meadow in spring compared to the thousand-times breathed air of this place. Its soundscape was if anything even more complex than the air—lids clanking on pots, belches, crying children, shouting, barking dogs, an off-tune radio sputtering a song from 171

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India, someone breaking wind, someone else uncorking a jug. I began to think my putative research project on alcoholism rates wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Someone saw us and screamed and instantly the place fell unearthly silent except for the growling dogs. Not one head peered from out of its cubicle. Clearly everyone thought we were a kangany barging in a sullen arrack mood and looking for a woman for the night.

Father V. began speaking in Tamil and a few eyes edged out from behind cloth curtains and door jams. If the silence was profound before, after they got a good look at me it was utter. My very existence there could mean deportation for them and there was nothing they could do.

Father V. must have spoken for ten minutes before a single person ventured out to face us. It was a man. I assumed he was the line room's sub-kangany, delegated with keeping things in line on the home front for an extra twenty rupees (50 cents) a day. I had to force myself to remember that this was but a few years short of the year 2000 and that nearly all my European and American friends had a computer, took daily hot showers, and ate what they wanted when they wanted it.

It was another hour before life returned to the cooking pots and crying children. The sub-kangany gathered a few other men and heard Father V. out. There was a fierce argument among them and I seriously considered taking the impressions I had so far and leaving these people alone.

Certainly there were impressions enough: The "rooms" were separated by moldy, peeling whitewashed wattle-and-mud walls and the "doors" were coarse cloth draped over a string. Inside was a bed made of a piece of burlap stuffed with straw and dry leaves, a chair, a table covered with orange plastic, a couple of faded images of Hindu deities cut from a magazine, a small hand mirror, and the red glow of a hearth in a corner wafting eye-stinging wood smoke into the air.

The rooms where the children slept were crowded with bodies under a blanket. Body heat is all they have through the interminably cold rainy nights of the monsoons. Even in the dim light of kerosene lamps on low settings I could see the sallow faces of diets with little 172

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protein or iron, the stick legs and swollen bellies of undernourished children, and the drawn, irritable, fatalistic looks of people pushed over the edge. From these people, whose nourishment often contains less than eighty percent of their daily calorie needs, comes a large portion of Sri Lanka's national earned income.

They let us sleep in the corridor. My pillow was my notebook; Father V. used his breviary. Next morning we were awakened at 5:30 by the women getting up to make breakfast.

It is the woman's life on the plantation that is the harshest. They work from the time they wake until they go to sleep. They are the first to go without, the first to make sacrifices, and the last to eat after the men and children are taken care of. The child mortality rate of 150 per 1000 live births is an educated guess, because no statistics are kept on Tea Tamils. They pick the tea while their men dig, plant, and prune.

The men are as thin as their wives as they grunt at their mattocks, chop back underbrush, or open up clogged drainage ditches.

As we arose and combed our hair with our fingers, the women edged past without looking at us. They carried water pots with flared spouts out the tops. I didn't know where the village pump was, but it must have been a good walk because the women didn't return for ten minutes. Luckily this dry season was one in which there had been a rain shower almost every day; otherwise the woman would have had to walk to the only pump in the area with a cistern attached, twothirds of a mile away.

When they returned the women threw straw onto the embers of last night's fire. Twigs and then sticks went on after it had flared.

Smoke curled up into the room and hovered in thick layers under the eaves. Onto trivets over the flames went rice pots and bread dough on a tin sheet. Sons chopped chilis and manioc plant while daughters swaddled the babies and prepared Nestle to accompany them to the crèche (day nursery). The men waited for breakfast. They smoked beedi, a leafy nicotine-containing cigarette substitute which is rolled and smoked like a cigarillo. Beedi reeks to high heaven and is smoked only by the poor. I could only imagine its tar and carbon monoxide content. One man still had the shakes from the drunk of last night. I'd read that it was the women who turned to alcohol out of sheer 173

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desperation. Now I saw the drinkers were those who had so arranged their lives they did nothing while others served them.

The women fed the children on chipped mel-mac plates so old the original glossy sheen remained only along the underside of the rims. The average portion would slightly overfill a teacup. While everyone was eating the women wrapped lunches in newspapers for the children at school. At 7:00 A.M. the women left as a group, first to the crèche, then the mile and a half to the muster room. The men departed a little later in another direction, to the kangany's office. If any of them was late for the 7:30 muster, even by a few minutes, they could be sent home without pay.

Father V. and I, of course, didn't accompany them. In fact, we decamped as soon as they left and angled off along a tea range until we were two hills out of sight. No telling if someone might need a few extra rupees and inform the kangany. We spent the day in a grove of trees while we watched through binoculars the nearby slopes where other women were plucking.

After muster the women walk as many as three miles up and down steep terraces and across cols and ridges to the rows they will pick today. As they pick they sing "Poliyo poli, poliyo poli,"—"May the baskets be full, be full soon." They hump their loads at 9:00 back to the muster shed, where they weigh man enters their basket weights in a ledger, deducting a kilo for the basket. It begins to rain, drumming on the corrugated roof. The weigh man thereupon deducts another two kilos from each basket for the weight of the rain in the leaves.

Weighing is done on the women's own time. The long minutes in line eat into the time the woman have for their children. A mother nursing her child is allowed to feed the child at weighing times, but that means a trip to the crèche, and the time she takes for it is deducted from her daily hours, which she must make up at the end of the day.

The weigh master pins a slip to each woman's blouse. The women dump the leaves into hoppers, loosen the tumpline on their foreheads, set the baskets down, and catch their breath. The young girls chat and giggle; the older women sit staring. A few minutes of rest, then it's back to the tea a mile or two away.

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At noon they weigh in again. They have an hour for lunch. The women pick up their children at the crèche, take them to the line room, prepare lunch for their men, eat what is left after the men and children are done, return the children to the crèche, and are back at the weigh station at 1:00.

The optimal tea pluck is a tea bud and the upper two leaves below it. If a picker allows twigs or the tougher leaves lower on the branch to fall into her basket, she is "blaggarded" (blackguarded) by the weigh master and may be reported to the Senior Officer. The overseers are all men. They are fond of pointing out, "Strict supervision is necessary so workers bring in only good leaves." Their own bosses they rarely see.

By the third day Father V. and I were enough of the line room landscape that the women returning at 6:30 went about their chores without paying us much mind. They did not, however, look in our direction, not even furtively.

Their evening began with cleaning their cubicle while the fire heated water for the children’s baths. Then rice chatties went on the fire and the women left for the cistern to wash the day's clothes.

When they returned they added curry, chilis, and a few vegetables to the rice, and covered it to simmer. Then they washed the breakfast and lunch dishes. When the food was cooked they served the men and children. While the others ate the woman tidied the children’s' rooms and made their beds. When the men finished and left for their kasippu and cards, the women told the children stories and sang to them. When the children were finally to bed the women at last took the time to eat what was left over after the men and children. At 10:30 or 11:00 they sank onto their dusty straw mattresses. Whispers and rustles in the dark told of a few whose day wasn't over yet as their men came to them and now wanted them not wives but women.

I thought about Mrs. Dweeb and her comment about "free housing, medical care, and schools." I had seen the housing, but what about the schools and medical care?

The next day Father V. and I broke cover and wandered about the estate like tourists. He knew it well. It was such an irony that the tea country of Sri Lanka is so beautiful to behold, yet its beauty conceals 175

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all that we were seeing. As we headed toward the estate's school, I reviewed my notes on the typical statistical plantation: The average estate comprises 1500 acres of tea. The median population is 2423, of which 1200 are workers (570 males, 630 females) in 532 families. There are 595 children under the age of fifteen. The resident population, children included since they pick tea as well, is 1795 Tea Tamils and 628 Sinhalese workers, managers, and overseers. There is little social interaction between these groups and virtually no marriages between them. Their pay compares as follows with the rest of the Sri Lankan labor force:

Tea Estate Mean income in rupees/mo.

Average workers per household Household income in rupees/mo.

823 1.6 1341

Urban

Rural

617 1.5 950

300 2.4 722

There are two trade unions which take up Tea Tamil issues, the Ceylon Workers Congress and Lanka Jathika Estate Workers' Union.

The latter is sponsored by the government; the former is headed by a government minister. The one friend the Tea Tamils have in high office is Sri Lanka's Minister of Tourism and Industrial Development, S. Thondaman. He is a Tamil himself, and like President Premadasa, has lived "bare feet on the ground." Thondaman probably has the most unenviable job in Sri Lanka. He is constrained on one side by certain Sinhalese ministers who yearn for the good old days of Bandaranaike nationalism (a euphemism for racism), and on the other side by a suffocatingly indifferent and implacable management on the tea estates.

Coupled with the ignorance and fear of the tea workers themselves, this management system perpetuates a virtually insoluble problem that is a causus belli for the Tamil Tiger revolutionaries in the North. Sri Lanka today is paying in Tamil Tiger dollars for the penny-level thinking of the Bandaranaike era.

Thondaman is an enlightened men navigating the minefield of a business-as-usual-where's-my-paycheck bureaucracy, ministers with 176

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their fingers in the till, bottom-feeder local politicians, and a budget that will be gutted if he steps on the wrong toes.

We arrived at the "free schooling". The classroom was a forty-byseventy-foot ten-foot-high fading-whitewash mud-and-wattle hut with open-air windows, a corrugated tin roof, and no door. Inside was one blackboard, one teacher, and 182 students in grades one through five—the only grades taught on the tea plantations. There were only a handful of well-thumbed pamphlets in a rack on the wall and a single tattered, faded map of "Ceylon". The students were seated by hierarchy of age. First and second graders sat on the floor and got no teacher attention at all. They learned their one-two-threes and A-B-Cs from the third graders. The third and fourth graders sat twelve to a bench with nothing to write on. The fifth graders got four to a bench with a rough-sawn plank nailed across the front to write on. One lucky student selected by the teacher to be monitor had the status symbol of a desk entirely to himself. There wasn't a pencil or sheet of paper on or in it. His education was keeping others in line, a future sub-kangany in the rough.

This was one of two schools; the other had 210 students. The teachers are appointed by the Education Department of the Government. They work only with the students who are sent to them; over 100,000 children of school age get no schooling at all because their parents would starve without the extra income they bring in.

Child labor is paid at about 40 percent of adult. Of the children who do attend school, attendance is 50 percent. Any visitor to a line room is immediately mobbed by children clamoring, "Bonbon?", "School pen?", "Money?" In addition to the showcase necktie choirs warbling for the edification of the Mrs. Dweebs and their cameras, many other students are turned into a free personal labor force by the teachers.

Students clean and cook for the teacher, wash clothes, weed the garden, fetch the mail, buy necessities at the village market, and do whatever else the teacher orders. The teachers' gardens are for more than subsistence: they sell whatever they can to the local markets in town. If the plantation workers want food from the teacher, they have to pay for it. Hence able-bodied students of use to the teacher are not promoted beyond Grade 4 until the teacher trains replacements.

Father V. told me that once he had asked why the teachers were so 177

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unconcerned with the fate of their charges. The reply: "What's the use of study? They're all going to be pickers."

The "free medical care" was hardly an improvement. There were two dispensaries, each staffed by an Estate Medical Assistant and a Welfare Supervisor, for a grand total of four paramedic-level medics to handle 2,400 or so people, of whom the needs of the Sinhalese staff came before all others. Hospitalization is available in the nearest city, but the worker has to pay for it. There's no budget to buy imported drugs. I looked into the wire-fronted medicine locker: aspirin, iodine, bandages, a thermometer, several plastic bottles filled with herbs in capsules, and a crutch.

"Free child care" consisted of five faded yellow crèches for children under five, totaling 82 children in all. Each was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. The playground was an expanse of mud.

UNICEF provides two packages of Thriposha nutritional powder for each child per month. Thriposha is a precooked protein-fortified food supplement that feeds some 600,000 poverty-line Sri Lankan children.

When a child's allotment runs out crèches do not provide further rations. That's why the mothers prepared Nestle at the line room in the morning. They have to feed their children during their breaks and lunch hour, since the crèche managers won't do it. Of the five crèche managers, only two had any training in pediatrics or child illnesses.

To these amenities add the nonexistence of cultural outlets such as halls to enjoy music, song, dance, or movies; no playgrounds; no handicraft centers; no religious instruction in the Hindu faith; rampant superstition; and the predictable alcoholism, gambling, and spousal abuse. The Tea Tamils cannot vote for their own representative in government; one is appointed for them.

By the time we left we had become accepted to the point where I could conduct oral history interviews, with Father V. translating.

Here is the story of one 70-year-old woman: "I do not know when or where I was born. I worked for one year at X Estate. My first salary was forty-three cents a day. [The rupee is divided into one hundred cents; fifty years ago the monetary equivalent of her income would have been about ten U.S. cents per day.]

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"Then I came to Y Estate. I married here and this is where I have been ever since. The head kangany is powerful here. The superintendents do what he tells them to do. They are afraid he will got to another estate and take the workers with him. This kangany enters the names of new workers on the rolls only after they have worked three days. That's how he keeps their first three days' pay.

"We are made to feel our caste all the time. Once when I went to see my uncle in Badulla, I stopped at a boutique for tea. The owner asked me casually to which caste I belonged. I asked why he wanted to know. He told me that he served tea to Paraiyar or Pallar tea worker castes only in a coconut shell. I went to another shop. [Ed. Note: The Paraiyar caste was considered so low in Hindu India that it gave the English language the word "pariah".]

"In the days of the British, we got no education, but they fed us well. Now the estate managers cheat us terribly. We know they're doing it but they have such complex regulations none of us can understand them. They have been taught more than we have.

"In those days we did our work without fearing anybody. When we celebrated a festival on the estate, if other villagers came to disturb us, we would chase them off the plantation. We can't do that now. If we did they would retaliate with violence and no one would help us. In British days we didn't know the meaning of the words violence, shooting, murder, rape. Now every three-year-old knows them. Today if a girl is raped, the family hushes it up. Otherwise she could never find a husband.

"We began the school day by reciting the Theravam songs to the gods. Then the attendance was taken. Two or three boys who knew the routine were sent to clean up the teacher's cow shed. Two girls cleaned the teacher's kitchen and washed the dishes. These were always "high" caste girls; the children of Paraiyars or Chakkilians weren't allowed in because their presence would foul the kitchen.

"After the work the children were given tea or buttermilk. We were served in coconut shells instead of cups because we were the children of tea pickers. We had to drink the buttermilk outside the kitchen, even if it was raining. Children who didn't work got no buttermilk, but the teacher's cow always got buttermilk.

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"About ten o'clock the teacher would send two groups of boys to cut grass for the cows. If they didn't bring enough grass they were punished. Usually they came back about one o'clock, but sometimes much later because they had to go far for the grass. They got tea and buttermilk when they got back before one o'clock, but nothing if they were late.

"My brother was the teacher's postman. He had to go to the village six miles away to get the mail. He had to return on time. If he was delayed the teacher would accuse him of going for a cup of tea or a bite. He had no right to go home for tea or a bite while on duty.

Sometimes at the end of the school day he would have to go back to the post office to mail letters the teacher had written.

"My friend was chosen to go marketing for the teacher. One day he was sick so I said I would go for him. He told me I could take half a rupee from the amount I was given in consideration for the work I did. I took the half rupee [one-and-a-quarter U.S. cents]. The next day the teacher came to me and demanded it back. I gave it to her and then she beat me."

When I was doing my initial research on life on the estates I came across a poem by Rachel Kurian in her landmark study, gem-cutters. I had jotted it down and now turned to that page in my notebook: Withered roses Days remembered in thorns Unchanged in each detail.

Days like other days, So have the years gone One by one.

Twelve hours a day, Seven days a week; Thus their lifeblood flows To fashion this land, A paradise for some.

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First Light to Dawn, Gangarama Vihara As Kandy is but seven degrees above the Equator, days and nights are relatively uniform. At 5:30 A.M. the night birds cease singing and the day birds begin, their songs as different as their times to sing.

There is enough light to walk a path. Dawn comes at 6:00. Sunset comes at 6:00 P.M. and the birds stop singing at 6:30. Daylight saving time is a meaningless concept.

Below my home, about a kilometer down the main road then a side road bordered by a rushing stream and waterfalls which power the polishing wheels of a family of gem-cutters, at a sharp curve where the buses groan into the lowest gear as they try to navigate it, there is a small path leading to the left marked by a fluorescent light. Many street lamps in Sri Lanka are bare fluorescent tubes. They are much cheaper than incandescents but give intersections at night the character of sentinels without a view.

The path leads several hundred feet to a large roofed triumphal arch with steps leading up and down both sides. This is the entrance to the Gangarama Vihara, the Temple of the Great River. Hardly more than a mile from downtown Kandy's one-customer-at-a-time shopkeepers and the epochal grandeur of Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Gangarama Vihara sits amid an altogether different idea of time.

The sole purpose of the Gangarama's entranceway is to lift you up then let you back down; remove you from the earth, then return you, introduce you to a height then return you to the plane on which you walk. At the crest you can look straight up to the peeling paint of the barrel-vault arch over eighteen feet above, there to glimpse the limitation of the objects, that no matter how monumental the arch may be or how much rain it sheds, at some point it must turn back at some point towards where it began.

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Or you can look instead straight ahead, to where you were walking before the steps and the arch turned up.

The arch is where you remove your shoes or the "Bata" brand plastic flip-flop shower sandals which are the standard footwear of Sri Lanka. Batas are worn by everyone from shopkeepers to bureaucrats to physicians to the mechanics at the local bus repair shop. Kids run up and down cobbly paved streets and stony driveways in their Batas, yelling cheerfully amid arch-flattening footslaps that sound like bubblegum popping and must have every podiatrist reading this in a state of shock.

This is also the place where a certain category of people abandon undesired kittens and puppies "for the bhikkhus". The bhikkhus, whose diet consists of rice and vegetables, recognize the false mercy of prolonging the inevitable until it becomes agony, so the abandoned animals which can't eat rice and vegetables die. When I was young I lived on a prairie. There this same type of human would drive, open a car door far down the empty road, throw out a dog, and drive away.

These dogs would eventually show up at our door several days after trying desperately to track the car, retching from the diet of carrion they'd been able to find, tick infested, bedraggled with burrs, and desolate. They reminded me of the people who arrive at their parents' nursing home already eager to leave. Is reincarnation a new life or the state of existence we don't see in ourselves in this one? When you light a new candle with the flame of the old, is it the same flame?

One dawn in December I was putting on my shoes after meditating at the Gangarama when I heard a "mew" so faint I wasn't quite sure I'd heard it. The next time the mew was clearer and I looked around and found this thing so small it fit easily into the palm of my hand. I could have fit a wedding ring around its neck. For a moment I wasn't certain it was a cat, much less the refinements of whether a he or a she. I don't think I've ever seen anything so alone.

That abandoners will return as food for the abandoned provides scant comfort at the sight of a kitten taken from its mother before it was taught to hunt. That people who place possession above all will return as the homeless or that people in love with their own skin will return as whitewashed hovels peeling in the sun or that people who 184

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need their own suffering will return to it again — these are gratifying speculations made in moments of hopelessness and ill-will, but they feed no kittens.

There was simply no choice. The kitten was so small it fit easily into my shirt pocket and that's how it was carried home. Kuruppu brought a can of pilchards up from the kitchen, and Sriani retrieved milk from the maid's quarters. Allowing consensus to overcome ignorance we collectively decided it was a she. When she saw the two dishes in front of her containing more food in one place than she'd known since she was born, her eyes went wide in a way I never saw before in an animal. Kuruppu saw the same expression and simply said, "Nubbin," and so she was named.

"Nibbana" means "Enlightenment". Later when she turned into the chattiest cat I've ever known and bore three kittens of her own of which two survived, Kuruppu — who took care of her while I was away rambling throughout the country — decided that in her previous existence she had been a great but illiterate village poet who had never been heard beyond her cooking fire. Many nights in her kittenhood as she meowed incessantly while playing tag with the mosquito net, thereby letting in hoards of them.

As "Nibbana" is quite a handle for a cat, even a cat rescued in a Buddhist monastery in the heartland of a Buddhist country, we soon shortened it to "Nibby". After a yowlful bath with flea shampoo her fur sleeked into shimmery gray that I grandiloquently called "Sri Lankan Silver-tip". Aunty Joyce, who is a painter living out her quiet last days at the house surrounded by her colors and canvas, told me cats this color are as common in Asia as black long-haired with white booties are common in suburbs all over the world. Nibby quickly ate her way past the scrawny look. Housebreaking took two days, her eyes deepened into two black inquisitive pools, and she became pregnant a month before I'd been told she'd be old enough to neuter.

I would leave her at 5:00 A.M., feeling like a lover after a onenight stand, to go to the Gangarama to meditate before first light.

Even at 5:00 A.M. I wouldn't be alone. The Sri Lankans are an early-torise people whose wakings and retirings are attuned more to the sun than alarm clocks, TV, or the commute. Besides, given the clamoring 185

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CTB buses and private minivans, the commute is just about any time you want.

Although I am not Buddhist, the faith has many valuable things, and meditation is one of them. As I live in Sri Lanka, I do things their way — even so far as to memorize passages from the Dhammapada to recite before the Buddha. The words "Thy kingdom come" in the Lord's Prayer would appall Theravadan Buddhists, to whom the only kingdom coming is the understanding that there are no kingdoms. So "Namo tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa," the salutation that precedes the first verse of the Dhammapada, comes from my lips just as it does from the people around me. It means, "Homage to him, the Blessed One, the Worthy, the Enlightened One." These are the first two verses of the Dhammapada, which are the foundation stones of the Theravada Buddhist's sense of personal responsibility: Evil begets Evil.

Mind is the maker of evil states, Mind-made are they.

If one speaks or acts with a wicked mind, Because of that suffering follows Even as the wheel of the cart follows the hoof of the ox.

Good begets good.

Mind is the maker of good states, Mind-made are they.

If one speaks and acts with a pure mind, Because of that happiness follows Even as one's shadow never leaves.

Buddhism is a personal, not a group, faith. You don't have services at 7:30, 9:00, and 11:00 and an empty room the rest of the time. The vihara always has someone there. "Prayer" as we know it — a personal entreaty to a personal deity — doesn't exist. In Buddhism the formalized string of words we would call a prayer is a meditation rather than supplication. It addresses the issue of how one deals with the wall of existence which turns up on one's path towards 186

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Enlightenment. There are only three ways to deal with a wall: beat your head against it, find the path that goes around it, or fly over. In Buddhism the act we call prayer takes the form of (a) veneration, (b) reflection on the Buddha's teachings, or (c) aspiration.

Most Sri Lankan Buddhists worship at least once a day, laying jasmine or lotus flowers before the images and reciting any of the Dhammapada's twenty-eight Vaggas, each of which contains up to forty or more verses similar to those above.

There are several Dhammapada translations for English speakers, most of them containing (a) the verse in ancient Pali, (b) the English translation, and (c) an edifying story from the life of the Buddha which illustrates the origin of the verse. In the Appamada Vagga, the twelve-verse meditation on heedfulness, the Pali of Verse Five reads: Utthanenappamadena sannamena damena ca Dipam kayiratha medhavi yam ogho n'abhikirati.

Translated as: By sustained effort, earnestness, Discipline, and self control, The wise man makes for himself an island Which no flood can overwhelm.

The story is: A young monk named Culapanthaka could not memorize a verse of even four lines, despite trying for several months. He was advised by his brother monks to leave the Sangha, but he was reluctant to do so. The Buddha, understanding his temperament, gave him a clean piece of cloth and asked him to handle it while gazing at the morning sunrise. By his constant handling of it with his sweating hands, it soon became soiled. This visible change over time made him reflect on the impermanence of life. He meditated upon this and achieved Arahantship [the state of a Liberated One].

A verse in the Bala Vagga, "On Fools," reads: 187

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To his ruin indeed the fool gains knowledge and fame. They destroy his bright youth and cleave his head.

The story goes: A vicious man learned the art of shooting the bow so expertly he could bring down a crow from the skies. One day, seeing a monk, he shot the monk in the head, killing him instantly. In consequence the vicious man was reborn as Peta, the sledgehammer. Referring to Peta's past, the Buddha remarked that the knowledge of the vicious brings a man his own ruin.

A verse in the Papa Vagga, "On Evil," reads: Not in the sky Nor in the ocean, Nor in a mountain cave, Is found upon the Earth an abode Wherein one may escape The consequences of one's deeds.

The story: Three groups of monks came by separate routes to see the Buddha. A group coming by land saw a crow land on a fire and burn to death. A group coming by sea saw a drowned woman in the middle of the ocean. A group coming by jungle track saw seven people imprisoned in a cave. The monks wanted to know the meaning of these occurrences. The Buddha related that the crow, as a farmer in a previous birth, had burned to death a lazy ox. The woman had drowned a puppy because she wanted no more dogs. And the men in the cave were cowherds in a previous life who had tortured an iguana by tying it to an anthill. The Buddha observed that no one is exempt from the consequences of their evil, in this life or the next.

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The Dhammapada is full of such stories. There's one about a pig butcher who dies rolling on the floor squealing. Another tells of a monk meditating in a pleasure park when a courtesan comes by and attempts to seduce him; his response is to meditate on the attractiveness of forests. And there is a delicious story about a woman who unknowingly married a thief who took her to the top of a cliff and demanded to know where her family's money was hidden.

Under the pretext of paying her last respects to him, she got behind him and pushed him off, went back down the hill, and became a Buddhist nun.

But the greatest of all the verses in the Dhammapada is the eighth in the Jara Vagga, "On Old Age". These were the words the Buddha uttered immediately after his Enlightenment: Through many a birth I wandered in samsara, Seeking but not finding the Builder of the House.

Sorrowful it is to be born again and again.

Oh House-builder, I have seen You! You shall build no house again.

All Your rafters are broken, Your ridge-pole is shattered!

Achieved have I the end of wanting.

I lay no wood, brahmin, for fires on altars.

Only from within burneth the fire I kindle.

With this fire incessantly burning And with the self ever restrained I live the noble and higher life.

Theravada Buddhism is a faith of settling the accounts of one's life with oneself. The Buddha is a guide, but the Path is found within.

There is no prelate to pass out punishments or brush aside your actions with a handful of words or the acceptance of a donation. You take full responsibility for your part in any interaction, and if the interaction goes badly you acknowledge your part in the matter and 189

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wish upon the other parties that they be able to acknowledgement the same. Release from the self and the world is an inside job.

At all hours people come to the viharas. On poya days, the day of the full moon when it is traditional to bring gifts, the temples are flooded with families bearing jasmine and sweet cakes and rice. They light small oil lamps — a clay pot with a wick sticking up from one end — to symbolize their need for wisdom and enlightenment, and burn incense to symbolize the purification of self. Since poya days are also national holidays, this is the time to attend all the other events at the temple — listening to monks describe how to live a life of the Dhamma, classes on meditation, chanting of suttas (discourses rather like those from the Dhammapada), and so on. Devout Buddhists also reaffirm their pledge to the Five Precepts — no killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, or partaking of intoxicants.

Within the overall temple complex is a Bodhi tree, a pansala or monks' quarters, a dagoba which is a dome-shaped solid brick whitepainted relic chamber, and one or more viharas which are small shrines containing an image of the Buddha. Most of these shrines have been donated by individuals much in the same way that families in Renaissance and Reformation Europe donated apsidal and side chapels to a particular saint. The difference is that in the Buddhist tradition of almsgiving, the gift should be without the taint of personal aggrandizement. The donation plaques that declare an individual has sponsored a work are affixed not glorify the donor but to establish the connection between the donor's family name and the temple. The Buddha's doctrine on love, the Metta Sutta, holds that perfect love should be manifest but invisible. True metta, the practice of universal love, is unselfish, all-embracing, and devoid of selfinterest.

To this I come at 5:00 A.M. In the cool season, October through March.

The North Star lies so low on the horizon that even on clear nights you can't see it. Taurus and Gemini are well to the north of straight up. In May the Southern Cross rises, four brilliant stars amidst the great sheet of stars of the southern Milky Way which carries constellations like Carina and Argo; Argo the great ship of Jason, sails set away from sunset and into the golden fleece of horizon-led clouds.

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About a week after I started meditating here — which was about a week after I arrived and chanced on the vihara on a random getacquainted walk — I befriended a little dog. He was about halfway between puppyhood and guard dog, and most unguardedly friendly.

I don't know how they raise dogs in Sri Lanka, but they're the most benign dogs I've ever known. Never in all my walks has a cur circled around for a nip at my ankles and a run for the fence. Occasionally a dog will venture out to sniff curiously at this light-skinned ambulatory object, but in most cases the house dogs simply look on.

"Guard" dogs here are "bark" dogs. The only time I've ever seen one bare its teeth was once when the Sarath's dog got into a fight with a monkey. The monkey got the drift and headed for a tree.

He got the name "Buddha Pup" the same way my kitty became "Nibbana": food. I'd bring him the leftovers from last-night's dinner which I'd stuff into a plastic bag that was, fortuitously enough, exactly the size of a puppy's tummy. He'd sense my coming even before I'd rounded the curve leading in from the public road. I'd barely see him in the dim starlight and the fluorescent tube back at the corner. I'd usually hear him first. He'd give a happy "yowlp" and bend down on his front paws. I don't recall that the Buddha ever gave us this particular mudra, but that was no fault of this puppy. I'd scratch his ears and he'd be all licks and tail. This from someone who used to hate dogs so much I'd never go for a walk without a sharp stick. Self-centered fear will do it every time.

At the top of the half-dozen steps under the arch where I found Nibby, people remove their footwear, if any. There's a Bata shelf nearby. To the right is a large rectangular hall with wire meshwork over the apertures which serve as windows to keep thieves from breaking in — even in Buddhaland there are the light-fingered types.

I like to speculate that they come back as night guards at a junkyard.

At this hall the bhikkhus conduct meditation and Dhamma classes. It is also where the Buddha Boy Scouts and Buddha Girl Guides have their meetings. They recite the familiar rules about brave, clean, true, and reverent, but there's no three-fingered salute and no cap that looks like a private's. The Buddha Boy Scouts isn't a fishhook for future enlisted men.

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One morning I passed a layman who was sweeping the grounds with a broad, fibery ekal broom. The foot-hardened sand was a gorgeous pattern of precise criss-cross swaths as he made his way down and back, down and back, sweeping the Bodhi tree's leaves in the direction of a cul de sac corner.

He was performing a Buddhist veneration that did not come down through history from the lips of the Buddha. It came from the pens of followers so distant that the Buddha must have seemed to them shadows of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greatgreat grandchildren's' grandchildren's' grandchildren. When I first heard that phrase it seemed to me excessive. Then Sarath explained to me that the phrase meant each of those ancestors is still alive today as we will long hence be to our eons-ahead progeny, as each Sri Lankan family member is a facet of Indra's net which reflects every other facet while simultaneously being a facet itself.

Sweeping the vihara grounds is called Bodhi Puja. The idea comes from the second week after the Buddha's Enlightenment. As a mark of gratitude to the Bodhi tree that sheltered him, the Buddha stood a certain distance from the Bodhi and gazed at it "with motionless eyes" for one week. Venerating a Bodhi tree has come to be a commemoration of the Buddha's enlightenment.

As originally conceived, sweeping the leaves of the Bodhi tree was a simply a way to earn merit, keep the vihara grounds tidy, and better the circumstances of future existence. It was also a good meditation on impermanence.

However, in India the idea arose that Bodhi Puja also increased one's intelligence and intellectual attainments. As the Buddha specifically proscribed praying to his memory, today's Sri Lankan Buddhists turn to Hindu or the island's ancestral gods to solve the problem of help one's child to be born healthy, that a business venture shall prosper, or any of the multitude of other vexations over which willpower has no control. Many travelers on their way to Anuradhapura remark on the ubiquity of little papier-mâché idols of Gana Deviyo that reside amid flower offerings along the roadsides.

They look like chubby dwarves with elephant heads as they grin past their trunks. These little sacristies of palm-frond and raffia are usually set on a few rocks or a wood platform under a tree. Gana Deviyo is 192

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the Sinhala name for Ganesh, the Hindu god of intellectual pursuits.

Ganesh is the god to talk to when facing a tough exam. Yet enter any of the houses nearby and you will also find a Buddha statue in a corner or a wildly overyellowed print of the Buddha over the door.

These little Ganeshes go much further back than the Buddha, further even than the Hindu deities, back beyond even the upstart brahminism of the Aryans, back to the aboriginal gods of forest and field. The great-great-etcetera-grandchildrens' etceteras spanning such eons of Lankan time may have been gods and may have been human or perhaps a bit of both, but they had to originate somewhere.

The Veddah peoples are today's last remnants of the aboriginal Nakkas and Yaksas who settled ancient Lanka sometime after 50,000 B.C. They call their gods Ne Yaku. It means "spirits of dead ancestors".

The Ne Yaku gods were as fearsome as only gods related to disease and death can be. Their pantheon numbers in the hundreds of thousands — quite a propitiation job for the village kapuralas (god priests) or yakaduras (demon priests), and the devil dancers who writhe and grimace during all-night masked exorcisms even today.

Lucky tourists can occasionally find these (especially in the south) by asking around at a Hindu kovil, but the performances they see will likely be as sanitized as the Kohomba dance performances at Kandy.

It is in the little visited and sometimes inaccessible backroads regions of the Uva and Monaragala provinces where the ancient Veddah traditions are stronger. Here one can find exotica like a plate of red hot iron pressed against the bottom of a woman sufferer's feet to relieve her of an excess of the humors of bile while the entire village blows conches. By dawn it seems trivial whether the bile is any better or worse off than before.

As it freighted across the centuries, Catholicism put into quite a number of ports-of-call: Adoration here, Veneration there, with Pontifex Maximum on the horizon as it picked up cargo at Rosary and Beatification and Summa Theologica. Today it groans like a galleon. Over that same ocean of centuries and a third of the world away, Buddhism was voyaging across similar currents, even to the point of devising its Bodhisatta equivalent of the Virgin Mary and its analog to the Rosary, Bodhi Puja.

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Bodhi Puja was named and formulated by an arahant named Sakim Sammajjaka, whose name means "The One Who Swept the Bodhi Shrine Once". He limned of Bodhi Puja: "My heart is suffused by serene joy upon seeing the Patali Bodhi Tree of the Buddha. Taking an ekal broom I sweep all around the tree and worship it. I do not suffer from boils, spots, nor itching of any kind. Such is the merit gained by sweeping! My heart is never beset with sorrow or lamentation. My mind remains firm and upright. Such is the merit gained by sweeping!"

A good man with a boils and a broom Sakim might have been, but he proved more adept at adding ailments than removing them.

Shortly after his paean above we begin to read in Mahayana Apadsana literature that venerating the Bodhi Tree earns not simply merit in general but many quite specific merits, namely: 1. Future births will always be among humans and gods; no further births will be in states of woe.

2. When born among humans, such births will always be in rich and fortunate families.

3. Acquiring a handsome form and a majestic personality.

4. Acquiring a golden complexion.

5. Being endowed with skin that is soft and smooth like that of an infant, not coarse like that of an alligator or buffalo.

6. Dust and dirt will not accumulate on the body.

7. The body is never rendered impure by sweat.

8. Boils, sores, colored spots, itching, and pruritis never assail the body.

9. Immunity from disease.

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10. Immunity from mental worry.

11. Not having enemies.

12. Being blessed with sufficient food, clothing, drink, and other objects of use.

13. Never being subject to calamities arising from fires, thieves, or the king.

14. Obtaining servants, helpers, or followers according to ones liking.

15. Enjoyment of a long span of life.

16. The people in one's village being well disposed towards the sweeper and solicitous of the sweeper's 17. Fame and prosperity, enjoyment of pleasures, friendliness of one's relatives, and the ability to live without fear or suspicion.

18. Protection afforded by gods, men, asuras, gandhabbas, yaksas, and raksas.

19. Attainment of the supreme nibbana.

20. Being blessed exceedingly with the propensity towards meditation and attainment of the Path and the Fruits thereof.

Although Bodhi Puja is practiced by the pious faithful in Sri Lanka today — a good example being every morning at 5:30 A.M. as I blearily arrive at the Gangarama Vihara — its principles come to us via Mahayana writings called the Saddharmapundarika, which has this as a preface: Anyone who has merely heard the Buddha's preaching, who has performed the kind of meritorious actions, who has led a 195

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meritorious life, can become a Buddha. Moreover, even those who worship relics, erect stupas, construct images whether jeweled or marbled or wooden, be they statues or frescoes, even children at play making stupas in the sand or who scribble figures on the wall, those who offer flowers or perfumes have on some occasion thought of the words "Honor to the Buddha" — all these will attain Enlightenment.

As Joseph Campbell so aptly put it, "Well for Pete's sake!" Sakim may have been good at combining mental gymnastics with wishful thinking, but he didn't spend much time absorbing the lessons of nature: in a hive of hundreds of bees there is only one queen bee at a time. In the hive of humanity, there comes only one Buddha at a time.

If all this seems like some curious artifact from times gone by, it is helpful to read today's New Age literature.

The centerpiece of a temple is its dagoba. This cupola-shaped whitewashed dome made of solid brick conceals a relic of the Buddha or holy person inside. The dome rests on a multilayered plinth of which the uppermost layer is the turned-up-and-out petals of a lotus.

The five layers of the plinth beneath are composed of architectural shapes whose profiles are termed cyma recta (a lissajous S sloping inward), torus (like a thin cookie with ovaloid edges), facia (a short fat vertical column), cyma versa (the lissajous S turned upside-down so it slopes outward), and beak, which looks more or less like you'd imagine. The result bears a striking resemblance to the pedestals of Greek columns. This fact keeps all sorts of Ph.D. candidates off the streets as they write their way through fellowships trying to deduce what happened to the remnants of Alexander's armies and what were Hellenic trade patterns in the seven centuries bridging the life of Christ. While it is true that motifs from Greek art suffused past Mojendaro and the Indus into Subcontinental art, what academics writing for their peers tend to underreport is the majesty and beauty of the great Lankan land whose great Lankan people still bake the bread and grow the rice and sell the cloth, little changed by the great Lankan centuries that, too, freight over time, even though they're dhoni rigged these days and sport a Buddha on the prow.

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Some dagobas can be truly immense. Two of the many at Anuradhapura are the size of the second pyramid at Giza and equally solid. Directly in front of the Gangarama's dagoba is an image house.

That's hardly the word for it. Inside this vaulted enclosure, with the approximate floor space of the rumpus room in a suburban tract home, is a gauzy veil behind which rises a painted image of the standing Buddha — in this case a nearly twenty-foot-tall solid rock Buddha whose robes are painted in a brilliant lustery carmine red.

The color is darker than the orangified salmon hue used for the robes of monks throughout the Theravadaland of Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. Cloth dyed saffron renders them valueless.

The walls enclosing the Gangarama Buddha are covered with frescoes. Lankan frescoes were already a robust art tradition by the time of Christ. Some four-hundred-year-old leather templates in the Colombo Museum were used to produce the repeated ceiling and wall lotuses which are a hallmark of "contemporary" Sri Lankan frescoes. The word is in quotes because the Sri Lankan idea of a contemporary fresco is any painted during and after the time of the great restorer king Kirti Sri Rajasinha starting about 1747. In the hamlet of Niligama near the great rock cave paintings of Dambulla, you can pay a call on seventy-year-old Mr. P.G. Jivan Naide, where you will be served warm tea and even warmer reminiscences. Mr. Naide is the current generation of a family of painters who were chartered Bodhinarayana Mulacharya about 150 B.C. The name derives from Mr. Naide's distant ancestor Bodhinarayana, who belonged to a group of craftsmen from India who came to Lanka during the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa in the third century B.C. As Mr. Naide relates his lineage and the art his family has invented as offhandedly as most people talk about their Aunt Myrt the rose painter, he presents a few artifacts for your interest: a golden pin and plate used to anoint Anuradhapura kings, a golden processional headdress which is the visual insignia to his profession much like the guild robes of medieval and renaissance Europe; and above all, the formula books which describe how to powder gemstones, macerate roots, or prepare whitewash base from rehydrated quicklime that was originally made by burning the crystalline pure white dolomite rock 197

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that seams its way across strata all over Sri Lanka. Lime kilns are as ubiquitous in Sri Lanka as hardware stores in suburbia.

Gangarama's frescoes were painted by Mr. Naide's forebears between 1747 and 1780. The background color is a red like thinned blood, i.e., the same chroma of red but with less black. One image depicts Gotama on his horse with his great black hair flowing backwards and his golden crown and earrings, wearing flowing robes knotted at the waist in the same silhouette and drape as one sees today all over Sri Lankan among workmen who similarly knot their sarongs. He has a massive jeweled collar that extends from his neck to the ends of his shoulders and two gauntlets that look like long flared gloves from which the hands have been cut off. He carries a battle knife that looks little different than what the mango sellers and coconut huskers use today. His favorite charioteer Channa holds his horse Kanthaka by the tail to calm it from the apparition which lies ahead, four devas who have strewn red flowers across his path.

Behind him is the palace where Yasodhara, the cross-cousin wife he had married when both were sixteen, and infant son Rahula still lay sleeping.

The son had acquired his name because he was born just as Gotama was leaving to renounce the pleasure palace and its false goals, and depart on his quest for greater truth. When Yasodhara bore him this son, far from being happy Gotama greeted the news with frustration. He lamented, "A fetter has arisen, an impediment has been born!" In the Prakrit dialect of Gotama the word "impediment" is rahu. He therefore named his son Rahula. Today Rahula is a popular name for boys.

The walls on all three sides — and the insides of the inwardlyopening doors — are covered without cease with scenes from the life of the Buddha and the Jatakas, the stories of the Buddha's former lives in which he gradually perfected the qualities that led to his Enlightenment. Almost every vihara has dozens of painted stories on its walls. They are the island's equivalent of the facade at Conques in the Auvergne or the portals of Moissac, Souillac, Beaulieu-surDordogne and dozens of other French eglises. Just as in the rhythmic woven wrought-iron strapwork on the doors of eleventh-century chapels in Bourgogne you can see Descartes looming over the horizon 198

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six centuries hence, in Sri Lankan image houses today you can see the Buddha looming over the horizon in the century of 4500 A.D., which according to Buddhist scholars is when he is supposed to return.

While the great Sung and Tang dynasties were developing their ceramics and bronzes; when the Japanese were evolving the junihito, the earliest and greatest kimono silhouette of them all; when Charlemagne was creating a cadre of scribes who can be said to have truly begun the Information Age as we think of information today — in Sri Lanka monks were painting the enclosures of their viharas with frescoes representing the life of a man who bore a great message about living without the bondage of self and who died 1,300 years prior. The point Sakim missed and that Mr. Naide has got is that puja of any kind, whether Bodhi tree or fresco, must be beyond the bondage of self. Sakim dwells on the benefits that sweeping leaves will bring to his self; Mr. Naide talks of what benefits his self can bring to the art.

Here to the Gangarama I come to meditate. Buddha Pup settles himself in for a long lap snooze, belching contentedly from the leftovers of last night's rice and curry.

On good days I meditate before the image house. In bad weather I go inside. But on the best days I meditate before the lotus.

Between the dagoba and the image house, encircled by a plot of trod grass and a few worn stones, the Gangarama's pool produces but one sole lotus. One cannot really describe the lotus. True enough, it grows from the mud and unfolds to the sky. But many flowers do that, and for that matter, so do many art forms. The lotus sheds water, whether from waves or the skies. But so do ducks and rooftops and umbrellas, and during the storms of men, caregiving personalities.

The lotus is very beautiful — one could go through the rest of this book stringing together adjectives both eloquent and improbable, and never really capture its beauty. The lotus is said never to die. Well, it, too, is made of matter, and perhaps if it can't be said that matter doesn't last forever, it certainly sticks around longer than the rest of us. Why then does the lotus figure so highly in Buddhist art and psychology?

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Once a Hindu brahmin named Dona saw in the Buddha's footprints certain characteristic signs that marked the soles of a holy man.

"Your reverence will be a Deva?" he asked.

"No, a Deva who resides in heavenly planes I am not."

"Your reverence will be a Gandhabba, then?"

"No, a musician of the heavens I am not."

"A Yaksa, then?"

"No, brahmin, nor am I a demon."

"Then your reverence must be a human."

"Indeed, nor am I a human."

"What then, pray, is your reverence?"

The Buddha looked at the brahmin and said: "As a lotus, fair and lovely, By the water is not soiled, By the world am I not soiled.

Brahmin, therefore am I Buddha."

This morning I brought this to my Gangarama meditation. I'd hardly scrunched my tush into a good meditation spot when Buddha Pup decided he would help along my meditation with a lap sit. I had been bothered by the dilemmas presented by a recent two-day visit at a refugee camp from which I had just returned. I went there to learn the real results of the Tamil Tiger war — who was being hurt, who was being kidnapped, who was being dispossessed. I'd chanced on the camp near the Ritigala Nature Reserve on the oft-traveled Maradankawala/Habarane shortcut between Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. Near Palugaswewa a group of enterprising villagers has created half a dozen two-story scarecrow displays that look like a cross between Opening Night At The Opera and Punch & Judy Build Their Treehouse. I'd been past these twenty times but one day while my guests were off happily photographing I wandered away and chanced on a group of cadjan frond huts which were spaced much more closely together than those in any Sri Lankan village I'd seen 200

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before — tight families they like, but tight living conditions are quite another matter. Perhaps thirty children came running and surrounded me. Very few of them pleaded the standard lines, "School pen!? Bonbon!?" That was unusual. The fact that they were all under about twelve also intrigued me: where were the teenagers? As the adults began to congregate I noticed many but not all the men wore Muslim skullcaps and some women wore brilliantly colored calico Hindu saris and earrings through each nostril, while others draped their osaris over the left shoulder as Sinhalese women do.

As it is unusual to find all three of these groups living in such a crowded space — the combination of different languages, religions, and racial stocks is a volatile mix, even without the added problem of cadjan-frond walls so thin no one has any secrets. It was even more unusual to find all the village men in the village rather than the fields.

It suddenly dawned on me these were refugees from the Tamil Tigers in the north.

One of my reasons I had come to Sri Lanka was to discover firsthand what was really happening beyond the infrequent headlines and sparse facts being printed in the Western press. The refugee camp was a heaven-sent opportunity. That day I couldn't spend any time with them because of my tour group. I returned a week later with a sleeping bag, mosquito net, camera, and lots of the kind of paper one doesn't expect to find in refugee camps. I pitched my makeshift tent a kilometer away thinking I'd have some privacy and time to write. I was wrong. How would you like to wake up surrounded by thirty children just dying to see how a Westerner pees?

The mudalali was a fiftyish Muslim man. In his white embroidered skullcap, shirt, and sarong, he was the very picture of stern demeanor required of a refugee camp leader. I never saw him smile. I don't suppose I would either, given at least seventy inhabitants to look after, half of whom were children with no schools to go to, plus three religions and languages, a limited supply of firewood to be had from the local trees without alienating the land's owners, a biweekly supply of food trucked in with a breezy attitude about schedules, no electricity, too many children around too many kerosene lamps in the middle of too many wall-to-wall grass huts, 201

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and a per-household income of 1,200 rupees ($30) per adult from the International Red Cross and High Commissioner on Refugees.

The absent teenagers had been forcibly conscripted as cannon fodder by the Tigers and none of their families had a clue where they were or whether they might be seen again. Here the children grew up. Camp life was the only life they had ever known. What schooling as existed was overcrowded. The mothers wore the lined creases of years with few smiles, years of constant preoccupation from what the next meal would be prepared, years of trying to wash with not enough soap. There were no TVs, no cellular phones, no international faxes. International awareness was one radio. Near prayer times the Muslim mudalali tuned it to Radio Islamabad to pick up the call to prayer, then he would order the men to roll out the rugs. The rest of the time the radio picked up a Tamil-language station whose saccharine film-musical songs and hysterical announcements identified it as 150,000-watt-strong Radio Madras, which blasts Tamil songs and news all over Asia and is the only link of refugees like these have to the homeland less than eighty miles away from which they'd been driven by the Tamil Tiger terrorists.

All this to get heroin from the Golden Triangle to Europe. For, although the Tamil Tigers might have once been patriots fighting for their people, I soon learned from a large number of sources (mostly Tamil) that the Tigers are now the biggest dope dealers in South Asia.

The homeland their leaders want isn't for their people but for its ports and airfields. If you think any of this is farfetched, spend a day in a refugee camp and ask the people who live there.

Buddha Pup changed his angle of snooze. Once he and Nibby were starving; now they were fed. That had nothing to do with me. It had nothing to do with the fact I too got my food from somewhere else and was merely passing it on. But it had everything to do with the fact that inside those cadjan frond huts built so close to each other, where there were not even comic books for children, there were toys.

Homemade toys.

One child was so proud as he came up to me, towing on a string a little toy truck he had made out of the most improbably of materials: 202

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gokkala palm-fronds that he had woven into something resembling a frame, a suspension, a cab, and a flatbed, and wheels made of sections of dried gourd sawn into half-inch widths and spinning on axles of stick. It was a perfect little truck, and he had made it himself.

And to the Buddha's words to the brahmin I added for Sakim and Adam, wherever they be: Homemade toys Are lotus toys.

In fact, the lotus itself.

Neither wall nor path around nor leap over, the lotus grows from the mud and unfolds to the sky. It sheds the water of its existence. It is beautiful. And it will never die.

Buddha Pup stirred, then resettled, his tail tip just covering his nose. I thought to meditate on him, but that was so presumptuous. One really can't adequately describe anything, meditation or Buddha Pups included — but then, that's the whole idea.

For the first few seconds, eyes closing slowly until all imagery vanishes, the senses are distinctly five — incense, hibiscus, gardenia, jasmine, the guttering smell of the oil lamps lit last night, birds, coughs, faraway truck roars, children sounds, the acridness of a household cooking fire just getting started, the sound of the arising monks blowing their noses with their fingers, the dryness in my mouth.

Via these is self relinquished into tranquility. There's a brief time of ego, the self, the I's place in the scheme of things, of the trap of wanting to think about the events ahead in the day. But then, muscle by muscle, thought by thought, breath by breath, emptying comes.

The I transforms into a plankton floating in the sea and eating the sun. Every sound and sight around seems somehow distilled, yet in the clarity they are really one while being each of themselves at once.

This is but a few moments, and then comes the descent into the hour of peace. The immensity is such that it is like what happens to that plankton when eventually it dies. Its calcium carbonate husk slowly descends towards the floor of the sea. From its former life a 203

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few feet from the surface, it descends into the subsurface currents that gyre across every sea and make the world's weather and fish as they swirl. Then beneath the hundreds of feet of these into where the light fades to faintness then nothingness then black. The lighted part of the ocean is but its skin; true oceanic being is miles and miles further, down into the black. That's where the plankton falls, passing wondrous glowing fish as it does. But as it nears the miles-deep bottom it encounters the first movement it has known since the equatorial and continental currents way up in the light.

Abyssal currents are what truly power the ocean. They flow in continent-sized sheets from the sinking, cold, dense, salty waters of the poles towards the Equator traveling but a few meters in an hour.

There they collide with each other and force themselves sideways in jets, like the jet stream of the skies, to the surface. The plankton comes with that flow, emerging in one place as a great upwelling off the coasts of Japan, in another as the driving force behind the Gulf Stream, and in yet another the great wall of nutrients off Peru that when disrupted by the surface currents become El Nino.

First light comes in pastels of pastels. The colors of the brick and stone and wood of the vihara change as though black is imperceptibly being removed from the ink of a printer's pot leaving the brilliant pure colors of the day.

A drummer picks up a stick and begins to flail a log drum in a complex rhythm of staccatos. He's warning the night that the day's diversions are about to begin. The bhikkhu arrives in shuffling sandals. In this early light his robe's color resembles the subtle hues of the Masaccio frescoes in Florence's Carmine Chapel before they recently restored them. His exquisite Sri Lankan polished-mahogany skin is so dark at this hour it looks like the ghost of a departed color come back to visit Earth before the final voyage out into nibbana. He rings the bell to the image house, where within is the eighteen-foot standing statue of the Buddha. The statue is nearly invisible at this hour behind its tulle veil, but the low lamps reveal dim reddishness on an enormous flowing robe that during the day radiates its color almost inextinguishably from within.

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The Gangarama's bhikkhus enter and begin a chant, a long, low, sonorous, vocabularyless mingling of their voices with the voices of nature all around. It is a series of monotones spaced above and below about a third of the chromatic distance from the notes of the Western scale. Their risings and fallings over the waves of these five tones is so solemn and century-laden I hear in them as equals a Gregorian chant in the eleventh-century Abbey of St. Gall and Greek hermits hailing Mary from their caves on Mt. Athos. The crickets have not yet stopped singing and the birds have just started. The water from the hills pours through a bamboo spout into the basins which the monks use equally for thirst as for baths. Dogs and crows speak of hunger in the distance.

We are not alone. A villager comes in wearing his sarong and short sleeve cotton shirt. He mutters "Aiubowan — Good Morning — Dooglahs" as I sit. I feel Buddha Pup perking is hears. The man knows his greeting does not disturb me; meditation is, after all, not church. It is the acceptance of accepting all things, the unconditional acceptance of beingborne borne by the abyssal flow of being without knowing it. I realize that churches are what happens to people who are afraid of going to hell while spirituality is what happens to those who have been there.

Somewhere I begin to upwell from that current flowing very far down. I recognize the man's voice and greet him, though my eyes are still closed. He owns the boutique where I buy my bhondi thumb-toforefinger-sized doughnuts spiced with anise and cumin which taste like heaven and digest like lead. These he sells strung by the dozen on a tube of cinnamon.

The mists around the vihara vanish into clear dawn skies. I rise into the lighted layers of the sea. The little geckos call for their mates.

The first bus of the day honks down at the junction for commuters into Kandy. A moth flutters around the lamps of the Buddha. The clang of the anvil at the distant Lithili Lathe Works descends down the hill from the street near the room where I stay.

By 5:45 the sky has lightened and now emerges tint by tint with birdsong from the trees. By 6:00 it is legions of birds and lacework flight as they seek an insect end to their hunger. By 6:15 the sun is up and the world is alive. People are off to their jobs. Buddha Pup 205

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snuffles around my pockets hoping I forgot a little something in his lunch bag. I make a mental not to bring extra next time for just such a surprise. I know Nibby will be waiting for me under the bougainvillea grove. Someday they will return bringing food for refugees. The ocean is immense, complex, inexplicable, an existence which no wall can span or surmount, and in fact, the wall means nothing.

I walk back to my room a nutrient just thrust up off the coast of Sri Lanka.

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Tales from the Jatakas The development of Buddhism paralleled that of Christianity as the simplicity of the message became lost amid the worshipful fantasies of the message-bearers. The more the disciples, the more the embellishments. Jesus's memory had only twelve followers to contend with; the Buddha's memory had over three hundred.

Neither desired a personality cult. Had Jesus known what Saul of Tarsus would do to his teaching, he probably would have omitted the lightning bolt from Saul's list of lifestyles. The Buddha's teaching was in even a worse position, as it was communicated solely by word of mouth for over five centuries after he passed into parinibbana.

If Jesus would be hard-pressed to find himself — much less his words and even still less his deeds — in Chartres cathedral the day they consecrated it in 1260, imagine the Buddha's reaction if he were to wander through the Rock Temple of Dambulla today, with its 360odd statues of himself in every imaginable meditative position and its 20,000 square feet of frescos depicting, among other things, 547 stories of his lives before reincarnating in the body of Siddartha Gotama in the fifth century B.C. Visually, Dambulla is as splendid as any manmade object on Earth, but the message is hardly one of nonattachment.

These 557 stories are called Jatakas. They are hand-me-down legends from a much older storytelling tradition for which the life of the Buddha was perfectly suited for recasting into morality tales. The Jatakas have nothing to do with the Pali Canon, which is the Theravada sect's compilation of the Buddha's words as recorded on ola-leaf manuscript by 500 Buddhist reciters and scribes between 35 and 32 B.C. at the monastery of Aluvihara near the contemporary town of Matale.

Rather, the Jatakas slowly evolved from stories told by the laity — at that time composed mainly of farmers and villagers who already 209

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possessed an immense folklore of superstitions, astrology, divinations based on the behavior of animals, nostrums, and animist deities such as sacred trees and springs. The word most often used to describe the quality of the Jataka stories is pasada, which is a unity of emotion and belief that avers something is so because one believes it to be so.

The personality cult of the Buddha appears even in the most fundamental text of Buddhist belief, the Dhammapada. Before the text begins there occurs the salutation Nammo tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa — "Homage to Him, the Exalted, the Worthy, the Fully Enlightened One". Every Buddhist rite begins similarly.

As with Christianity, it wasn't long before acting out the faith — pilgrimages, rituals, relics, devotional art — supplanted living it.

Lesser gods derived from folk deities and deities from the Hindu pantheon — which were more like super-humans than true deities — came to occupy a place in Buddhism akin to saints in Catholicism. It is easier to deal with a human figure with human failings than with a remote patriarchal figure with supernatural knowledge. Unlike Christianity, the early Buddhist faithful did not turn for succor to arahats — fully enlightened humans which are the Buddhist equivalent of saints — but rather to their indigenous gods and the comforts of the unchanging behavior of nature. Faith of this kind is more a form of literature than a spiritual understanding, and thus are the Jatakas.

The same thing happened in Europe a millennium later. The missionaries to France and Ireland may have carved crosses on the Celtic menhirs and cut down the druids' oak forests to get rid of the sacred mistletoe, but beliefs in witchcraft and demons remained. To this day there are springs in the Poitou and Brittany regions of France where one can lift up stones and find coins underneath. The mother goddess in the Virgin Mary and the multitude of special-purpose saints reminds us how much closer Catholicism is to paganism than to Jesus. A revealing difference between Buddhist and Catholic psychology is that the principle architectural image designating the Catholic place of worship is the oversized penis of the spire and the locked womb of the tabernacle which only a priest may enter, while the Buddhist temple is marked by the breast-shaped dome of the dagoba and a vihara sanctuary anyone may enter.

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In its doctrines of reincarnation and a multiplicity of Buddhas of which Gotama is only the most recent, Buddhism provided even more fertile ground for fantasy. Even in documents as ostensibly "pure" as the Pali Canon there are references to the Buddha remembering his former births. The Digha Nikaya Sutta, verse 14, mentions six, and verse 26 alludes to the Buddha's next incarnation as the Bodhisatta ("Future Buddha" as spelled in Pali) named Mitraiya — pronounced "Metteyya" — meaning "The Kindly One". Bodhisattas forego the release from suffering in this life via the path to Enlightenment taught by Gotama in order to return from samsara time after time to help those less spiritually developed.

However, when we read that these seven rebirths occur on seven lotus blossoms rather than via more traditional methods, we realize we are on the path to attachment, not Enlightenment. Supposedly there are an infinite number of Buddha rebirths because the world has no beginning or end. This view squares with the information provided by geology and anthropology about the way Genesis does.

Historically, the doctrine of the Bodhisatta may have been adapted from the doctrines of the Jains, another reformist cult reacting against the selfish arrogance of Brahmanism about the time of the Buddha's own reforms. The Jatakas probably evolved into their mythopoetic form in order to make the abstractions of Buddhism more palatable to farmers and fishers who loved gaudy tales told by the village fireside and who were more keen on a good plot than on exemplary virtues.

Now matter how they originated, the Jatakas are miniature morality plays which focus on the ten moral perfections which lead to the spiritual path of the Buddha — benevolence, generosity, fortitude, and so on. Translated with scrupulous attention to their original language and form, the English versions of the Jatakas are a fusion of Milton's couplets with John Donne's prose ("Yea, would he fain have wished ...."). They are also quite long, with a profusion of subplots.

Fortunately, a renowned Sri Lankan writer named Miss Sujatha Udugama has condensed a number of the Jatakas into the contemporary short story form, which are much more "readerfriendly" than the originals. The four Jatakas below have been condensed from Miss Udagama's renderings. They illustrate some of the literary devices the Jatakas employ. The first prefaces one morality 211

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drama with another, the combination of which is a seeming nonsequitur until the moral itself is explained in the last few lines.

Baka Jataka: The Crane, the Fish, and the Crab There once lived at Jetavana a monk who was an expert in the art of making robes. He could patch up the oldest of material most skillfully, dye it in deep orange, starch it and give it an exquisite silky finish, and make the robe look brand new. When a monk came to him with new material to make into a robe, he would exchange it for a ready-made robe, made with the old material. And, believing him, every monk who came to him went away with the ready-made robe. But one day the robe would become dirty, and when washed in hot water it faded and became bedraggled and all the patches showed.

Now during this time there was yet another robe maker in a nearby hamlet, who at one time used to deceive everyone just like the monk at Jetavana, but had now reformed himself because he had tired of being caught in his lies. A monk who had been deceived complained to him, "There is a person just as mean as you once were. He takes new material, and supplies robes made with old cloth, thereby cheating all those who purchase robes from him."

The robe maker from the hamlet made a beautiful robe from old cloth, dyed it in a lustrous shade of orange, and gave it the finest silky finish. He then wore this robe and paid a visit to monk at Jetavana. The moment the monk saw the robe he coveted it and felt he had never seen one so beautiful. He proposed to the robe maker from the hamlet to exchange the robe for some new cloth, saying, "Sir, we village brethren find it difficult to obtain cloth as fine as this for robe making." The hamlet robe maker let himself be persuaded, and went home with a fine piece of new cloth.

The monk from Jetavana wore the robe with great pleasure. But after a time it became dirty and he washed it. All the flaws on the robe showed. It looked old and shabby and it was obvious he had been tricked by his own methods.

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There once lived a kind and gentle spirit on a tree which stood near the lotus pond of a great forest. During the summer, the water in the pond would fall very low and the fish in it would be very uncomfortable and afraid.

One day a crane saw the fish in this pond and had a great desire to eat them. He perched himself on the pond and thought very deeply. The fish caught sight of him and asked, "What are you thinking of, Sir, as you perch there by yourself?"

"I am thinking," the crane said, "of you, my dear fish. How very uncomfortable you must feel in this pond that is drying up. The heat is intense and your food is scarce."

"What a strange thought," said the fish, "No one has ever thought of us fish like that. They only think of us as food when they are hungry, and that is what you are thinking of, too, isn't it?"

"Oh no!" the crane said hurriedly. "I want to take you to another pond, which is large and beautiful and full of water. Five varieties of lotus blossoms are found in it, and trust me, I have no desire whatsoever to eat you. If you have any doubts, allow me to take one of you and I will show him the pond and then bring him back here safely to you."

Believing the crane, the fish gave him a very large fish, blind in one eye, which they felt would be a match for the crane, ashore or in the water. The crane took the large fish and flew him to the large pond. After he had seen the extent of it, the beauty and coolness of its water, the crane took the fish back to his companions. The one-eyed fish told them about the new pond and all the fish were eager to go there.

First of all, the crane took the one-eyed fish to the new pond. But instead of putting him in the water, the crane flew into a vaeana tree.

There the crane squeezed him into a fork in a limb and pecked him to death and ate him, letting the bones fall at the foot of the tree. Then he flew back and said to the fish, "I have taken your friend to the pond. Who is the next one who wants to go there?"

Thus he took them all, one by one, and all of them met the same fate, adding to the pile of bones at the base of the tree.

When he came back to the pond for the last time he could find no more fish. There was only a lone crab. The crane felt like eating him, 213

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too, and said to him, "I have taken all the fish away, to a pond fine and beautiful, and full of lotuses. Why not come? I shall be happy to take you there, too."

"But how will you carry me?" asked the crab, who was suspicious about so fine a story.

"I can take you on my beak," replied the crane.

The wily crab said, "Ah, but my shell is very slippery and I am afraid you might drop me. But if I take hold of your neck with my claws, I can hold on tight and then go to the pond with you."

The crane agreed to this. With his claws gripped the neck of the crane with pincers that, if he chose, could be as strong as the pincers of a smith. "Now you can take me to the pond," he said, "I won't fall off now."

The crane then flew to the pond and showed the crab the water.

But then he turned towards the veaena tree on the bank.

"The pond is the other way," said the crab, "why are you going this way?"

"Do you think I am your slave to carry you around?" the crane replied angrily. "You see those bones under the tree? I ate up all the fish, just as now I am going to eat you."

"You won't get that chance," said the crab. So saying, he tightened his claws around the crane's neck. With his beak wide open and tears coming from his eyes and trembling with fear, the crane said, "Please, Sir, I will not eat you. I will put you in the pond. Please...don't kill me!"

"Then put me in the pond," ordered the crab.

The crane flew to the mud by the water and entered it. But the crab tightened his grip suddenly and nipped off the crane's head as easily as a knife cuts off a lotus stalk.

The Spirit of the Tree, who lived beside the pond, felt happy at what had taken place. He made the whole forest ring with the words he sighed with his leaves, "Guile profits not guileful folk. Mark what the crane got from the crab."

In one of his previous births the Bodhisatta was the Spirit of the Tree, the Jetavana robe maker was the crane, and the robe maker from the country was the crab.

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***** Sammodamana Jataka: The Quarreling Quails Long ago, when Brahamadatta was king, there lived in a forest a very good and wise quail with a following of many thousands of quails.

One day a fowler came into this forest to capture quails to make a living for himself by selling them in the market. The method he used to capture quails was this: He would whistle an imitation of a quail song from a distance and thus draw a number of them together. Then he would throw a net over them and beat the sides of the net to get them all to huddle together in the middle. Then he would take them out one by one and put them in a basket for the market.

This continued for a time, until at last the wise quail gathered all the quails together and spoke to them. "The fowler is harming us greatly, for he has already destroyed many of us. There is a way you can escape from him and his way of capturing you. The moment he casts his net over you, each of you must put your head through the mesh of the net and fly up and away together until you find a thorn thicket. Then you must land on that. After that you must remove your heads from the mesh, then creep through the thicket and fly back to your homes."

The quails could see the logic of this and agreed. The next day, when the fowler cast his net over them they did as they were advised.

When they had allowed the net to fall over the thorn bushes, they crept away and flew home.

The fowler went all over in search of his net, and when he found the net, it was very difficult for him to get it out. He tore the net in many places and spent the whole day scratching and puncturing himself. Day after day this went on. He became very dejected and disappointed, and his wife grew angry and stamped her foot and berated him, "You come home empty handed every day. What is the meaning of this? Do you have another home to maintain elsewhere?"

"Far from it," he said, very sad that his wife should think thus instead of helping him find a solution. "Those quails are very united 215

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now. The moment I cast my net they fly up together and escape. Then they drop my net on thorn bushes. Anyway, very soon, I know they will begin quarreling among themselves, for everyone knows how quarrelsome they are. Then I can capture the whole lot, and then you will smile and stop making nasty remarks to me."

By and by, just as he had said, one of the quails accidentally trod on another's head when they alighted in a grain field.

"Who trod on my head!?" the quail demanded angrily.

"I did. But it was an accident. I didn't mean to do it," replied the guilty one.

But the other quail remained angry and said to the others, "I don't think he flies as hard as the rest of us when we lift up the net the fowler throws over us!"

Soon all the quails had taken up one side or the other and they all made a furious noise with their accusations. The wise quail leader heard these angry words and knew there would be no safety for the quails as long as they quarreled this way. He decided to go away, leaving the screeching quails to their battles, for he knew they were headed for destruction.

After a few days the fowler returned and by whistling their calls he managed to gather a good number of them together. Then he cast his net over them and herded them towards the middle. The quail whose head had been stepped on said to the other, "They say when you don't lift the net because you're afraid your feathers will get mussed." The other quail retorted, "They say your wings molt when you lift the net, so go ahead, lift the net by yourself.

On and on they bickered like this until before they knew it the fowler was putting them into the basket for the market. "At least!" his wife said, and she was all smiles and joy welcoming him.

The Bodhisatta, in one of his previous births, was the good and wise quail who knows the power of unity. The foolish quails were Devadatta, who is always trying to destroy the wisdom of the Bodhisatta.

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Serivanija Jataka: The Two Hawkers Long ago in the kingdom of Seri there lived a hawker of pots and pans named Serivan. He was very wise, kind, and gentle, and had a serene appearance on his face.

In the same kingdom there was also another hawker who traded in pots and pans. Unlike Serivan he was wicked, greedy, and selfish, and had an angry appearance on his face. Each day he would cross the Televaha River and hawk his wares from street to street in the town of Andhapura.

In that town dwelt a very poor family, the only survivors being a young girl and her grandmother. They came from a family of very wealthy merchants who had lost everything during a raid from marauding bandits, including all male members of the family. The two women now lived in penury, earning what little they could by working for others.

However, they had in their house a collection of old pots, and a beautifully shaped eating bowl which in the old days the head of the household would eat from. Now it was brown with dirt and grit and looked shabby.

One day, to their door came the greedy hawker, shouting out loud, "Water pots for sale! Pans for sale!" When the girl heard him she wanted her grandmother to buy a new water pot because the one she carried to the town well had a crack in it and lost half its water on the return to their home. The grandmother told her they could not afford a new pot, and the girl suggested, "Perhaps we can exchange some of our old pots for a new pot." She picked up the eating bowl and continued, "Why can't we exchange this old bowl? It is useless to us."

The grandmother asked the hawker to come in. He sat down and showed him the bowl. He weighed it in his hand and looked at it, and immediately suspected it was made of gold. He took a knife from his pocket and scratched the pot. Indeed, it was gold, and worth very much money.

But being greedy, the hawker immediately devised a plan to get the pot for nothing, not even the exchange of a water pot. He 217

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pretended to be angry, threw the pot aside, saying, "Why do you waste my time on this? This is worth nothing!" So saying, he arose from his seat and left the house.

The granddaughter was upset at the man's behavior. She knew of Serivan's reputation for honesty and went to fetch him. He came to their house. The grandmother was surprised and a bit upset at the girl. "Why did you waste his time?" she said angrily, "There is no point in showing him the bowl another hawker doesn't want."

But the granddaughter was determined to get a new water pot.

"This man," she replied, "has a kind and serene face. He will not insult us or be rude to two poor and lonely people like us." So the grandmother brought the bowl to the hawker.

He weighed it in his hand and looked at the scratch and said, "Mother, this bowl is made of gold and worth a lakh (a hundred thousand) pieces of money at least. I do not have that much coin with me."

"Sir," the grandmother said, "the first man who called said this bowl is not worth even a water pot and he threw it aside. Surely, your kindness and compassion has turned it from clay into gold. So take it away, and give us what is fair for it."

At the time the hawker had only five hundred pieces of money and a stock of pots worth very much more. He gave all these to the grandmother and said, "I will weigh this pot on my scales and return to you with many pieces of money."

Placing the golden bowl under his cloak, he retained eight money pieces for the boatman across the river and back.

Only moments after he had disappeared around the corner and into the streets, the first hawker returned to the woman's house and told her he had decided after all to trade her a water pot for the bowl.

The grandmother shouted, "You said the bowl wasn't worth even a water pot. But we asked Serivan and he said it was worth a lakh of money pieces. He has already taken it away."

The greedy hawker beat his temples and cried, "That cheater! He has robbed me of a hundred thousand money pieces! He has caused me great loss! I shall go to the king about him!" He was so angry he tore his upper garments and ran to the river to try to catch Serivan.

He reached the water and saw Serivan's boat already halfway across.

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The hawker plunged into the water chasing after the boat. But his hatred was so great he paid no attention to the swift-flowing water.

He lost his footing and was carried away and drowned, berating Serivan until his head disappeared under the water. He returned in the next life as a water wheel, condemned to constantly be drowned and then revived while doing other people's work for them.

Serivan was the Bodhisatta and his enemy Dewadatta was the selfish hawker.

Kaccha-Apa Jataka: The Tortoise Who Loved His Home Too Much A family in Savvhati was once stricken by malaria fever. The parents said to their son, "Make a hole in the wall and escape somewhere to save your life." Come back after the malaria has passed, for under this house is buried our family treasure. You can get it and carry on our family." The young man returned after the malaria had passed and found everyone in his household had died.

He recovered the treasure and re-began the family line.

On another occasion a man laden with oil, butter, clothes, and other offerings called at Jetavana and sat unknowingly beside the Bodhisatta, and engaged him in conversation. The man told that there had recently been cholera in the city and he had escaped it by fleeing his house and staying outside of the city. The Bodhisatta listened to him and later addressed a crowd as follows: "In the days of old, when there arose some danger, there were some people too fond of their homes to leave them, and they perished. Those who left their homes went to a safe place and saved themselves." Then he told them this tale: Long years ago, when Brahmadutta reigned, the Bodhisatta was in one of his previous births as the son of a village potter. This son himself became a potter and had a wife and family to support.

He collected his clay at a massive shallow lake near a river. When it rained the river and lake grew so full they were one large sheet of 219

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water. But during the dry weather they separated and the lake dried up. As the waters slowly receded, the fish and tortoises that lived in the lake eating insects and water plants swam back to the river.

But one tortoise chose not to go back to the river, saying, "I was born here and I grew up here. This is my parents' home. I cannot leave it!"

As the waters disappeared and the lake bed began to crack, the tortoise dug a deep hole and buried himself in the soft, wet mud.

Sadly, it was in the very place where the potter came every year to collect clay for his pots. As he dug his wooden spade into the mud he struck the tortoise and cracked open its shell, then turned the mudcaked tortoise over onto the ground as if it was a large stone in the clay. The tortoise in its agony began to moan the song Here was I born and here I lived, my refuge was the clay; And now the clay has played me false in a grievous way.

Thee I call my potter friend, hear what I have to say!

Go where you can find happiness, wherever the place may be; Where the wise neither birthplace nor home need to see; Where happiness is life, not the death that masters thee!

Thus the tortoise spoke to the potter until he died. The potter picked him up, and, hailing for all the people of the village to come and see, said to them, "Look at this tortoise. When the fish and the other tortoises went to the river, this one stayed because he was too fond of his home. Do you see what happens when you become too attached to your things? Take care not to say to yourself, 'I have sight, I have hearing, I have smell, I have taste, I have touch, I have sons, I have daughters, I have men and maids in my service, I have gold.' Do not cleave to these things, or you will die singing the song of the tortoise."

The potter was the Bodhisatta and the tortoise was Ananda, the faithful disciple of the Buddha, in a previous birth.

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The real life and times of the Buddha are almost as much a mix of fantasy and reality as these tales. Buddhist literature religiofies the simple story of a man named Siddhattha Gotama (as it is spelled in Pali) who was born to a king who wished to shield him from the vicissitudes of the world. The young man is said to have been kept in a pleasure palace with only the finest foods, tastiest sweets, and prettiest courtesans. He married and fathered a son, but became disillusioned with court life and wanted to see the world. Disobeying his father, he left the palace grounds four times to venture into the world. He was horrified at the sufferings of everyday people. At the age of twenty-nine he left his palace and wife on the day his son was born, crossed a river which bordered the kingdom, cut off his beautiful long black hair, and went off to find a way to end suffering.

In time he discovered that the extremes of indulgence in sense pleasures or the extreme deprivations of asceticism provided no answers.

Six years later he was in a town named Gaya some distance from the city of Benares (modern-day Varanasi); there he recalled a childhood incident in which he had sat under a rose-apple tree and had entered a state of meditation. It occurred to him to return to that meditation; perhaps it was the answer. He made a cushion of grass under a ficus tree and vowed to meditate until either the answers or death came. That night, as the May full moon rose during his meditation, he rediscovered the "middle Way" of the ancient sages, which rejects extremes of pleasure and pain. From then until his eightieth year he taught his doctrines to the world. The Enlightenment that came over him is called nibbana, and consists of the four truths which are the core of Buddhism: All life is suffering.

The cause of suffering is attachment to self-centered desire.

When one foresakes self-centered desire, suffering will be extinguished.

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The Noble Eightfold Path eliminates desire: = Sila, or right living, is the moral behavior of right speech, right action, and right thought; = Samadhi is equanimity of mind brought about by the meditation goals of right exertion, right attentiveness, and right concentration; =Panna is the wisdom and insight achieved through right aspiration and right understanding.

Most Westerners accept an interpretation of the world according to beliefs devised by scholars and scientists, which describes a linear progression of human development starting with isolated huntergatherer tribes which led to nomads which became pastoralists who provided enough food for urban agglomerations to develop. If this explanation is accepted the Gotama Buddha was historical rather than metaphysical figure, a unique human who was a great reformer and teacher, but nonetheless only a single person who died and will never be with us again except in the legacy of his teachings.

Buddhists see the matter differently. To them, life is endless in the past and future. When Gotama realized the Dhamma or "Truth" under the Bodhi tree, he rediscovered an eternal Truth which is periodically uttered by great spiritually aware geniuses who arise in the universe and who are able to entirely renounce the self — the ego — so the Truth may enter them. These geniuses also possess the compassion to teach the Truth to the world so others also may attain it. Each Buddha arrives after a long succession of previous lives in which the Buddha-to-be brings to perfection a sublime virtue, called paramis. During this Bodhisatta stage in which Buddhas-to-be return from samsara time after time to help others achieve Enlightenment, they make their initial vow to follow the Path at the feet of a Buddha and return periodically to this Buddha to renew their vows during a long period which will end in Enlightenment and full Buddha-hood.

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This illustrates a fundamental difference between Sri Lankan thinking as compared with our own. We believe truths are constantly being discovered and that when proven wrong by the evidence of reason or experience they are no longer truths. Hence there are no real "truths" but only facts which are valid at the moment.

Many Sri Lankans, however, hold that the Truth is a changeless principle which was discovered by great sages long long ago and is gradually forgotten until periodic geniuses like Gotama come along to rediscover it through meditation and mindfulness. The "Three Clear Knowledges" all Buddhas discover at the moment of Enlightenment are: The fact of former existences The mechanism of kamma in which those who do evil are reborn in miserable states and those who do good are born in higher states The knowledge that there are four walls to the trap of samsara, the cycle of rebirths which result in unenlightened life being led over and over. These walls are: sensual desire, the desire for existence, the addiction to having views, and ignorance.

Was Gotama's transformation into a Buddha in the sixth century B.C. mere happenstance, or were there events that precipitated it?

Modern scholars and archaeologists have pieced together a fairly comprehensive picture of social and economic life during the time when Gotama lived. This research does not change any of the tenets of Gotama's teaching, but gives a much clearer view of the society to which he addressed them. The Jatakas support archaeological evidence with literary evidence. They provide through the devices of allusion, metaphor, and physical description a detailed picture of daily life and social attitudes during Gotama's time. One can smell the cooking fires he passed, the faces he saw, feel his feet squishing into the muddy roads of the monsoon or becoming coated with dust during the dry season. No other period in human history is as fertile in original spiritual creativity than the century leading up to 223

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Buddhism. Confucianism came into existence shortly after 551 B.C., which is generally regarded as Confucius's birthday. Buddhism was finalized about 483 B.C., when Gotama passed into parinibbana.

About 599 B.C. a reformer named Mahavira founded Jainism. Taoism was founded by Lao Tzu about 604 B.C. Japan's Shinto is said to have no specific date of origination, but was the religion of the first Japanese emperor about 660 B.C. Zoroastrianism's roots also may predate it recognized founding date, but it, too, came into eminence about 660 B.C. About the same time, Judaism's great prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah spoke from their Babylonian exile. And finally, the Greek world was alive with an Olympian potpourri of gods, titans, sibyls, Pythics, Bacchantes, Orphics, shamans, Eleusians, and mere humans, who happened to have names like Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus.

Heady brew, even quaffed over a hundred and fifty-odd years.

The spiritual beliefs of the Aryan peoples who entered the Indus Valley about 1500 B.C. were not directly recorded. They may have picked up some proto-Zoroastrian beliefs on their way through the country whose name still commemorates them: Iran. They overran the cities of Mojandaro and Harappa, which had been in existence from at least 6000 B.C. Over the next thousand years they spread first east and then south over the Ganges Plain, where they gradually evolved from raiders to herders to rice cultivators — and brahmins.

The major impetus towards paddy cultivation was the discovery that transplanting rice from a germinating bed to flooded paddy fields while the plants are still shoots increases their yield approximately five times. For the first time cultivators had a surplus beyond their family and seed-crop needs. In fact, the surplus was so great that it surpassed the needs of even the notoriously grasping local petty despots. This meant there was enough food to make possible a society in which not everyone needed to farm or perform religious functions. That in turn permitted the rise of towns and the various artisans and traders that towns require. The Jataka of the two hawkers describes two townships separated by a river. There is a public well, and artisans such as potters and goldsmiths exist. The cheating robe maker testifies to yet another occupation demanded by towns.

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Sometimes the testimony of the Jatakas is subtle. The potter who accidentally kills the tortoise in the Kaccha-Apa Jataka does so with a wooden, not iron, spade. Indeed, there is little archaeological evidence of the use of iron, although it is mentioned in passing in the Pali suttas written in the last half-century before Christ.

Archaeologists have found some remnants of cast and beaten iron in the Bihar area where Gotama preached, but the warm, wet, acidic soil in that area has undoubtedly rusted away iron implements to the extent that we really have no idea how extensive their use was. No identifiable remnant of a plowshare has yet been found, which implies that the labor required to mattock over every square foot of a rice paddy would keep a cultivator so busy he would be unavailable for forced labor or labor in fief to build palaces or fight wars. That meant kings would resort to the sons of those better off, or raise mercenary armies from other regions. Indeed, the constant use of mercenaries so intermingled populations on a given territory of land that we still witness the racial conflicts of two or more longestablished peoples claiming a single piece of territory. The Tamil struggle in northern Sri Lanka goes back in a direct line to the Tamil mercenaries used by Lankan kings fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago.

The minimal availability of iron also determined the character of cities. Iron may not be necessary to the cutting of stone, but abundant labor is. The precise stonework of the Indus cities was shaped without iron chisels. The Egyptians cut the granite for their pyramids and fortified cities without the use of iron. The Aztec and Inca cities of the Americas also were built without it. Where stone suitable for building existed, it was quarried by chipping holes in a line using harder stones, placing wood chocks into the holes, flooding them with water until the wood swelled and the stone split free. It was transported by being pulled by draft animals (elephants in India, mules or humans elsewhere) over coconut trunks or other logs laid down like a series of rollers. Harder stone tools made of materials like basalt could be used to laboriously pulverize fragments until a stone was surprisingly plane and smooth.

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after Gotama, royal economics was limited to the surplus of one rice crop a year-when, indeed, there was a surplus. Hence few in Gotama's time enjoyed the luxury of stone buildings — or for that matter, even fired brick. The lakebed mud sought by the potter who accidentally killed the tortoise could also be shaped into bricks. Some were kilnfired, but most were sun-dried, and these eventually washed back into their elemental earth by long centuries of monsoons. To this day, fired bricks in Bihar are as rare an archaeological find as iron tools.

The little remaining physical evidence indicates that at the time Gotama lived most human habitations were of mud and stick construction — as indeed many are in today's Indian and Sri Lankan countryside.

Six hundred years later, when the kings of Anuradhapura in ancient Lanka had built enough reservoirs and irrigation sluices to guarantee a year-round supply of water for cultivation — thus making possible ancient Lanka's two-crop economy which was the envy of every petty despot in south India — the simultaneous development of iron-making provided them with chisels hard enough to cut the tough granite into smooth columns, lintels, doorway carvings, statues of the Buddha. Two crops of rice per year meant a considerable surplus, and that meant enough food to employ enough workers to build Lanka's great and beautiful cities. Buddhism in Lanka thrived in a way it never did in India. One reason for this was the powerful water-based economy underlying it. Sri Lanka's most famous non-Sri Lankan writer, Arthur C. Clarke, describes the impact of irrigation on ancient Lankan civilization this way: It is hard to plan for the future when the sun beats down from a cloudless sky, the waves whisper softly up the beach, the terraced fields of ripening paddy seduce the eye with their soft greens and golds. The men of the cold north believe that the tropics are hostile to civilization because the struggle for existence can be too easily won. There is much truth in this, but there are also times when the sun and drought can provoke as great a response as storm and snow. This happened in Ceylon before the beginning of the Christian era, when a series of tremendous irrigation works transformed the island's dry zone into what must have been a 226

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fertile paradise. Some of the artificial lakes created then are many kilometers in circumference; there are thousands of these "tanks", linked by intricate networks of canals. Only a stable, wellorganized, and technically advanced society could have undertaken such massive projects. Such a society was seldom allowed to exist in peace for long, and successive invasions destroyed much of the work of the ancient [Lankan] engineers.1 1.

Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller; 2nd ed., Studio Times Limited, Colombo, 1983.

The transition from cattle-keeping to paddy farming and towns brought problems of its own. Cattle provided energy, milk, and dung for fuel as long as they lived. Hence the brahminical injunction against killing cattle, which transformed in the Hindu religion into cattle being worshipped as gods which must never be killed, much less eaten.

Cattle raising is essentially a dry-land affair. Paddies, on the other hand, keep cultivators up to their knees, and sometimes their waists, in muds which are a fertile breeding ground for parasites, molds, and insects. Malaria and dengue fever are propagated by water-breeding mosquitoes, and cholera spreads through drinking water contaminated by excrement. As the agricultural development of the Ganges basin turned south in search of new land, farmers encountered a wetter, warmer climate that was perfect for microbe and insect growth.

Although cultivators would develop resistances over many generations, their thinly spread populaces made transmission more difficult. The same could not be said for the rapidly evolving towns.

The Jataka of the tortoise is preceded by a brief story involving an epidemic. The point of the story is that one must not become attached to things, for possessions will not prevent — and may even bring about — suffering and death.

Today the term the Buddha Gotama employed to describe suffering — dukkha — is often interpreted as "the unsatisfactoriness of life", the sense that if one looks beyond material complacencies, there 227

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is something fundamentally empty in a life lacking spiritual direction.

In Gotama's time, "suffering" was probably more literally that.

Plagues of mosquitoes and flies, the unrelieved pains of aging which herbal nostrums could do nothing to relieve, fear of the unpredictability of the weather, loss of limbs resulting from trivial injuries which became infected, cataracts for which there was no known cure, the untimely deaths of loved ones, the uncontrolled growth of families attended by the necessary subdivision of one's lands at death, bandits on the rutted muddy tracks that passed for roads (the first paved road in India was not built until the 1400s), on and on.

The brahminical religious tradition was hard-pressed to deal with this sudden accretion of problems, many of them exacerbated by the population density of towns. The brahmins became hostile to towns in general, as their tradition relied on a rigid hierarchy of social roles, the credulity of villagers, and particularistic rules geared to the maintenance of their own material well-being. Ignorant villagers were eager to pay those who promised salvation but town dwellers were far less sanguine.

When Gotama began to teach, he was as much at home in the towns as in the countryside. One reason for his comfort within large populaces is that the story of his being the pampered son of a king is probably a romanticized enhancement of the facts. His birthplace was a town named Kapilavatthu located on the border between what is now India and Nepal, at the north end of a region then called Magadha. Today it is called "Bihar" — a name which is a distant corruption of the place-name, "Land of the Viharas", because of the large numbers of them spread over the countryside.

Gotama's father was more probably the leader of a community called a Sakya, meaning "clan" rather than a king in the sense of a Maharaja. The most common Sanskrit epithet for Gotama himself is Sakyamuni, meaning "Sage of the Sakyas". Sakya communities had no hierarchy; they were essentially a seniorial polity in which elders met in council to discuss their problems and reached agreement by consensus. This was very different from the rigid hierarchical system of the brahmins. Indeed, one reason Gotama was able to see through the defects of the brahminical system is that he probably never 228

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encountered it until he left his family and traveled south through Magadha. One notable scholar, Richard Gombrich, believes there is evidence that Gotama's mother did not speak an Aryan IndoEuropean language. Later, when he formed his Sangha to carry the message of the Four Noble Truths leading to Enlightenment, he organized it along the same casteless lines as the Sakya community from which he came.

Bihar is in the central Ganges plan, where towns were evolving quickly into cities in Gotama's time. Cities invite trade, traders need coinage, coinage implies mines, mines imply territory to protect, and territory implies kings. Kingdoms in Gotama's times were less a matter of circumscribed boundaries than a field of influence centered on a king whose strength, like that of light, weakened with distance.

The object of war was not to take territory but to kill its king.

This was the rapidly evolving world into which Gotama walked, and he came just as the power base of the brahmins in the villages was eroding and a spiritually directionless populace was emerging in the towns.

One reaction to this was a sudden bloom of experiments with nonbrahminacal ideas. Four known sects emerged in the Bihar region about the time of Gotama: Skeptics rejected Brahmanism altogether and proposed that Truth probably did not exist, and even if it did, it was unknowable and unattainable. Like their Greek counterparts with the same name a few centuries later, they were excellent debaters and prided themselves on being able to escape any argument.

Materialists (the Lokayata sect) believed that the world was composed of four elements. In the case of living beings, these elements slowly decomposed after death. There was no afterlife, and poor man and king are governed by the same fatalistic rules.

Therefore, one should take as much pleasure from life as possible.

This view is remarkably like that of the Greek Epicurians.

Determinists (the Ajivaka sect) believed that the final end of all things was preordained long ago and nothing could be done to alter the progression of the universe towards ultimate perfection, although the end of time was long eons away.

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Jains (the Moksha sect) were followers of a religious reformer named Mahavira, who lived about the same time as Gotama. Jainism is the only other sect besides Buddhism that still exists today. Jains believe that life is extremely painful and one can attain complete moksha — complete liberation — only by wearing away all karmic accretions in this life through extreme mortification and faultless moral conduct. Jains believe that all karma, good or bad, is bondage.

Hence they are especially concerned with the karmic consequences of killing living beings. Some carry this to the end of wearing gauze masks so as not to inhale microscopic creatures and sweeping the ground ahead of them to clear away insects. Extremist Jains hold that the best course in life is to do nothing at all, which by implication means starving to death. Why self-killing is different from killing other beings isn't made clear. Even today members of the Digambara sect of the Jains go about naked after having plucked all their body hair out by the roots. They eat only once a day and that only with what they can gather and hold in their hands. They refuse to wash, clean their teeth, or live under shelters. They carry possessionless to the point of never sleeping more than one night in a particular place.

To these four negative reactions against brahmanism, Gotama replied with a positive reaction: spiritual enlightenment based on meditation and a humanistic code of conduct. The analogy of healing has often been used to describe his four fundamental tenets (The Four Noble Truths): the complaint is diagnosed as dukkha or the sense that life is unfulfilling; the cause of the ailment is tanha or the "thirst" for satisfaction via the things of the world; the cure is eliminating the cause of the ailment; and the medicine prescribed is the Noble Eightfold Path, through which one can achieve nibbana or Enlightenment.

The core of Gotama Buddha's belief is that humans are responsible only to themselves for their welfare here and hereafter, and we attain a final beatitude solely through our own efforts, not via divine aid. In fact, the Buddha said many times that one can believe in and even worship all the gods he or she wants, but those gods won't help one achieve Enlightenment.

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No written records have come down to us which date to the time of the Buddha. Perhaps some form of writing existed, but if it follows the pattern of the transition between oral and written culture in other areas of the world, the proto-writing of the Buddha's time probably served a tally or accounting function. The Buddha's own words were carried in the memories of hundreds of monks and weren't recorded in writing at Aluvihara in central Lanka until over four centuries after the Buddha's parinibbana.

The Jatakas were popularizations of the intellectual concepts in the Buddha's thought. Each tale usually confines itself to one moral principal or aspect of the Buddha's teaching. The moral is always tidily explained at the end for those who may have missed it in the complex imagery and poetic rhythm of the stories.

But far more important, the Jatakas give us a sense of the timbre of life in the Buddha's time and somewhat after. They paint a picture of the ordinary person's daily round of existence during a time when an extraordinary person walked the earth. In analogies closer to our time, if we really want to know what life was like when Francis I was consolidating France into a nation, we don't read his proclamations or the disputations at the University of Paris, we read Rabelais. If we really want to know what court life was like in medieval Japan, we don't read the edicts of shoguns or monks, we read Lady Murasaki's Tale of the Genji, the world's first novel, written about the year 1000.

The Jataka mix of rural folklore and urban daily life tells us much about Gotama which he does not tell about himself. That the folksy, easygoing Jatakas were ideally suited for their purpose is indicated by two facts: (a) Nearly three-quarters of the Sangha during the Buddha's life were located outside towns but near enough to them that the monks knew well the ways of town life; and (b) the Buddha's village support was strongly based on gahapati, or "heads of households", who comprised the all-powerful decision-making village councils. To have appealed equally well to the sophisticated urban palate and the conservative ways of the village implies that the Buddha was perceived as the bearer of the great Truths discovered long ago by the sages.

What the Jatakas illustrate are not merely vivid glimpses of daily life in the Buddha's time. They also show why his teaching reached as 231

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deeply into the traditional village as it did into the powerful towns and cities. It is no surprise that when the brahmins realized how quickly they were losing their fear-based mastery over people, they turned the Buddha and his teachings into yet another god in the pantheon of Hinduism.

In Lanka Buddhism retained its original character, and has remained so all the way into our times. To this day the Jatakas are recited at village campfires and are the subjects of TV docudramas.

When a Buddhist dies, his family holds vigil over the casket the night before cremation. By candlelight they read the last of them all, Number 547, the Vessantara Jataka. The family members read in rounds the lesson of Prince Vessantara, who attained the perfection of generosity by giving away first all his material possessions, then his lands, then his wife and children, and finally his life.

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The Mahavamsa Writers often describe Sri Lanka using the image, "a teardrop falling from the eye of India."

That might do well for the appearance of the island on a map, but a metaphor for the island's culture might better be, "a drop of distillate from the alembic of Asia."

With a populace embracing eight ethnic groups, four languages, five religions, a 2,500-year history, and one of the oldest written literatures, Sri Lanka is at once Asia distilled and an entity unto itself which no other country resembles.

A pity, then, that the great epic of its founding and early history is probably the least read of all the world's epic works. The Mahavamsa is arguably even less familiar to most literary scholars than the Norsk Heimskrinngla or the Finnish Kelavela. Yet in Sri Lanka every schoolchild knows long passages of the Mahavamsa by heart. It is one of the most concise and poetic of all the epics, and its own history is as absorbing as the chronicle it relates. Together with its successor the Culuvamsa, it relates the 2,300-year span from the legendary arrival of an Indo-Aryan royal prince about 483 BC to 1795, when the British occupied ancient Lanka, renamed it Ceylon, and turned it into a colony. For many years the British thought the fabulous stories in the few available written copies of the Mahavamsa to be a form of speculative literature. Only in 1826 did a British colonial servant discover a long-lost commentary in a cave in the south of the island which established the factual nature of much of what the Mahavamsa related.

The Mahavamsa or "Great Chronicle" was overlooked for so long for several reasons. It was never graven onto stone in its entirety, and the Buddhist monks who transmitted ancient Lanka's body of literature never developed the technique of printing. Until colonial times 235

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Lanka's primary literary vehicle was a form of an ola-leaf manuscript whose leaves were approximately eighteen inches long and an inch and a half high, graven in the ancient Pali language which was a direct descendent of the Prakrit language the Buddha spoke. Both were related to India's Sanskrit. Pali transmuted over time into modern-day Sinhala. Back in British days, both Pali and Prakrit were so obscure few colonials bothered to learn them, hence the Mahavamsa was largely the preserve of the native Sinhalese until philologists became interested in it in this century. The first translation was made by the German Sanskritist Wilhelm Geiger in 1912.

Although commonly called ola-leaf manuscripts, the actual leaf used in all ancient Lankan writings was a section from the giant first frond of the talipot palm, which can be fifteen feet long as it uncoils scroll-like from the stem of the young tree. The leaf is cut, flattened, partly dried, and sectioned cookie-cutter style into the future manuscript leaves. These are smoothed with rounded stones, then gathered in stacks several hundred leaves thick and placed above the kitchen of a Buddhist refectory so the cooking smoke can dry and toughen them over a period of two years.

When ready, monks laboriously shaped each letter with an iron burin. In all their history, only three sizes of burins were ever developed to convey the immense body of Sinhala lore. The letters were about the size of fourteen-point type. Many visitors from the West have observed that Pali, Prakrit, Sinhala, Bengali, Hindustani, and many other Asian scripts are all dominated by curvilinear forms with virtually no straight lines. These scripts developed because any attempt to engrave a straight line either vertically or horizontally would split the dry leaf along the grain of its fibers. For the same reason there is no period or other dot-based punctuation; monks ended sentences with a tiny, graceful leaf. Illustrations are rare because they took up valuable space that could better be used for text. This is a pity because there was little transmission of daily-life vignettes of the type we find in European books of hours. One reason that illuminated manuscripts, cartouches from atlases, and paintings are so useful to contemporary historians is their abundance of vivid scenes from daily life which are tucked away in the back corners.

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Ancient Lanka inherited—and invented—an enormous amount of Buddhist iconography, but not until the mid 1700s did anyone come along and paint scenes like those from van Eyck and Breughel, and these scenes are to be found in cave paintings rather than ola-leaf manuscripts. Today we have no direct evidence what everyday life was like; everything we know must be inferred from chronicles like the Mahavamsa and the very slow rate of change in Sri Lankan society.

The ola-leaf scribes missed another great opportunity as well.

When completed (engraving a full leaf took two days), the leaf was rubbed with a gummy resin that had been blackened with carbon from coconut-oil lamps. This ink penetrated into the incising. The excess was then wiped off with a cloth so the unengraved portion of the leaf was ink-free; the leaf was then set aside to dry. If at this point one of history's fortuitous accidents had occurred and someone had placed an absorbent material on top of the freshly wiped leaf, the monks might have noticed an ink transfer to the new surface, forming a reversed but duplicate impression that would have led directly to a Lankan equivalent of the woodcut.

"Lanka" means "Beautiful Isle." The "Sri" or "Nobly" was added in 1972. Few other peoples have an account of their history so thorough and uninterrupted. The Mahavamsa was written by a Buddhist bhikkhu or monk named Mahanamasthivara during the reign of King Moggallana I about A.D. 500. Both lived in one of the great cities of the ancient world, Anuradhapura, whose ruins today cover several square miles of the island's north-central region. Anuradhapura thrived through 1,400 years and 123 kings, and was a trading entrepôt known to Romans and Chinese alike. Its riches also were known to vandal-like pirate raiders called the Cholas, who eventually succeeded in destroying everything but the city's stone columns.

Mahanamasthivara's literary efforts had few antecedents to reflect upon. One was the Sanskrit Ramayana, which glorified the Brahmanistic culture the Aryan peoples devised after they settled in India. Another was the Dipavamsa (History of the Island), a fifth century AD history lacking the Mahavamsa's epochal sense of time and its poetic qualities. There are many moralistic fable-like commentaries in the Mahavamsa. These came from the fanciful and 237

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highly elaborated tales of the Jatakas, or legends of the previous incarnations of the Buddha. Another influence, the Dhammapada, is a series of fables illustrating Buddhist moral maxims. These were very convenient when Mahanamasthivara needed to deflect the royal wrath when he was obliged to pass judgment on royal acts.

In its English form, the Mahavamsa's 270 pages span the era between the first arrival of the Indo-Aryan people under a leader named Vijaya in 483 BC and the reign of King Moggalana I about AD 500. Its continuation was the Culuvamsa or Lesser Chronicle, written

by Dhammakitti in the thirteenth century to chronicle the five-and-ahalf centuries of history between Moggalana I and Lanka's greatest king, Parakramabahu I (1153–1186). Another bhikkhu extended it to the fourteenth century, and a final bhikkhu brought it to 1795.

Altogether these relations span 2,278 years in a single historical discourse. Just as it is almost unknown that the Jatakas are the world's first short stories, the Mahavamsa is the world's longestrunning history.

The Mahavamsa begins with an apocryphal visit of the Tathagata to various sites in prehistorical Lanka "through the air." These sites are still worshipped by white-garbed pilgrims on full-moon days.

"Tathagata" is the name by which the Buddha referred to himself; it translates to "He who comes from nowhere and goes nowhere."

His visit is followed by almost biblical accounts of the genealogies of kings and councils of bhikkhus, most of which are enhanced with improbably large numbers—"Eighty-two-thousand were the sons and royal grandsons of King Sihissara", etc. On the other hand, the Mahavamsa's lush but illusionist style is evident from the outset: The spirits of the air brought garments in five colors, and yellow cloth for napkins, and also celestial drink from Chaddanta Lake.

Out of the naga (serpent) kingdom the nagas brought cloth colored like the jasmine blossom and without a seam, and celestial lotus flowers and collyrium and unguents; parrots brought rice daily from the Chaddanta Lake. Mice converted this rice, unbroken, into grains without husk or powder, and therewithal was was meal 238

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provided for the royal family. Perpetually did honey bees prepare honey for him, and in the forges bears swung the hammers.

Karavika birds, graceful and sweet of voice, came and made delightful music for the king. And being consecrated king, Asoka raised his younger brother, Tissa, son of his own mother, to the office of vice-regent. Here ends the consecration of the pious Asoka. {V, ¶27-33} Even at the outset Mahanamasthivara is at pains to identify his chronicle with triumphant Buddhism. The Asoka of concern above became India's greatest emperor. Having killed or maimed 150,000 Kalingas in his attempts to expand his kingdom, he slowly grasped the futility of bloodshed and converted to the then relatively little known religion of the Buddha. He became the religion's greatest proponent and sent emissaries all over his kingdom and overseas to spread the faith.

One of these emissaries was his son Mahinda. The Mahavamsa relates how Mahinda transported himself and four theras (elders) "by the air" to the top of a hill in the rugged region of Mihintale about seven miles from the Lankan king Devanampiya Tissa's capital at Anuradhapura, in the north-central part of the island.

Tissa was hunting nearby. He spotted a majestic Great Elk or sambhur in a thicket. The animal bounded up the mountain. Tissa followed. At the top, the elk turned into a sage. The sage called to Tissa by name.

"What name does this tree bear, O King?"

"This tree is a mango tree, sir.

"Is there yet another mango besides this mango tree?"

"There are many mango trees."

"And are there yet other trees besides this mango and all the other mangos?"

"There are many other trees, sir, but those are not mango trees."

"And are there, besides all the mango trees, and all the trees that are not mango trees, yet other trees?"

"There is this mango tree, sir."

"Thou art wise, O King."

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Tissa correctly grasped the concept that as one thing is everything, everything is one thing, though the two are not one and the same. One faith is a thread and the whole cloth is the truth. Then Mahinda goes on to a more pertinent point: "Hast thou kinfolk, O king?"

"There are many, sir."

"And are there also some, O king, who are not kinfolk of thine?"

"There are yet more of those than even my own kin."

"Is there yet anyone besides your kinfolk and the others?"

"There is myself, sir."

Mahanamasthivara's point is that the ruler is also ruled. This is the point at which the Mahavamsa leaves the apocryphal and dwells on the world. The Mahavamsa was the single pivotal document which defined ancient Lanka's political hierarchy, social contract, and religious underpinning.

The duty of the king was to protect the land, act as charismatic symbol of the people, and provide rain. Droughts were considered signs of an unworthy king. In those days there were only two ways to provide water: charms and canals.

The sprinkle charm in which water is symbolically sprinkled over a shoot or religious artifact has long been a part of Lankan culture; to this day an annual parade of the Sacred Tooth of the Buddha in Kandy is cast in the form of an elaborate theatrical charm involving hundreds of drummers, dancers, and elephants whose efforts will bring rain. (The parade is thoughtfully scheduled just prior to the autumn monsoon.)

Charms and processions make dubious weather forecasters.

Hence Lankan kings joined Chinese emperors in writing the world's first job description for royalty: hydraulic engineer. For over 1,500 years both civilizations built and maintained reservoirs, canals, sluices, runnels, and drainages which would protect against the fickleness of monsoons. The Mahavamsa describes the diversion of entire rivers and the construction of reservoirs up to ten square miles in area with banks nine miles long.

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Such waterworks added up to tremendous quantities of labor.

The kings obtained it through a feudal polity called rajakariya, "the king's labor". Farmers were placed at the top of the civil hierarchy in a caste called govi-vamsa. Without Hinduism to give it a religious base, the Lankan caste system which the Mahavamsa describes is a system of occupational niches rather than a hierarchy of social and spiritual merit. There is, for example, no untouchable caste.

In consideration for their exalted status the govi-vamsas gave one-sixth of their produce to the king's officials. This provided so much revenue the kings were able to build massive irrigation works, palaces, roads, plus save a large surplus yet sell such quantities to India that the Mahavamsa describes Lanka as "The Granary of Asia".

The govi-vamsas and other castes such as artisans and merchants also were required to donate certain periods of free labor for the king. In exchange they were given free shelter and provisions.

Taken out of the context of the lengthy, discursive passages of the Mahavamsa, the foregoing outline of Lankan socioeconomic structure does not convey the intense vividness of the Mahavamsa's telling — the dust that would have been almost always in the in the air, the straining muscles of rice-fed men with pipestem legs, the thigh-high mud when it rained, the cries of the workers when someone was hurt, how the wives and families lived, what the smells of cooking fires were like at night, the Buddhist monks moving among the people as society's only educators, that they taught by firelight because during the day the children worked alongside their fathers tapping the oxen along with sticks while staying warily clear of the lurching, yawing wagons sagging from broken granite and gneiss, that the surveyor's transit leveling the tops of the embankments was a sightline along two pots of water with a string stretched between them, that the earth was compacted by elephants shod in leather booties, and that the bund top was smoothed into a flat access road by herds of sheep or goats driven along them — a technique that has passed into our own time with the invention of a huge, water-filled cylindrical earth tamper used in highway construction whose outside surface is made of hundreds of steel knobs which compact and smooth the soil the same way the sheep did, and is called the "sheep's foot roller" for that reason.

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Less evident to the casual reader is that the Buddhist monk named Mahanamasthivara had a Buddhist agenda. As he was writing the Mahavamsa Buddhism in Lanka had divided into two sects. One was called Theravada, which means "Doctrine of the Elders". The Theravada sect was the first to be introduced to Lanka and had for the most part enjoyed nonstop royal patronage. However, two centuries prior to Mahanamasthivara a king named Mahasena had favored a variant of Buddhism which we call Mahayana. In Theravada one attains Enlightenment via one's own direct efforts by practicing the law of the Dhamma as preached by the Buddha. In Mahayana one practices the law but postpones one's own Enlightenment in order to devote oneself to the aid of others. The immediate consequence was a class of beings called Bodhisattas or Buddhas-to-be whose virtues were rather like Catholic saints.

Today Sri Lankan Buddhism is a rich syncretism of these two interpretations, blended with worship of the Hindu gods and with holdover shamanistic practices from animist spirit religions which flourished in Lanka long before either Buddhism or the Mahavamsa.

However, Mahanamasthivara was faced with the task of permanently engraving the primacy of Theravada on royal minds. His method was to raise Lankan royalty to a status akin to the Buddha himself. He made the island's kings responsible for the health and happiness of the Theravada doctrine by proposing that a good king would achieve Enlightenment without any further effort than being a good king. The bad kings? Well, Buddhism has a hell, too, a sort of super-purgatory named Avici. However, as nothing is permanent in Buddhism except Enlightenment, the length of one's stay in Avici is measured by the acts that sent you there.

However, the true danger to Theravada came from unexpected directions, one without and one within. A little before the year 1000 invading Cholas from Hindu India utterly destroyed the great Theravadan capital Anuradhapura where Maha-namasthivara once wrote. The Cholas built a new capital fifty miles away whose deities bore names like Vishnu, Shiva, Skanda, and Parvati.

Hindu gods had in fact been around all through the Buddhist era.

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variant of Brahminism that evolved into Hinduism. Several times the Mahavamsa mentions the presence of Brahmin priests advising royalty along with Buddhist bhikkhus. Everyday people have long embraced both religions. A person venerates the Dhamma of the Buddha but solicits help from the gods of the Hindus — the elephantheaded god Ganesh is particularly useful when facing a tough examination. Popular worship has always been a fertile blend of the Buddhist Law, the Hindu gods, and a vast multitude of local deities arrayed in a hierarchy of devas (godlings lower than the Hindu gods), gandhabbas (musicians of the heavens), nagas (serpent gods which are the Lankan equivalent of Chinese dragons), and Yahksas (demons controlling the forces of nature). The fact that the Mahavamsa makes little mention of these ancient folk gods isn't a matter of selectivity as much as it is a statement that all things, even the gods and heavens and hells, are impermanent. After all, the gods envy humans because only humans can attain Enlightenment.

The wide diversity of Mahanamasthivara's styles and themes mark him as a gifted writer at home with a complex language. When he deals with the mythological origins of the Sinhalese people he embellishes an existing folk tale to the point where it becomes as allegorical as Romulus and Remus: In a country of the Vangas [Bengals], in the Vanga capital, there once lived a king. The king's consort was the daughter of the king of the Kalingas to the north. By his spouse the king had a daughter. The soothsayers prophesied her union with the king of beasts.

Very fair was she and very amorous, and for shame the king and queen could not suffer her. Alone she went forth from the house, desiring the joy of independent life. Unrecognized, she joined a caravan traveling to the Magadha country.

On the way there, in the Lala country a lion, sinha, attacked the caravan in a forest. The other folk fled this way and that, but the daughter fled along the way by which the lion had come. When the lion had taken his prey and was leaving the spot, he beheld her from afar. Love for her laid hold of him and he came towards her with waving tail and ears laid back. Seeing him, she bethought her of the 243

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prophecy of the soothsayers which she had heard, and without fear she caressed him, stroking his limbs.

The lion, roused to the fiercest passion by her touch, took her upon his back and bore her with all speed to his cave. There he was united with her and from this union with him the princess in time bore twin children, a son and a daughter.

The son's hands and feet were formed like a lion's and therefore she named him Sinhabahu. The daughter she named Sinhasivali.

When Sinhabahu was sixteen years old he questioned his mother on a doubt that had arisen within him, "Why are you and our father so different, dear mother?

She told him all. Then he asked, "Why do we not go forth from here?" And she answered, "Thy father has closed the cave up with a rock." Sinhabahu therefore took up the rock upon his shoulder and carried it a distance of fifty yojanas, going and returning in the same day. [A yojana is about twelve miles.]

Then one day when the lion had gone forth in search of prey, Sinhabahu took his mother on his right shoulder and his sister on the left, and went away with speed. They clothed themselves with the branches of trees, and so came to a border village. There, by chance, was a son of the princess's uncle, a commander in the army of the Vanga king.

When he saw the three he asked who they were and they said, "We are forest folk." The commander bade his people give them clothing and these turned magically into splendid garments. He offered them food on dried leaves and as they touched the food the leaves turned to bowls of pure gold.

Amazed, the commander said to them, "Who, indeed, are you?"

The princess told him her family name and clan. Then the commander took them to the capital of the Vangas.

When the lion returned to his cave he was so sorrowful with grief he neither ate nor drank. Seeking his consort and his children he went to the border villages, but every one was deserted when they saw him coming. The border people came to the king and told him, "A lion ravages thy country; ward off this danger, O King!"

Since the king found no one who could ward off the danger he had a thousand pieces of money led about the city on an elephant's 244

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back and this proclamation was made: "Let him who kills the lion receive these!" But no one came forward. The king then offered two thousand, and then three thousand.

Twice did Sinhabahu's mother restrain him. The third time, without asking his mother's permission, he took the three thousand pieces of money so that he might build a kingdom of his own with the reward for slaying his father.

They presented the youth to the king, and the king spoke thus to him: "If thou shalt take the lion I will give thee at once the kingdom."

Sinhabahu went to the lion's cave and the lion came forward for the love of his son. Sinhabahu shot an arrow to slay him. The arrow struck the lion's forehead, but because of the lion's tenderness towards his son it rebounded and fell to the earth at the youth's feet.

Sinhabahu shot three more arrows and they each rebounded to his feet. Then at last did the king of beasts grow wrathful, and because of his wrath an arrow sent at him finally was able to pierce his body.

Sinhabahu took the head of the lion with the mane and returned to the city. Just seven days before, the king of the Vangas had died.

The ministers rejoiced over his deed, and upon hearing that he was the king's grandson and on recognizing his mother as the princess who had been sent away, the ministers met all together and said of one accord, "Sinhabahu, be thou our king!"

He accepted the kingship but handed it over then to his mother's husband the commander, and he went to Sihisivali to the land of his birth. There he built a city and they called it Sinhapura, City of the Lion. In the forest stretching a hundred yojanas around he founded a thousand villages. He made his sister Sinhasivali his queen and as time passed she bore twin sons sixteen times.

The eldest was named Vijaya. In time the king consecrated Vijaya as vice regent. But Vijaya was of evil conduct and his followers did many intolerable deeds of violence with him. Angered by this the people told the matter to the king. The king severely chastised his son. But matters soon fell to the way they had been, the second time and then the third did they king chastise Vijaya. The angered people came thence to him and said, "You must kill thy son."

But instead Sinhabahu caused Vijaya and his seven hundred followers to be shaven over the head, which signifies the loss of 245

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freedom, and he put them on a ship and sent them forth upon the sea, and their wives and children also, in a separate ship for each. The ships landed on three separate islands. The island where the children landed was called Nagadipa, from "naga", The Naked Ones. The island where the women landed was called Mahiladipaka, the Island of the Women.

Vijaya landed at Lanka, in the region called Tambapanni, for the color of its sands. He landed there on the very day the Tathagata lay down between two sala trees to pass into parinibbana. {VI, ¶1-47 The Mahavamsa establishes much of Lanka's nationalist legend with this story. First, the lion, sinha, is the father of the Sinhalese and the progenitor of the Sinhala language. Today's Sri Lankan flag is emblazoned with a lion holding a sword. The far-off mythical city called Sinha Pura is today's Singapore, an allusion of the future maritime greatness of the Sinhalese people. However, Mahanamasthivara takes his greatest pains to establish a direct connection between Vijaya and the Buddha by proclaiming that Vijaya stepped onto Tampabanni's shores the very instant the Buddha passed from this life. This brief tale thus lays the theoretical groundwork for the Mahavamsa's extensive descriptions of Sinhalese history and panoply.

As he moves out of legend into history, Mahanamasthivara succumbs to the instinct to sanctify the relation between royalty and Sangha with descriptions of opulence which may seem excessive to our taste but must have pleased his royal patrons no end. In Lanka the preeminent symbol of Buddhist faith was (and still is) the dagoba.

Originally a heap of dirt with a stick jutting from the top to symbolize Mount Meru, the great mountain at the center of the cosmos, by Mahanamasthivara's time it had become a dome made of solid brick with a great cone-shaped tower on top. The largest were immense — three of them in Anuradhapura are the most massive solid objects on earth after the largest two pyramids. Mahanamasthivara describes one of these relic chambers as follows: At the four quarters of the heaven stood the figures of the Four Great Guardians of the World [Dhatarattha, Virulha, Virupakkha, and 246

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Vessavana], and the thirty-three gods and the thirty-two celestial maidens, and the twenty-eight chiefs of the yahksas. Above these devas raised their folded hands with vases filled with flowers, devatas dancing and playing musical instruments, devas with mirrors in their hands, and devas bearing flowers and branches, devas with lotus blossoms in their hands, rows of arches made of gems and rows of dhammacakkas [eight-spoked Wheels of the Dhamma; a sun symbol], rows of sword-bearing devas, and devas bearing pitchers. Above their heads were pitchers filled with fragrant oil with wicks of dukula fibers continuously alight. In an arch of crystal there was in each of the four corners a great gem and four glimmering heaps of gold, precious stones, pearls, and diamonds. On the wall made of fat-colored stones sparkling zig-zag lines [chatoyant gems such as cat's-eye], serving as an adornment for the relic chamber. The king commanded the artisans and bhikkhus to make all the figures in the relic chamber of massive wrought gold. {XXX, ¶89-97} As befitting a faith whose founding belief is non-attachment to things of this world, all this opulence was sealed in layer upon layer of brick until the structure reached as high as forty stories and equally large in diameter at the base. The very few relic chambers which have been opened testify to the accuracy of Mahanamasthivara's description.

The Mahavamsa chronicles other matters besides the nexus between monkish piety, royal opulence, and the dutiful labor of serfs.

Battles are lost as often as won, victory pays no attention to the virtue of the combatants, sons are as traitorous as often as loyal, daughters abscond with commoners, and malaria makes short work of grand schemes. The Mahavamsa and the Jataka stories are a fertile source of new plots of use to novelists. There is even the first recorded morality tale involving road kill: At the head of his bed, King Elara caused to be placed a bell hung from a long rope so that those who desired judgment at law might ring it at any time.

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Now Elara had only one son and one daughter. When one day the son was going in a car (a large elephant-drawn cart) to Tissa Lake, he unintentionally ran over the neck of a young calf lying with its mother by the side of the road, killing it. The cow came and tugged at the bell in its bitterness of heart and the king caused his son's head to be severed from his body by that same wheel in the same way. {XXI, ¶15-18} Finally, there is a character who would have been dear to the heart of Shakespeare, Queen Anula. Her few years at court (48-44 BC) match the lusty treachery of any monarch in literature: After Coranaga's death Mahacula's son Tissa ruled three years.

But Coranaga's spouse, the infamous queen Anula, did him to death with poison because she was enamored of one of the palace guards whose name was Siva. Anula placed the government into the hands of Siva.

Siva made Anula his queen. He reigned a year and two months.

But Anula, who was now enamored of Damila Vatuka, poisoned Siva.

Vatuka, who had been a carpenter in the capital, made Anula his queen and reigned a year and two months.

One day Anula saw a wood carrier named Tissa. She fell in love with him. She killed Vatuka with poison and put the government into Tissa's hands. Tissa ruled for one year and one month. But Anula, now enslaved in passion for a temple brahmin named Niliya, put Tissa to death by poison and put the government in Niliya's hands.

Niliya likewise made Anula his queen and reigned with her support, for six months. Even while married Anula pleased thirty two of her palace guards. When she poisoned Niliya, she reigned by herself alone for four months.

King Mahaculika's second son, Katakanna Tissa, had fled from fear of Anula and taken the royal insignia with him. He returned with an army. He killed the wicked Anula by poison, and reigned twentytwo years. {XXXIV, ¶15-30}

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Sri Lankan Poetry Sri Lanka is blessed with some exceptionally fine poets. A sampler follows below. This is not to slight the many deserving others, but these I chose to demonstrate the wide range of styles and feelings.

The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife Patrick Fernando When you were not quite thirty and the sun Had not yet tanned you into old-boat brown, When you were not quite thirty and not begun To be embittered like the rest, nor grown Obsessed with death, then you would come Hot home to me upon the sea, Chaste as a gull flying pointed home, In haste to be with me.

Now that, being dead, you are beyond detection, And I need not be discreet, let us confess, It was not love that married us, nor affection, Not even loneliness, but our Elder's persuasion.

Recall how first you were so impatient and afraid, My eyes were open in the dark, unlike in love, Trembling, lest in fear you'd let me go a maid, Trembling, on the other hand, for my virginity.

Three months the monsoon thrashed the sea, and you Remained at home; the sky cracked like a shell In thunder, and the rain broke through.

At last when pouring ceased and storm winds fell, 251

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The gulls returned new-plumed and wild, When in our wind-torn flamboyance New buds broke, I was with child.

My face was wan while telling you, and voice fell low, And you seemed full of guilt and not to know Whether to repent or rejoice over the situation.

You nodded at the ground and went to sea.

But soon I was to you more than God or temptation, And so were you to me.

Men come and go, say they understand, Our children weep, the youngest thinks you're fast asleep, Theirs is fear and wonderment.

You had grown so familiar as my hand, That I cannot with simple grief Assuage dismemberment.

Outside the wind despoils of leaf Trees that it used to nurse; Once more the flamboyant is torn, The sky cracks like a shell again, Someone practical has gone To make them bring the hearse Before the rain.

The Fiddler of Kollupitiya Anne Ranasinghe He sat untroubled on the crowded pavement Between the rough plank stall of pineapples And salt dry fish, his twisted back Against the hard brick wall, and playing A scratchy tune upon his violin.

He was so old his bony hands were trembling, 252

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And the skin hung loose from off his neck Like chicken skin — Sat playing Enclosed within the tune that only he Could hear (for sound of passing traffic Deadened his music). There he sat So happily enclosed within the music, His cataract eye turned inward to a place And time only the music knew — His thin old eyelids shutting out The bowl that unassumingly and empty Stood on the ground before him. Till the night Of shuttered stall and neon lamplight, Of empty paper bags blown by the wind Into the garbage gutter, washed the street Of life. And with a smile all sweetened innocence So full of happiness Only the music knew, upon the pavement stone He laid his grizzled head to rest Hugging his past, his life, his violin, And silently the darkness covered him.

Penelope Alfreda de Silva I watch you leave.

Your ship now lifts in wind, climbs, glides and dips into the void of the sea's rim.

A vast tumult or great emptiness (I don't know which) hurtles me back to the loom of everyday: the humdrum hearth, the hooded grain on the stone 253

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the brittle bones of the roof that needs repair, our solemn-faced son, waiting for laughter and the recurring rage and grief shrouding the celibate bed.

Oh the enormous waste of years!

The moon that drags the tides of sea and womb has drunk me dry.

Now there will never be fruit, when you returning bringing me the seed.

A Soldier's Wife Weeps Kamala Wijeratne Last Saturday when you went back from leave I watched until you disappeared over the bend and long after, until my breast gave a great heave and I lit the lamp before the Buddha and prayed no end.

On Wednesday when the crow cried on the dead branch and the sky colored over with the color of charcoal I had no fears, I knew you were safe; I had your horoscope read and there were no malefics.

But on Thursday when they bore you home I did not know what to believe, what to think.

It was as if I had slept a long sleep and saw things in a haze between life and death.

Was it on Saturday that we bathed together in the village well and you boy-like threw stones at the sleeping frogs and drank deeply of the scent of the giant palm that had broken in splendid fragrant flower?

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Looking back now I seem to see things I never saw before the way you hung behind me and touched my hair the way you leaned against the door and watched me as I bustled about.

They gave you a hero's burial with all military honors the band played and your body passed from hand to hand.

I saw everything from inside a mist the drone of voices like an airplane making its uncertain way through the clouds I think they spoke of the way of life and death.

I think of the bare, barren years ahead stretching like a road through the desert and wonder how to preoccupy myself how to make the days go forward.

On weekends when I have nothing to do I spread the white wedding sari on the floor and contemplate how I stood on the poruwa with you shyly untying the piece of white cloth around my waist.

How wrong the horoscopes were.

[These have been taken from Modern Sri Lankan Poetry, an anthology edited by D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, Professor of English at University of Kelaniya. It is available through Sri Satguru Publications, 40/5, Shakti Nagar, Delhi 110007, India, 1987.]

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Sri Lankan Folk Stories Most folk stories and legends are related by mothers or grandmothers as they lull their children to sleep. In Sri Lanka it is often the grandfather who does the relating, and it takes place out of doors before fires at night.

In both chena and rice paddy cultivation, the crops have to be protected at night as well as during the day. From their woven palmfrond watch huts, farmers guarded against the nighttime marauding wild pigs, buffalo, and elephants. Since the fathers of the family had to tend the fields and guard against birds during the day, it fell to the grandfathers and the children to guard them at night. Through two thousand years of weary vigils on countless farms, a rich fabric of lore, legend, demon appeasement, interpretations of the planets, the origins of animals, meaning of the weather, and countless other fantasia about nature developed. The volumes of direct relation and scholarly interpretation of this rich body of folklore runs into the dozens.

Hence the fact that grandfathers were most often the bearers of these stories. One important result of this is that, unlike the moralistic quality of many maternal tales, grandfather-related folk tales often have a mordant wit.

For example: A hungry man once said to his King, "Feed me for six months, and I shall move a mountain." The King agreed, and at the end of the six months summoned the man and asked him to move a mountain. Said the man, "If you will just place it upon my head, I will happily carry it away."

Monkey, being as common to the landscape of Sri Lanka as prairie dogs are to the Plains, also figure largely in humorous lore.

Once a troop of monkeys took it into their heads to actually do some work. (Monkeys are notorious thieves.) Approaching the King's gardener, they offered to help and were told that they might do so by 257

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daily pouring water on the plants. However, the monkeys soon found that the supply of water wasn't enough to go around. They took counsel among themselves and were delighted when the wisest of them suggested that the best way to apportion the water was by the size of the plant's roots. Accordingly, they uprooted each plant before watering it to determine how much it should get.

Although Sri Lankan folk tales are not given to overt moralization, the point to this story is, "Kindness backed by ignorance generally produces more harm than good."

As there are no foxes in Sri Lanka, the role of cunning craftiness is given to the jackal — just as the role of the well-intended witless is given to the monkey. (Interestingly, there is no role equivalent to Coyote Old Man.) One jackal story is this: A jackal had become riddled with fleas.

He took a piece of coconut husk into his mouth and waded slowly into a stream. The fleas scrambled up his body as he waded in deeper, until finally only his nose and the coconut husk were above the surface. The fleas scrambled for refuge onto the coconut husk, thinking it to be the jackal's tail. When the husk was black with them, the jackal let the husk go and it sank, killing all the fleas. The jackal waded ashore, flea-free.

The leopard, on the other hand, is at the bottom of the hierarchy, being considered the stupidest of the animals. At one time, the cat was the master and the leopard was the pupil. Wishing to always maintain its superiority over the leopard, the cat taught the leopard how to climb up a tree, but not how to climb back down. That is why leopards always have to jump from trees — and why they will always kill a cat if given the chance. The regal elephant — symbol of royalty — was often the subject of cautionary tales regarding responsibility.

An elephant trampled a nest of quail's eggs because he didn't want to be bothered to step over it. The mother bird, distraught with sorrow, cried her sorrow to a crow, a fly, and a frog. The crow helped the quail get revenge by pecking at the elephant's eyes. The fly deposited its eggs in the wounds. Blinded by this, and desperate with thirst, the elephant headed for the croaking frog, thinking there it would find water. But the frog was croaking from the edge of a precipice, off 258

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which the elephant fell, paying with its life for the life it had so remorselessly taken.

The story is a reminder to rulers that tyrants may well come to their ends from sources they scorn.

Many tales simply explain natural phenomenon. The sad sound of the Sri Lankan dove's song is said to have come because a woman placed some berries on the ground to dry in the sun. She told her little boy to carefully guard them. When she returned some time later she looked at the spot and did not see the berries. Thinking the boy had been neglectful, she hit him so hard she killed him. Then she saw that the berries had already dried and were so small she didn't see them the first time. Out of her grief she ended her life and was turned into a dove. The dove's call in Sri Lanka sounds remarkably like Pubbaru pute pu pu, which in Sinhala would mean, "Little son, oh! oh!"

The characteristics of three other birds also have their story. A corawakka bird once went across a river to procure a supply of areca nut (puwak in Sinhala) for food. Having completed the purchase and filled the nuts into bags, he arrived at the riverbank and hired a woodpecker's boat to carry him across. In midstream, the boat capsized. Their calls for help brought a flock of geese to the scene.

The geese immediately set about diving for the bags, but the bags were so heavy they could not raise them. They tried so hard they stretched their necks into the way they look today. The woodpecker now flies from tree to tree looking for a suitable piece of wood to build another boat. And the corawakka can be heard at the edge of every marsh, calling "Puwak! Puwak! Puwak!"

And as you might imagine, the cobra comes in for its share of legendry. It is a well known fact in Sri Lanka that the cobra and the viper are mortal enemies. It is also the case that the cobra, if you move back slowly, will deflate its hood and slip away. The viper, on the other hand, is aggressive and will actually go on the attack and chase after you as you flee (they are also remarkably swift, which is not a comforting thought in the thick undergrowth of the jungle).

In any event, a cobra and a viper once met at the height of a drought. Noticing that the cobra had recently slaked his thirst, the viper asked where he had found water. The cobra said, "Beyond that grove you will find a child at play, and nearby a pool of water — but 259

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mind you, do not hurt the child!" The viper followed these directions and found both the child and the water. But the child was next to the water, so the viper bit the child and it died. [The viper is not locally called "The Ten-Stepper" for nothing.] In any event, the cobra, knowing the viper's vile temper, decided to return to the scene just to make sure all was well. He saw the dead child next to the viper drinking the water. The cobra became enraged, attacked the viper, and the two had a terrific fight. During the battle the cobra bit off the end of the viper's tail, which is why they have stumpy tails. To this day the two are mortal enemies and will attack each other on sight.

All this is but a taste of the delicious feast of Sri Lankan folklore.

There are literally hundreds of stories like these, some moralistic, but most simply folkish explanations of phenomena such as the sounds of birds, practices of animals, behavior of the weather, and character of people. Most of the publications in which they appear are smallpress-run works from Sri Lankan presses (see Bibliography).

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A Glossary of Useful Terms Abi and Aya: Titles preceding a name which in ancient Lanka designated royal status; pron. "AH-bee" and "AH-yuh".

Amalaka: A bell-shaped dagoba taller than it is round, as distinct from the bubble-shaped dagoba which is equal in height to its diameter; pron. "aah-muh-lAH-kuh".

Appa: Also known as hoppers — a pancake-like food made of sourdough and water; pron. "aahp-paah".

Anicut: A dam, dike, embankment, or channel which directs water into different streams for irrigation; a sluice gate; pron. "ah-nee-cuht".

Arahat: In Buddhism, an individual who has completely emancipated himself from the passions and defilements which keep one in the endless cycle of rebirths in samsara; sometimes spelled arahant; pron. "aah-ruh-haht".

Arama: Buddhist monastery complex; pron. "ah-rah-muh".

Areca: A species of palm whose pingpong-ball-sized nut is chewed with betel leaf and ash as a mild stimulant; bitterly astringent; creates abundant cinnamon-colored spit which decorates most sidewalks; makes one wonder who could have been so hungry as to have discovered to this combination; pron. "air-EE-kuh".

Arrack: Hard liquor distilled from fermented coconut or palm-flower sap called toddy; comes in several grades ranging from the virtually poisonous to what has been described as "coconut cognac"; generally contains about 32-35 percent alcohol with a high sugar and congener content which is said to produce the worst hangovers in the world; illegal homemade arrack is called kisappu and is perhaps the swiftest known route to delerium tremens; kisappu has been known to cause blindness; tourists should never drink liquor from an unsealed bottle or a bottle with no label; pron. "aah-rahk".

Avasa: A monk's personal quarters in a pansala; pron. "ah-vah-sah".

Ayurveda: An ancient indigenous system of herbal medicine stressing naturopathic healing; pron. "ayu-hr-VEH-duh".

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Bali: A sacrificial ritual involving masked figures and often exorcism dances; pron. like the unrelated island in Indonesia.

Basnayaka Nilame: The principal lay officer of a Buddhist shrine, equivalent to a Protestant deacon; pron. "bahs-nAYA-kuh neelam-EH. Bathmalla: A portable meal of rice and curry originally packed in areca-palm leaf; pron. "bath-mAH-luh" (also spelled bathmula).

Beedi: A poor-man's smoke made by wrapping cheap tobacco into a cigar-like tube; smells like burning garbage, which announces its presence up to several dozen meters away; pron. "bEE-dee".

Bhavana: Meditation; there are two major types of bhavana: samadhi (tranquillity) and vipassana (insight); pron. "bhAH-vah-nuh".

Bhikkhu: Monk of the Buddhist Sangha or order; pron "bEE-khoo".

Bisokotuwa: A sluice valve consisting of a square well on the upstream side of a tank bund, sunk a few to many meters down to the level of the surrounding fields; functions as a water gate and also a silt trap; pron. "bee-soh-kOOH-too-wuh".

Bodhi: A tree of the ficus religiosa species, under which the Gotama Buddha attained nibbana or Enlightenment approximately 544 B.C. about 200 miles from Benares (present day Varanasi) in India; a cutting of this tree was sent to ancient Lanka between 230 and 210 B.C. and today is known as Sri Maha Bodhi, the oldest continuously maintained tree on Earth; Sri Lankans today often use the term bo as shorthand for Bodhi; Bodhi is often used as a first name or the prefix or suffix to a devout layperson's surname; it also is often adopted by bhikkhus upon ordination, e.g., "Bodhidharma"; pron. "bow-dee".

Bodhi-maluwa: A raised terrace on which a Bodhi tree is planted; pron. "bow-dee mah-loo-wuh".

Bodhisatta: The Pali spelling of Bodhisattva, a Buddha who has forsaken the final extinction of parinibbana, choosing to remain in the cycle of birth and death called samsara in order to help other beings ascend the ladder of karma, pron. "Bow-dee-sAHt-tuh".

Brahmins: The highest Hindu caste; priests who teach and study; pron. "braah-minz".

Bund: An embankment fully or partially surrounding a tank; built up of heavy rock forming a broad base narrowing at a low angle toward the top, into the interstices of which have been tamped clayey mud which when dry solidifies the mass into a waterproof wall; the bund 263

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is usually surmounted by an inspection road; the whole embankment is tamped at each rise in elevation first by walking elephants atop it, then driving herds of sheep along it to level the surface; pron. "booond".

Burghers: Light-skinned descendents of Dutch settlers comprising less than one percent of the Sri Lankan population; pron. like the famous American culinary product.

Cadjan: A fence made of palm leaves woven at a 90-degree angle into a tight mat; used as fencing, windbreaks, roofing (in layers of four or more thick), and protective covers for objects lying on the ground; pron. "cah-djahn".

Chena: Forest land brought under cultivation for a few years by the slash-and-burn method, then abandoned; normally fenced in with a dense mat of branches and vines; in the center there is often a palmfrond hut in which family elders and children make noises and sing pel kavi ("pehl kah-vee"; lit. "songs of the hut") through the night to ward off wild pigs and elephants; pron. "chAY-nuh".

Chulu: A torch made for outside use by tying coconut leaves or the dried sheaths of coconut flowers tightly together and then lighting; often used during fire dances during village festivals; pron. "chooloo".

Chutty: An unglazed clay cooking pot which rests above a fire pit made of three stones, with a space between them for burning sticks; a Sri Lankan cook can turn out incredibly complex rice-and-curry dishes using one fire and half a dozen chuttys; washed only with cold water so food oils penetrate the pores of the pot, creating a smooth nonstick surface; a well-cared-for chutty will last a lifetime; also spelled chattie but both are pron. "chewt-tee".

Culavamsa: An epic of the Lankan kings written by Buddhist monks as a sequel to the Mahavamsa; covers the period roughly from the time of Buddhaghosa starting in A.D. 337 to the British era; pron. "Coo-loovAHm-suh".

Dagoba: Originally a relic chamber; later, a monument built over a relic of the Buddha or a Buddhist holy man; solid brick in construction; usually dome-shaped (rounded with a pronounced shoulder line) or the bubble-shaped (nearly a hemisphere); surmounted by a pointed stupa (sometimes spelled thupa). Many 264

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dagobas in villages contain gifts from pious lay members in the relic chamber at the center; in ancient literature often referred to by the term cetiya; pron. "dAHH-go-buh".

Dalada Maligawa: Temple of the Tooth; a temple sheltering the sacred left eyetooth of the Buddha; many such temples have existed since the Sacred Tooth arrived in ancient Lanka in the early part of the fourth century A.D.; from, 1590 the tooth has resided in Kandy; pron. "Dahl-EE-da Mah-li-gAH-wuh".

Dana: Almsgiving, a very important part of earning merit towards reincarnation on a higher level; pron. "dAH-nah" Dansela: An alms-hall, usually in a Buddhist temple, where food is given out, especially during the Wesak festival on the full-moon day in May, on which the Buddha is said to have been born, attained Enlightenment, and passed into parinibbana; pron. "dahn-seh-luh".

Deva: A god; The word derives from the gods worshipped by indigenous Yakhsa and Naga tribespeople prior to the arrival of the Aryans; later, gods were incorporated from the Hindu pantheon and worshipped in addition to paying homage to the Buddha; pron. "dayvuh".

Devala: A shrine devoted to particular gods in the Buddhist or Hindu pantheon; also, the lands attached to that shrine; pron. "day-vuh-luh".

Deviyo: A deified folk hero; popular cult figures in villages corresponding to the minor local saints after which many European towns are named; pron. "day-vEE-yoh".

Dhal: A mush of cooked red lentils that accompanies nearly every rice and curry dish; pron. "dahl".

Dhamma: The Pali-language spelling of Sanskrit dharma, the teachings of the Buddha; synopsized in the Dhammapada, itself a part of the Pali Canon of officially accepted teaching of the Buddha first written down between 35 and 32 B.C. at Aluvihara near Matale in central Sri Lanka; pron. "dahm-mah".

Digge: A room in a temple used for chanting; pron. "deeg-gay".

Diyawadana Nilame: Chief lay trustee of the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy; the highest Buddhist lay person in Sri Lanka; pron. "Dee-yuhwuh-dAH-nah Nee-lah-may".

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Ela: Brook, creek, rivulet, channel, or canal, depending on the context; a small watercourse; when dammed by an earthwork becomes an elaamuna; pron. "ehl-luh".

Gal-bemma: Stone wall, rampart, or embankment, especially those bordering a tank; pron. "gahl behm-muh".

Gal-wana: Dam spillway cut from rock in situ or assembled from stone transported from afar; pron. "guhl-vuh-nuh".

Gana denu: The first business transaction of the new year (April 13 for Buddhists, 14th for Hindus); the exchange of cash must be directly hand into hand, accompanied by a handshake, the money is never placed on a table first; pron. gah-nah day-new".

-gama: Suffix designating "village" or "settlement", even if in later years it grows to town or city sized; an example is Weligama in the south coastal strip, which due to tourist development is hardly a village any longer; pron. "-gah-muh".

Ganga: A large river; the Mahaweli Ganga is the longest river in Sri Lanka; pron. "gahn-ga".

Gansabhava: A village council in which decisions are made by the elders; pron. "guhn-suh-bhAH-vuh".

Gedige: An brick vault roofing over a Buddhist image house; the vaulting usually consists of vertical walls supporting a gable-like inwardly sloping straight-line terrace of brick which ends in a barrelvault; tends to place great stress on the joint where the vault begins to close in above the walls, necessitating extremely thick walls (the occasional appearance of a flying buttress indicates a modern reconstruction which doesn't appear in original vaulted roofs); pron. "geh-dee-guh".

Gopuram: An incredibly exuberant and ornate multi-level tier of sculptures adorning the entrance and roof of a Hindu kovil; wildly painted in brilliant colors and complex decorative motifs; renders the Spanish churrigueresque style or German baroque calm by compare; pron; "goh-poor-ahm".

Gurula: Sinhalese spelling of Garuda, the Hindu mythical eagle which is half human and half bird which flies Vishnu through the skies; pron. "goo-roo-luh".

Hirimane: A serrated metal disk used to scrape coconut from its shell to be used as the basic ingredient of sambol (an acetylene266

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temperatured condiment sprinkled to taste on food); smaller sixbladed version is used to eviscerate limes for their juice (plain lime juice and water is a popular Sinhalese refreshment); pron. "hee-reemAH-nay".

Horana: A double-reed instrument used by snake charmers and accompanists to dance performances; sounds like an oboe with asthma; pron. "hor-uh-nuh".

Horowwa: An exit sluice from a tank or canal; usually in the form of a square-shaped outlet sunk to the base of an embankment, with a gate at one end which when opened allows water into irrigation ditches; pron. "whore-ohw-wuh".

Howdah: A structure on the back of an elephant; in Sri Lanka used mainly to carry artifacts or relics during perahera celebrations, especially the golden casket containing the Sacred Tooth of the Buddha during the Kandy perahera in late July; pron. "how-duhh".

Illam: Gem-bearing gravel which from before the time of Solomon and Sheba is the source of Sri Lanka's famed gemstone trade; pron; "eel-laahm".

Jaggery: A rock-hard unrefined brown sugar made from palm sap; superb way to make friends with children and elephants; said to dent forged hammers, but this may be apocryphal; bane of dentists, which is not apocryphal; pron. like the name of a famed British pop singer with a suffix "ee" tacked on.

Jak: Thick cobble-skinned fruit used when unripe to make curries; when ripe peeled and deseeded and eaten as a dessert; the fruit grows larger than a basketball as appendages on the sides of trees; monkeys hurl them down on tree trunks, rocks, or passersby in an attempt to break them open for the flesh; pron. "jack".

Jataka: One of 547 stories of the Buddha's various lives in previous existences; according to some interpretations, the Gotama Buddha is but one of many Buddhas or bodhisattas who return to earth to provide enlightenment or help others achieve enlightenment; these stories often provide the inspiration for frescos and other imagery in temple image houses; pron. "jAH-tuh-kuh".

Jati: Literally "birth"; hereditary group or caste; sometimes subgroups within one's own caste; pron. "jAH-tee".

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Kahapana: Early Lankan coins circulated from the first century A.D. through an indefinite date during the Anuradhapura period; weight varies due to amount and type of metal used, although the same values fixes to each; pron. "kuh-HAH-puh-nuh".

Kangany: Labor manager at a tea plantation; appointed by the government-appointed plantation management to oversee the work of Indian Tamil immigrant labor; pron. "kahn-gAH-nee".

Kapurala: Buddhist priest who officiates at a service at a devala; pron. "kah-poor-ah-luh".

Karanduwa: Name of the assemblage of seven concentric caskets which hold the Sacred Tooth; also, a replica of the innermost casket which consists of a gold base, glass bell jar, and gold stupa, often sold as tourist items; pron. "kah-rahn-doo-wuh".

Khamma: Pali spelling for the Sanskrit word karma, the cause-andeffect cycle of present actions determining future actions, both good and bad, transmitted from this life to the next; pron. "kahm-mah".

Kiribath: Rice cooked in coconut milk; possesses an adhesive coefficient greater than that of toffee; slow chewers may find their teeth glued together; pron. "kee-ree-bahth".

Kema: A water hole where animals go for water and hunters go for animals; pron. "Kayh-muh".

Kolam: Masked drama combining ritualistic dance with theatrical skits; "koh-luhm".

Kovil: A Hindu temple devoted to one or more gods; pron. "kohveel".

Kuveni: A Yaksa demon goddess who subdued the first Lankan conqueror Vijaya and bore him two children; pron. "Koo-vayn-ee".

Lamprais: Rice and curried meat wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf; Sri-Lankan version of the tortilla; pron. "lamb-prays".

Lanka: The ancient place-name for today's Sri Lanka; lit. "perfect beauty" but sometimes translated as "resplendent isle"; pron. "Lahnkah".

Lasya: A graceful, feminine dance form unusual in a country noted for its mostly male and mostly virile dance forms; pron. "lahs-yuh".

Lingam: A oversized and symbolic male phallus associated with the fertility of the goddess Shiva; barren women rub their vulvas against it to improve their fecundity; pron. "linn-gum".

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Mada idam: A muddy plot on which paddy is sown; pron. "mah-dah ee-duhm".

Maha: (a) "great" when used as an an adjective (e.g., Maharaja = Great King); (b) the largest of the two annual paddy crops, sown in September and reaped in February-March; the lesser crop sown in April and reaped in September is called Yala, or "lesser"; pron. "maahaa" and "yaa-laa" respectively.

Mahakavya: Generic term for any epic poem; pron. "muh-HAH-koovEYE-ah".

Mahanayake Thera: Lit. "Great Old Monk of the Chapter"; the highest official of a nikaya, or sect; pron. "mAH-huh-nEYE-uh-kuh Thair-uh".

Maharab: Muslim prayer hall; pron. "maa'hrahb".

Mahavamsa: "The "Great Epic"; a 270-page recital of the legendary qualities of Lankan kings written in the sixth century A.D. by Buddhist monks whose intention was partly to cement their relationship with the royal court; more fanciful than historical; bears about as much resemblance to the facts as the Arthurian Tales resemble the history of fifth century A.D. Britain; nonetheless a delightful read if for no other reason than the literature which can be produced by someone living in the midst of an austere monastic discipline; pron. "Mah-hah-vAHm-suh".

Mahout: Elephant trainer; pron. "mah-howt".

Makara torana: An ornamental arch over the entrance of a vihara or image house; usually contains mythical guardian beasts (makara = "dragon"; torana = "arch") on both sides in plaster and polychrome high relief; pron. "muh-kuh-ruh toh-rah-nuh" Metta: The philosophy and practice of universal love as preached by the Gotama Buddha in the Metta Sutta; pron. "meht-tAH".

Mettaya: The Pali spelling for Maitreya (pron. "M't'ray-uh"), said to be the next incarnation of the Buddha; pron. "Met'yah".

Mudaliyar: Prior to colonialism, chief or headman; during British period, administrator; pron. "mud-dAHl-ee-ahr".

Mudra: Gestures of the hand used in dance to express specific messages as a visual vocabulary; positions of the hands of the Buddha in statues or painted images, which convey specific meanings to viewers: the abhaya ("ah-bheye-ah") mudra signifies "peace" or 269

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"protection" and consists of the hand raised palm-outward with the fingers placed together; the bumisparasa ("boo-mees-pah-rah-suh") mudra is a gesture where the fingers of the right hand touch the earth while the Buddha is sitting in the lotus position, signifying closeness to Mother Earth; most seated Buddhas adopt the dhiyani mudra in which the hands in the lap are cupped up towards the sky; vitarka ("vee-tahr-kuh") mudras show the thumb and forefinger circled into a circle and the remaining three fingers raised, signifying a discourse on the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha.

Nadagam: A folk drama consisting of puppetry, prose, and dramatic song; pron. "nAH-duh-guhm".

Nadayo: One's kinsmen; pron. "nah-dEYE-oh".

Naga: The cobra, especially as depicted protecting the Buddha by sheltering him from rain with its hood; pron. "nah-guh". The nagaraj is the much larger King Cobra.

Nagas: One of the indigenous tribes of Lanka before the Aryans arrived; considered not to be true humans by settlers and chroniclers alike; as with the Yahksas, the Nagas either intermarried or fled to the remote jungles; pron. "Nah-guhs".

Natya: Storytelling or narrative drama; (pron. "naht-yah".

Netra Mangalya: Name of the ceremony during which the Buddha's eyes are painted; pron. "Neht'rah Mahng-ahl-yeah".

Nibbana: The state neither existence nor nonexistence, sometimes called a quality of being without being in which perfect understanding exists, for which every Buddhist strives through meditation, the dhamma, dana, and metta; pron. "nib-bhan-nuh".

Nikaya: A Buddhist sect. There are three such sects in Sri Lanka. The Siyam [="Siam"=Thailand] Nikaya originated in the eighteenth century when the Kandyan Sangha had become so sparse the kings of Kandy sent an emissary to Thailand to recruit monks to ordain new novices in Kandy. This sect drew its bhikkhus from the kingdom's top two castes; no one else was permitted to become a fully ordained monk. Today this Nikaya consists of two chapters, both based in Kandy: the Malwatta Nikaya on the east side of Lake Kandy manages the affairs of the Sangha to the north of Kandy; the Asgiri Nikaya is located in the hilly southern suburbs of Kandy and manages affairs in the southern part of the island. The two co-administrate the Dalada 270

Chapter title

Maligawa in Kandy. In the final years of the eighteenth century, the exclusionary caste system of the Siyam Nikaya prompted a lowercaste bhikkhu to travel to Burma, where he was ordained at the monastery of Amarapura. He returned to Lanka in 1803 and established the Amarapura Nikaya, which admits novices from all castes. Finally, a dissident monk who felt the other two nikayas were too materialistic formed a much more austere sect, the Ramanya Nikaya, in 1835. While in agreement on questions of doctrine, these three nikayas differ as to admissions and practices. Pron. "nihk-AHeye-uh".

Nindigam: Village holding under the exclusive ownership of a proprietor such as a Buddhist temple or prosperous landowner; pron. "nin-dee-guhm".

Nritta: Pure dance with no intent to convey meaning or the dancer's personal expressiveness; pron. "nrit-tah".

Nritya: Expressive dance in which emotional content is the fundamental quality being communicated; pron. "nrit-t'yah".

Nurtiya: Operatic drama of the same lyric play as the nadagam, but containing less song and more recitation; very popular in villages due to absence of trained voices; pron. "nUHRr-tee-yuh".

Nuwara: Prefix or suffix name designating "city"; pron. "new-AHrah"; the tourist's delightful tea plantation town "Nuwara Eliya" is condensed to "New'rely-a"; Kandy's nickname for itself is "Maha Nuwara" — "Great City".

Ola: The dried nascent leaf of the talipot palm, which grows to fifteen feet in length before it uncurls, which is prepared by being flattened, smoked, and aged two years, before being inscribed with burin-like styluses; pron. "olAH".

Oruva: Dugout canoe whose original design was probably an import from the Indonesian islands about the time of Christ; pron. "oar-oovah".

Oya: A small stream or river, especially one which dries up between monsoons; pron. "oh-yah".

Paddy: Technically, unhusked rice; commonly but incorrectly, the field in which rice is transplanted from germinating beds and grown; pron. "paa-dee".

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Padhanaghara: A meditation center; some of these are a bit commercial and can be spotted by their road signs near tourist destinations; pron. "pahd-hah-nAHg-hah-ruh".

Padma: A lotus flower; Padmini, meaning the same thing, is a common surname or nickname for girls; pron. "pahd-mah" and "pahd-mee-nee" respectively.

Panchama: Fruit salad containing five kinds of fruit, depending on the season; excellent with yoghurt or curd; makes mortal knees quiver when covered with ice cream; pron. "pahn-chah-muh".

Pandal: A bamboo framework, often shaped into a series of semicircular arches on which raffia strips have been tied, emblazoned with paper-shrouded candle lanterns for festive occasions and used unadorned for burials and memorial services at the gravesites of people too poor to afford cremation; pron. "pahn-dahl".

Pansala: The building where bhikkhu's reside in a temple complex; formerly referred to the complex itself; originally derived from pan = "leaf" and "sala = "hut"; pron. "pahn-suh-luh".

Paraveni: Hereditary property held in perpetuity that cannot be transferred; pron. "puh-ruh-veng-ee" (the "g" in "ng" is soft as in "ring").

Parinibbana: The passage of a Buddha beyond physical life into transcendent nibbana; pron. "pair-ee-nib-bah-nuh".

Patimaghara: "Image House" — a building in most (but not all) Buddhist temple complexes which houses as a minimum three statues of the Gotama Buddha: (a) standing as the Counsellor or Teacher; sitting in samadhi or deep meditation; and reclining either in sleep (the feet parallel) or at the moment of passage into parinibbana (the feet somewhat offset); an image house may also contain other images numbering into the dozens which depict momentous events in the life of the Gotama Buddha, fabled kings, an occasional Hindu god or two, abstract lotuses, and paintings of stories from the Jatakas; pron. "pah-tee-mAH-ghah-ruh".

Pavula: Extended family, as in "kin"; pron. "puh-vOO-luh".

Perahera: An ornate processional pageant featuring dancers, people in period costumes, and many elephants caparisoned in brilliantly colored raiments; can go on for as many as ten days; (see Calendar for 272

Chapter title

a list of the major peraheras throughout the year); pron. "pair-uh-hairuh".

Peramuna: Political "front", as in the dissident political group Janata Vimukti Peramuna ("People's Liberation Front"), or JVP; pron. "pairuh-moo-nuh".

Pesavalulu: A series of rings placed atop one another at the base of a dagoba; often the lowest ring is shaped in the form of an unfolding lotus blossom; pron. "peh-sah-vAH-loo-loo".

Pinkama: The giving of alms; pron. "pinn-kAH-muh".

Pin-kate: Offering box at a Buddhist shrine; when placed next to a road, many drivers stop when setting out and returning from a journey to put alms into the pin-kate beseeching and then thanking the Buddha for a safe journey; pron. "pihn-kAH-tay".

Pirit: Buddhist liturgical chant akin to Gregorian chant; texts drawn from the Dhammapada and other suttas (sacred literature); sung on poya and other days of special worship, and at events such as death, cremation, and the ordination of monks; the musical form's origins are undocumented but probably stretch back to the days of the Buddha himself and were adapted from brahminical canonic music; pron. "pih-riht".

Pirivena: School attached to a Buddhist temple complex used for the teaching of the Dhamma to lay people; pron. "pee-ree-vayh-nuh".

Pokuna: A pond or small lake; pron. "poh-koo-nuh".

Polthel pahana: A coconut oil lamp made of a pottery bowl about the size of the bottom quarter of a sliced-off tennis ball, with a lip at one edge to hold a wick; placed by the dozens before images of the Buddha at a vihara or other place of worship; pron. "pahl-thel pAHhah-nuh".

Potgul: A library, secular or sacred; pron. "pawt-guhl".

Poya: Technically, a phase of the moon; in practice, days at the four quarterly phases of the moon, especially full moon, on which the devout visit their neighborhood temple to offer dana (gifts, usually food) and puja (offerings such as incense, oil lamps, and flowers), and chant suttas (discourses originally given by the Buddha). Full-moon poya day is a national holiday; the devout are expected to renew their Five Precept vows; pron. "poh-yah".

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Poyage: A hall in which poya-day services are held after the outside worship before a vihara or the main temple; especially for the ceremonial midday meal; pron. "poh-yah-dj".

Punya: Meritorious acts which give one good karma and help on the path rising through samsara toward nibbana; pron. "poon-yah".

Purana: Oldest inhabited village in a district; assumes a quasi-capital status over newer villages in the area; pron. "puhr-AH-nuh".

Puranas: The oldest known Lankan coins; small square or oblong pieces cut from a strip of silver and then punch-stamped in the center; earliest examples date from pre-Christian times and continued in circulation until the second century A.D.; similar to Indian coins of the same period and may have been minted there; weight ranged from fifteen to fifty grams; pron. "puhr-AH-nuhs".

Raj: A king; pron. "radj".

Rajakariya: "The King's Duty" — hereditary forced service to the king, as in Western European feudal levies; however, rendered only to the king, not to lesser nobility; in modern times has come to mean the duties of an officeholder; pron. "rah-djah-kahh-rEE-yuh".

-rata: Suffix designating a county, district, or region; pron. "rah-tuh".

Raelapana: A "ripple band" of heavy chunks of stone placed on tank embankments where wave action would erode soil; pron. "ray-luhpAH-nuh".

Sadu: A novice monk not yet ordained; also a term of greeting used only with monks, as in "Sadu, bhikkhu" when meeting a monk on the street; not appropriate for addressing non-bhikkhus; pron. "sah-doo".

Sagara: The ocean surrounding Lanka; pron. "sAH-guh-ruh".

Sakra: King of the gods; pron. "sAHk-rah".

Samadhi: Deep meditation leading to ineffable tranquillity; pron. "sAH-meh-dee".

Samanera: A novice monk, also known as a sadu; pron. "sah-mahnair-ruh".

Sambura: A large many-antlered deer; Mahinda changed into this form to entice King Devanampiya Tissa to ascend the rock of Mihintale (pron. "mihn-tah-lay") so he could preach the Dhamma to the king; pron. "sahm-boo-ruh".

Samsara: The cycle of rebirths one passes through on the way toward attaining nibbana; often described as a place in the same way outer 274

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space is often described as a place; in fact samsara is state of existence in between physical manifestations; pron. "sam-sAH-ruh".

Samudra: The Sinhalese word for tank; the latter is most often used in speech but the former most often appears on maps; pron. "sa-mOOdruh".

Sandesa: Lit. "message" but commonly a genre of Sinhalese poetry in which a messenger such as a bird carries the message from the poet or a character in the poem such as a king or queen to another being, usually a god or goddess; the trouveres of medieval France would have loved this device; pron. "sahn-day-suh".

Sangha: The Buddhist order of monks; one of the Three Jewels (the others being the Buddha and the Dhamma) of the Buddhist faith; pron. "sang-aah".

Sangharaja: The chief bhikkhu of a monastery; pron. "sahng-aahrAH-juh".

Sasana: The Buddhist religion itself, as in the "Protestant" or the "Islamic" faith; pron. "s-AHH-suh-nuh".

Sanka: A conch shell with the pointed top shorn off to make a horn; used most often as an instrument in Kandyan and Bali dance and during demon exorcisms; also announces the entry of a bride at a wedding; pron. "sAHng-kuh".

Sanni yakuna: An exorcism ceremony using an eighteen-faced devil mask to drive out demons from a sick person in a ceremony which usually lasts until dawn; performed mainly in villages in the south of the island; pron. "sAHn-nee yah-koo-nuh".

Sarama: The sarong worn by men; tied with a single or double knot in the front which is then thrust into the waistband to increase tightness; field workers raise the long hem up to the waist and tie it in an identical manner, which turns the sarong into a sort of knee-length loincloth; pron. "sAH-ruh-muh".

Sil: Spiritual improvement via meditating, reading spiritual guides, listening to scriptures; pron. "seel".

Sila: General morality; pron. "see-luh".

Sinha: A lion, but more particularly, the lion with which the unnamed daughter of a Kalinga king mated to bear the first progeny of the Sinhal race; pron. "seen-huh".

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Sokari: A form of drama to ensure an abundant rice crop; masked characters enact a story in mime; a village art that becomes majestic in its silence; pron. "soh-kahr-ee".

Sariputra: A system of measurements in the Pali Canon which are used to establish the proportions of a Buddhist statue; using these proportions one may construct an image forty feet tall or long which will look exactly like an image forty inches tall or long; especially useful for carvers of stone images in which, unlike built-up brick images which are then plastered over before painting, a mistake can't be chipped out and replaced knowing the plaster will conceal it; pron. "suh-ree-poo-truh".

Sutta: A discourse of the Buddha; set to memory by his followers and finally recorded on ola leaf over 500 years after his parinibbana; pron. "suwt-tuh".

Tandava: Energetic masculine dance; pron. TAHn-dhuh-vuh".

Tank: An artificial reservoir built from natural depressions or lakes by the addition of embankments and sluice gates leading to irrigation or water transport canals; derives from the Portuguese word for reservoir, tanque; pron. as in English.

Tapal: Mail runners prior to the introduction of mechanical transport; these runners ran in relays from way stations; pron. "tah-puhl".

Tekkam: A dam or weir built across a flowing river to turn water into a canal or irrigation ditch; pron. "tehk-kuhm".

Thali: A wedding necklace placed by the groom; a plain gold necklace for Buddhist brides; for Hindu brides adorned with a medallion on which appear the Hindu symbols for the trinity, a conch, a trident, and a ring; in ancient times a Hindu thali was a simple yellow cord knotted three times; pron. "thAH-lee".

Thambili: Juice of the king coconut; being sterile it is often drunk by natives and visitors alike when local water is impure; pron. "thimbah-lee".

Thera: Originally a Buddhist sage; recently it has come to mean any bhikkhu who has been ordained ten years; pron. "th-air-uh".

Tikka: Lit. the "Divine Eye"; placed above eye level in the center of the forehead; most often used by Hindu women young and old, but many Buddhists apply it to their little girls, calling it the "Beauty Eye"; pron. "tee-kuh".

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Tipitaka: The "Three Baskets" of sacred Buddhist literature; sometimes spelled Tripitaka; pron. "Tih-pee-tah-kah".

Tivanha: The "thrice-bent" posture of a standing Buddha, in which one leg is slightly bent at the knee, thus lowering the waist and shoulder on that side; the idea conveyed is relaxation; pron. "teevahn-aa".

Torana: A linteled gateway at the entrance to a Buddhist shrine or temple; normally a stack of three lintels atop each other with a space in between, bent slightly upward in the middle and elaborately carved; pron. "toh-rah-nah".

Tunhavul: During the Dutch period, land which was granted on the condition one-third of it was cultivated in cinnamon; pron. "toon-hahvuhl".

Uluma: A teacher of the Koran and Islamic faith; pron. "oo-loo-maa".

Upasampada: The higher ordination of a bhikkhu, equivalent to a monsignor or abbot; pron. "ooh-puh-suhm-pah-duh".

Vali-kangana: The distinctive "parapet wall" surrounding most Buddhist temple grounds; resembles a giant sawtoothed wall with decorative holes pierced through them teeth; pron. "vahl-ee kAHngah-nah".

Vannama: An imitative secular dance in which the dancer tries to portray the movements and habits of a bird or other animal; pron. "vahn-nah-muh".

Vatadage: A protective enclosure for a dagoba consisting of a circle of stone or wood pillars holding up a wood and tile roof; pron. "vahtAH-dah-guh".

Varna: The original four Hindu castes of brahmin (priest), kshatriya (warriors; pron. in Sinhalese "kssh-aht-ree-yuh"); vaisya (cultivators and traders, pron. "vah-ee-syuh"; and candalas (menial laborers corresponding to the Hindu sudra caste who lived on the outskirts of towns and did scavenging and similar work, pron. "cahng-dhAHluhs". Over time these four broke down into an elaborate melange of castes based on hereditary occupation and region of origin; pron. "vAHr-nuh".

Veda: Any of four canonical texts written approximately 3,500 years ago in the form of brahminical verses defining the polytheistic brahminical faith and rules of conduct; pron. "Vay-dah".

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Veddahs: Aboriginal tribespeople now numbering very few members who live in the remote jungles of Sri Lanka and try to practice their original late neolithic hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle; thought to be the last remnants of the island's original Yahksa and Naga inhabitants; pron. "Ved-dhaa".

Vihara: Originally the hall in a Buddhist temple where the monks took their morning walks; eventually evolved into the designation of the entire temple itself; now used only to designate a building or shrine dedicated to the memory of the Gotama Buddha and set apart from other temple structures as a place where the faithful may worship and offer flowers and incense; not to be confused with an image house or pansala; pron. "vee-hAHr-uh".

Viharagam: Land and villages whose revenues benefit a specific vihara; pron. "vee-hAHr-uh-guhm".

Vila: A lotus-meadow of shallow water overgrown with lotuses and other lilies; beautiful beyond heaven, especially when the herons come hunting; sometimes spelled villu; pron. "vee-luh" and "veel-loo" respectively.

Vinaya: Monastic disciplinary regulations; while the laity have the Five Precepts to obey, bhikkhus have 227 to keep in mind; the Buddhist equivalent to the Rule of St. Benedict; pron. "vee-nayh-yaa".

Vuvera: Hindu god of wealth; revered mostly by people who have too much of it; pron. "Voo-vair-aa".

Wesak: The full-moon day in May, on which the Buddha is said to have been born, attained nibbana and died.

Wewa: Suffix name for a tank or reservoir, as in "Kalawewa" or "Newara Wewa"; pron. "vay-vuh".

Yahksa: Malevolent supernatural being or demon; the name of the original aboriginal inhabitants of Lanka who sometimes intermarried with the Aryan settlers but most often retreated into the jungles; pron. "yaak-suh".

Yakadura: A low-caste demon exorcist/priest; pron. "yah-kah-dooruh".

Yak bere: A drum used in demon exorcism ceremonies; positively deafening; pron. "yahk bear-uh".

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Yakdessa: Shaman or priest; pron. "yahk-dess-suh". The prefix "yak" in the foregoing few terms hearken to indigenous aboriginal traditions which were adopted by Aryan and other settlers.

Yala: A supplemental rice crop planted in May and reaped in September; pron. "yAH-luh".

Yoda-ela: A "giant" canal, such as the one connecting the Kalawewa tank to Anuradhapura; popularly imputed to have been made by giants (Yoda is an adjective meaning "huge", though not necessarily made by giants; pron. "yoh-duh ay-luh".

Yojana: Ancient Lankan measure of distance equalling approximately twelve to sixteen miles; a yojana is made of four gowwa of three to four miles each (the exact measure is unknown); sometimes spelled yoduna; pron. "yoh-djhah-nuh" and "gOW-wuh" respectively.

Yoni: A representation of the vulva associated with the worship of Shiva; pron. "yoh-nee".

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Bibliography Normally a general-audience work like this is not accompanied by a detailed bibliography of other publications consulted in its preparation. However, for those readers who wish to discover Sri Lanka in more depth, the following annotated bibliography may be of some help.

Many titles are printed in small quantities by Sri Lankan private or government presses and are unlikely to be available outside of the country. Some of the titles listed below are out of print but can be found in municipal libraries, used bookstores, and occasionally on the back shelves of contemporary bookstores. In the case of publishers unlikely to be listed in Books in Print and other references, I have appended the mailing address of the publisher to the citation; in the case where the same publisher produces many works listed herein (e.g., the Department of Cultural Affairs in Colombo), the address is listed after the first citation only. The prices for locally produced Sri Lankan books can be astonishingly low — ten rupees (25 cents) for the Department of Cultural Affairs booklets being a case in point.

And most are in letterpress!

Readers who have trouble finding the volumes cited below may wish to contact Mrs. Veena De Silva of KGB's Bookstore, 86 D.S. Senanayake Vidiya, Kandy She is one of Sri Lanka's most knowledgeable people on where to order or locate difficult to find books. The reference section of the British Council libraries in Colombo and Kandy have many out of print reference books, but you must become a member to have access to them. The fee as of this writing was Rs. 175, or $4.40.

Buddhism

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Note: With some 360 titles in print and an expanded publishing program being inaugurated in 1991, the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy is the world's largest publisher of Buddhist-related material.

Though mainly devoted to Theravada Buddhism, the Society is nonetheless the place to find Buddhist texts and commentaries difficult to come by in the West. Only those few which were used in the preparation of this book are cited below. For the complete picture, the reader is urged to contact the Society at 54, Sangharaja Mawatha, P.O. Box 61, Kandy.

Baptist, Egerton C.; The Supreme Science of the Buddha; Colombo: Printing House, 1955; distributed at no cost by the Mrs. H.M. Gunasekera Trust, Colombo. Mr. Baptist is a Protestant with a scientific background who converted to Buddhism. His various works attempt to reconcile the teachings of the Buddha with Christian beliefs and uses analogies from the world of Science to describe the link between physics and certain Buddhist tenets such as reincarnation.

Bodhi, Bhikkhu, ed.; Dana — The Practice of Giving; Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1990. Essays by four Buddhists hailing from Sri Lanka, the United States, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and edited by an American. Unselfish giving is an essential step in Buddhist practice. When combined with morality, mindfulness, and insight, one can ultimately be released from samsara. Hence giving and these other practices lead not merely to a happier present existence, but future existences as well.

Bodhi, Bhikkhu; The Noble Eightfold Path; Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1984. Easily the clearest and most concise work available in English on the life of the Middle Way one must lead to achieve Enlightenment. Required reading for students of Buddhism, delightful and insightful reading for those who wish more peace in their hearts.

Buddharakkhita, Archarya; Metta — The Philosophy and Practice of Universal Love; Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1989. This 47282

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page booklet is the Buddhist equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount.

But instead of being content with "Love they neighbor as thyself," Metta, or universal love, is this: "Whatever living creatures there be; without exception, weak or strong; long, huge, or middle-sized; or short, minute, or bulky; whether visible or invisible; and those living far and near; the born and those seeking birth; may all beings be happy!" (verses 4 and 5). The Metta Sutta's ten stanzas, if practiced constantly and assiduously, would release one from every form of anger, hatred, resentment, and self-centered fear.

Copleston, Reginald Stephen, D.D.; Buddhism, Primitive and Present in Magadha and Ceylon; London: Longmans, Green, 1908. A history of Buddhism and Indo-Ceylonese religious sociology written by a Catholic Bishop steeped in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. For all that, a remarkably objective and clearly written account of Buddhism prior to the time the Sangha in Ceylon/Sri Lanka formed the political affiliations and alignments with power which are corrupting the Sangha today.

Dhirasekera, Jotiya; Buddhist Monastic Discipline; Colombo: Ministry of Higher Education, 1982. Westerners are far more acquainted with the mechanics of the Church hierarchy in the West than the Buddhist faith. Theravada Buddhism in particular has a strict behavioral code based partly on words passed down through the suttas of the Buddha, and partly on the procedural development indigenous to any monastic gathering. This doctoral thesis is of interest only for scholars who wish to compare the evolution of Church monasticism with that evolved by Theravada Buddhism.

Gombrich, Richard; Theravada Buddhism; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1988. An excellent book for the young scholar or general reader who wishes a well-detailed history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka; contains an excellent section on the problems faced by Theravada Buddhism today.

Jayatilleke, K.N.; The Contemporary Relevance of Buddhist Philosophy; Kandy, Buddhist Publication Society, 1978. Heavy reading for those 283

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without a grounding in current philosophical issues: Existentialism, Logical Positivism, Analytical Philosophy, Kant, Hegel, Hume — even Edgar Cayce. Demonstrates how Buddhism's positive account of humankind's destiny is compatible with both humanism and science.

Lokuliyana, Lionel (trans.); Maha Pirit Pota — The Great Book of Protections; Colombo: Distributed at no cost by the H.M. Gunasekera Trust Fund. For the serious student of Buddhism or religious ritual only. Contains 179 pages of original Pali and English translations of ceremonial invocations used to ward off evil and bring luck. One might compare this work to a translation of all the Catholic liturgical chants since the time of St. Gregory, or a relation and analysis of all the hymns in the Protestant prosody. For the nonscholar, a fabulous glimpse into what those bhikkhus are really singing during pirit and worship.

Ven. Narada Maha Thera; The Buddha and His Teachings; Colombo: Lever Brothers Cultural Conservation Trust, 1987. A profusely illustrated text and photo book providing a richly detailed translation of key Buddhist suttas and other texts. Perhaps the clearest originaltext description of the Buddha's teachings, embellished with superb temple photographs by Gamini Jayasinghe.

Ven. Narada Maha Thera; The Dhammapada; Colombo: Vajirarama, 1972. The Dhammapada is a fundamental text of the Buddha's statements as recorded in writing for the first time several centuries after his death. Absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to know what the Buddha himself said, rather than interpretations by later commentators. This edition is out of print. As of this writing (1991) the Buddhist Publication Society has plans to reissue it in the near future.

Ven. Narada Maha Thera and Kassapa Thera; The Mirror of the Dhamma; Colombo: Lake House Publishers, Ltd., 1975. Texts of pirit chants (Buddhist devotional hymns) sung on religious festivals and other ceremonies. Text in Pali, Sinhalese, and English.

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Nyanatiloka; The Word of the Buddha; Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, n.d. The first systematic exposition of all the main tenets of the Buddha's teaching, presented in the Buddha's own words as found in the Sutta-Pitaka of the Buddhist Canon as recorded in the Pali language. Ninety pages of concise text, superb bibliography, and useful index of the page on which various Buddhist terms are defined in context. An absolute must for anyone interested in what the Buddha himself actually said, shorn of accretions by later commentators.

Nyanoponika Thera, et.al.; Mudita — The Buddha's Teaching on Universal Joy; Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1983. Four essays on finding unselfish joy and happiness in the success of others, whether one likes the individual or organization or not. Many people can be compassionate in thought, but few are able to unequivocally sharing in others' joy.

Nyanaponika, Thera; The Power of Mindfulness; Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1986. Compared with intelligence, imagination, energy, and devotion, mindfulness is not much appreciated as a source of mental energy in the West. These four qualities have the attraction of immediate impact on people and situations.

Mindfulness, however, lies beneath these qualities, and if cultivated by meditation and practice, can turn them into, in the Buddha's words, "from what is little into what is much." Rather than a force directed towards a purpose, mindfulness is the quality of clear comprehension which enables one to see the true goals of one's outwardly-directed mental abilities. This work is a must for anyone who wishes insight into the truth beneath every living moment.

Perera, H.R.; Buddhism in Sri Lanka, a Short History; Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1988. Excellent companion to Gombrech's book cited above. Gombrich is more a study of philosophical development while Perera sticks to historical development. Combining the two one gets a clear picture of the ups and downs of Buddhism's development in Sri Lanka, and by extension, why Buddhism is such a powerful force in Sinhalese life today.

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Phadnis, Urmila; Religion and Politics in Sri Lanka; New Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1976. This is a recycled doctoral thesis which, thankfully, doesn't read like a doctoral thesis. It is, however, for the serious student of the relationship between Buddhism and Ceylon/ Sri Lanka political developments starting with the British Colonial period and emphasizing more recent events. Sri Lanka is a superb study in the tolerance which can arise between an official state religion and diverse minority sects, and Mrs. Phadnis's book is a detail study of how that came to be.

Piyananda, Dikwela; Cittatavasangrahah — Manual on the Nature of Mind; Washington, D.C., Washington Buddhist Vihara, 1979. (5017, 16th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20011. An analysis of the relationship of the mind to the world outside of the mind comparable to Descartes' Discourse on Reason. The original text was in the form of 50 poetic stanzas in Sanskrit. This booklet reproduces the Sanskrit, a translation into Pali, and a rendering into English. Verse 41 sums up the overall Theravada Buddhist view of the mind: "The mind as a complete whole is expressed by the concepts of kriya (mere mental action not producing effects), karma (mental action producing effects), and vipaka (mental affects appearing in life). It is also expressed by the concepts of vedana (perception), samjna (conception), samskara (defiled conceptions), and vijnana (passive consciousness by the Rahula, Walpola; History of Buddhism in Ceylon: The Anuradha Period, 3rd Century B.C. — 10th Century A.D. Most narrowly focused, heavily footnoted histories are interesting only for scholars or true enthusiasts of a particular culture. Sri Rahula adds fine writing talent to an exceptionally interesting civilization virtually unknown to most people; the result is an informative yet highly readable account of ancient Lanka's most prodigious and visually splendid culture, which was ruled by no fewer than 123 kings over 1,400 years.

Rahula, Walpola Sri; What the Buddha Taught; London: Gordon Fraser, 1978. The book to read about the Buddha's words and what was meant by them. Eighty-nine pages of text, 47 pages of directly 286

Chapter title

translated stories and other examples from the Buddha's career, excellent glossary of Pali terms. Easy to read despite its scholarly accuracy.

Snelling, John; The Buddhist Handbook; London: Century Hutchison, Ltd., 1987. A clearly written history of Buddhism in general; Buddhism's history, development, spread throughout the world, and a valuable Who's Who in the back.

Culture and the Arts Basnayake, H.T.; Sri Lankan Monastic Architecture; Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1986. Ancient Lankans contributed a number of unique architectural features to the world vocabulary, among them the guardstone, moonstone, wingstone, makara thorana, and vatadage.

Many of these had a particularly religious significance in connection with Buddhism. This illustrated book is rather technical, but for the architect or art student interested in the historical roots of the unique objects tourists exclaim about, it is a definitive work.

Brohier, R.L.; Seeing Ceylon; Colombo: Lake House Publishers, Ltd., 1981. (41 W.A.D. Ramanayake Mawatha, Colombo 2). A geological surveyor with a desire and an ability to write well, Mr. Brohier traveled all over the island jotting notes on topics ranging from the engineering principles used in constructing ancient Lanka's reservoirs and watercourses, to folk stories, to natural history, to accurate depictions of life in the past. Excellent armchair traveler material, and equally excellent filling-in when the visitor has finally exhausted what is in the tourist guides.

Brohier, R.L.; Discovering Ceylon; Colombo: Lake House Publishers, Ltd., 1982. More of the same, only better. Excellent descriptions of animal life in the nearly impenetrable jungles and the life and folklore of villagers.

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Coomaraswamy, Ananda K.; Bronzes from Ceylon; Colombo: Colombo Museum, 1914. Ancient Lanka enjoyed a period of superb bronze casting, notably during the Polonnaruwa period. Mainly Hindu in style, these bronzes rank as some of the most finely figured in Asian art. A mercifully brief introduction places the illustrations in perspective yet allows them to tell their own story.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda H.; Mediaeval Sinhalese Art; New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. A scholar to his teeth, Dr. Coomaraswamy is nonetheless a decent writer who can explain the complicated artistic nexus between political/religious event and artistic independence.

This work is mainly for the serious art historian or authenticator, as it provides highly detailed descriptions and drawings of nearly every type of art and folk craft known in ancient Lanka. For readers who really want to know the meaning of the painted checkerboards, lotuses, mythical animals, gorgons, chimeras, chevrons, grass mat patterns, eaves tiles, and the like, this is the book to read.

Disanayaka, J.B.; National Languages of Sri Lanka — Sinhala; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, 135, Dharmapala Mawatha, Colombo 7. The eleven booklets in this series are gold mines of succinct descriptions of Sri Lankan cultural forms. Well worth reading before and after seeing an event.

Dissanayake, Chandra; Ceylon Cookery; Colombo: Metro Printers, Ltd., 1968. Most visitors go away from Sri Lanka with a ho-hum attitude about its food. This is partly because they eat in inexpensive restaurants presided over by poorly paid cooks. Home cooking, on the other hand, is a very different matter. Since most visitors won't be in any one place long enough to enjoy a home-cooked meal, this book — and several others similarly structured — is a good take-home item. If you really want to surprise your guests with something new ....

Fernando, Seela; Traditional Herbal Food and Medicines in Sri Lanka; Colombo: National NGO (Non-Governmental Organizations) Council of Sri Lanka, 1982 (c/o Sri Lanka FFHC Board, 17 Longdon Place, 288

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Colombo 7). Ayurvedic herbal medicine came to Sri Lanka on the first boats bringing settlers. It is one of the most ancient and unchanged naturopathic medicinal systems in existence and is very prominent in Sri Lankan life today. This is a very "how-to" book which provides specific recipes, preparation methods, and dosages for specific maladies. It even includes a chapter in how to grow your own medicinal herb garden. The author provides the Latin names of the various species he describes. Most of the herbs are available outside Sri Lanka.

Godakumbure, C.E.; Twelve monographs entitled as follows: Embekke Devale Carvings, Panavitiya Ambalama Carvings, Medawala Vihara Frescoes, Tivanka Pilgrimage Frescoes, Polonnaruwa Bronzes, Buddha Statues, Guard Stones, Moonstones, Sinhalese Doorways, Terracotta Heads, Terracotta Decorative Tiles, and Dance Forms and Music; Colombo: Archaeological Department of the University of Colombo; reprinted by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Heavily illustrated descriptions in Sinhalese and English of many of Sri Lanka's most characteristic "formal" arts. In particular the visitor to the Ancient Cities country in the north may want to read the monographs on Buddha statues, moonstones, guard stones, and the material on terracotta work.

Godakumbure, C.E.; Architecture of Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, n.d. As with the Archeology Department booklets, the 11 Department of Cultural Affairs monographs cited in various spots below are excellent overviews of their topics. Excellent — and very inexpensive — "further readings" for those whose appetites have been whetted by a tour-guided visit and now want to know what they really saw which the tour guide didn't know anything about.

Godakumbure, C.E.; Literature of Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

Goonatilleka, M.H.; Masks of Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Goonatilleka, D.C.R.A.; Modern Sri Lankan Poetry: An Anthology; Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1987. Many of the poems quoted in the chapter Sri Lankan Poetry were taken from this book.

Goonatilleka, M.H.; Sokari of Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs. A solid look at a disappearing countryside dancedrama form which is unique even in Sri Lanka and somewhat resembles kabuki. An excellent book for students of the performing arts, as Sokari uses masks, props, and chanting in a manner unlike any other performance form. Performances are rare and hard to get to, but a perfect subject for a student after a Fulbright.

Gunawardena, A.J.; Theatre in Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

Kailasapathy, K. and Sanmugadas, A.; National Languages of Sri Lanka — Tamil; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

Keller, Dale and Patricia; The Handcrafts of Ceylon; Colombo: Ceylon Tourist Board, 1967. This well-illustrated color book is mainly of interest to practicing weavers, batik makers, woodcarvers, glassmakers, potters, lacquerers, and similar handcrafters. It provides details on techniques used by Sri Lankan handcrafters; despite such a dull-sounding analysis, it is a surprisingly interesting book.

Kiribamune, S., and Samarasinghe, V., eds; Women at the Crossroads, A Sri Lankan Perspective; New Delhi:International Centre for Ethnic Studies/Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1990. Eleven papers by women on the changing and the historical roles of women in Sri Lankan society. Education, family law, social traditions, gender inequality, dual roles, and the impact of career on family life are a few of the topics addressed by the authors. A particularly worthwhile read for males interested in how a society can work without the macho system.

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Kulatillake, C. and Abeysinghe, Ranjan; A Background to Sinhala Traditional Music of Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

Makulloluwa, W.B.; Dances of Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

Parker, H.; Village Folk Tales of Ceylon; Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1910, reprinted 1972. (Dutugemunu Street, Dehiwala). Thirteen hundred pages containing 226 examples of marvelous popular literature virtually unknown in the west. Excellent as a good read, but far important to folklorists is the author's citations at the end of each story of similar stories told in other countries around the world, particularly Asia. Even a casual reader cannot but be impressed with the remarkable similarities of folk legends in regions extremely ill likely to have communicated with each other. Out of print but available in good Sri Lankan municipal libraries and the British Council libraries in Kandy and Colombo (reference section).

Pertold, Otakar; The Ceremonial Dances of the Sinhalese; Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, Ltd., 1930, reprinted 1973. An exhaustive look at folk thinking as expressed in dance. Costumes, masks and mask making techniques, translations of dance recitations, footstep and drumming patterns — from the days when village life was almost untouched by Westernized culture, even the radio. Perhaps the most authentic, and readable, account on folk dance in print.

Radhakrishnan, S.; The Principal Upanishads; London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1953. Though dated, probably the best translation and commentary on the major theological work underlying Hinduism that has been published. The 145-page introduction provides an excellent overview of the constitution and meaning of the Upanishads. The translations themselves are tough sledding by virtue of their exactness and the fact that the original Sanskrit precedes each section and is often quoted in the author's explanatory matter.

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Ratnatunga, Manel; Folk Tales of Sri Lanka; New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1979. Thirty three stories written in a distinctly colloquial Westernized fashion. Nonetheless, a quick portrait of the huge body of Sri Lankan folk stories that have been told sometimes over centuries.

Reynolds, C.H.B., An Anthology of Sinhalese Literature, up to 1815; London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1970. Sri Lanka possesses a literary tradition longer than Britains and more diverse than Germany's. The traditional forms of the epic, allegory, legend, folk tale, morality play, and quatrain all exist, plus the unique form of the Jataka or prior life of the Buddha, and the sutta, or sutra. A pity not much of this is known in the West, as writers would find a fountain of new literary devices amid the thousands of pages of great storytelling.

Reynolds, C.H.B.; An Anthology of Sinhalese Literature of the Twentieth Century; Woodchurch, England: Paul Norbury Publications Ltd., 1987.

As with its ancient literature, Contemporary Sri Lankan writing is sadly ignored in the West. A pity, as although it may not contribute so many literary devices with no counterparts in Western literature, as the ancient Lankan literature does, there is nonetheless an abundance of high quality writing to be found by reading this book.

Sarachchandra, E.R.; The Folk Drama of Ceylon; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1952 and 1966. Devotees of the performing arts will love this book. It is a highly detailed description of the enormous body of song and dance, demonology, puppet plays, and masks that comprise Sri Lankan folk culture. Musical scales reproduce songs, there are extensive quotations from songs and plays, and a good selection of black-and-white photos round out a portrait of folkways first described long before mass tourism evolved. As Sri Lankan folk dance and drama are virtually unknown to the Western performance world, this book is an invaluable resource of philosophy as well as technique.

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De Silva, K.M.; Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies, Sri Lanka 1880-1985; Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1986. The title is misleading. This book is about inter-ethnic social history during a period of volatile change in Ceylon/Sri Lanka.

Virtually every aspect of a fragmenting social order being replaced by an unpredictable new order is broached in Professor de Silva's work — politics, economics, caste, the role of the Sangha, language parity and disparity, economic changes from colonial to socialism to capitalism, and much more. An obligatory read for anyone who wishes to reside in Sri Lanka for any length of time with an understanding of the society in which he or she is living.

De Silva, R.K.; Early Prints of Ceylon, 1800-1900; London: Serendib Publications, 1985. Color reproductions over one hundred excellent prints and paintings depicting native and colonists' life in Ceylon, embellished with equally picturesque accounts by the twenty-odd artists describing their journeys to where the picture was rendered. A superb glimpse of life before the modern era — and how little country life has changed. "The Ferry House at Pantura" (p.113) is hardly different today than what it was 150 years ago, and the map of Kandy from 1908 (p.60) could be lifted intact and placed on a tourist brochure today. Subject matter aside, many of the prints are worth the look simply for their artistry.

Smith, Vincent A.; A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930. Comparative studies of Indo-Lankan art are rather rare. Professor Smith's is invaluable in that he traces Indian art's roots in many traditions, including that of Greece after the Alexandrine invasion and Islamic art. The book's main focus is on India, but his historical analyses apply in some part to ancient Lanka as well. The book is particularly useful for art historians and authenticators, as it contains detailed descriptions of ancient paint formulas and techniques.

Tilakasiri, J.; Puppetry in Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Udugama, Sujatha; Jataka Stories; Colombo: Evangel Press, Ltd., 490/8 Havelock Road, Colombo 6, 1988. Twenty stories culled from the 577 which comprise the Jatakas, or stories about the various reincarnations of the Buddha. Today only the naive believe these are true stories; rather they are considered mythopoetic folk stories whose moral points illustrate the basic tenets of Buddhism. The Jatakas themselves are tough reading, filled with arcane references to gods and language which reads like English around 1450. These twenty distillations are an excellent way to get the spirit of the Jatakas without falling asleep in the middle.

Weerakoon, R; Sri Lanka's Mythology; Samayawardhana, 53, Maligakanda Road, Colombo 10. More than a bit technical, this is a detailed relation and analysis of the major mythological themes which appear as myths themselves but also as the foundation for various patterns of mythology — e.g., the lion myth of Sri Lanka's origins, flying through the air myths, popular stories derived from the Jataka myths about the Buddha's other reincarnations, and so on.

Not a light read, but superb for the tracker of mythic paths.

Wijesekera, Nandadeva; Ancient Paintings and Sculpture in Sri Lanka; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs.

Wickramasinghe, Martin; Landmarks of Sinhalese Literature; Colombo: M.D. Gunasena & Co., Ltd. A concise and lucid description o 2,200 years of literary tradition, embellished by quotes from pertinent works. As Sri Lanka's literary tradition embraces ideas and techniques unknown in the West, this is an excellent familiarization to the territory that enables the lover literature to navigate the sometimes uncharted seas of Lankan prose.

Wijesekera, Nandadeva; Deities and Demons, Magic and Masks (2 volumes); Colombo: M.D. Gunasena & Co., Ltd., 1987 (217, Olcott Mawatha). The most comprehensive description of Sri Lankan folk life and folklore in existence. Astrology, magic, devil dancing, masks, herbal medicine, agricultural deities, sorcery, healing invocations, 294

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popular dancing, 122 color and 29 black-and-white illustrations. A delightful read even if you aren't into folklore.

Wirz, Paul; Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954. Unfortunately for those interested in the details of culture, this book is out of print. It is one of the most comprehensive studies of the ceremonies and artifacts of Sri Lanka's enormous culture of demonology and animistic beliefs. Ritual artifacts, quotations from ceremonial chants, stories of the demons and gods who effect human life, and legends that have been passed on by word of mouth from Neolithic times. An utterly fascinating look at a way of thinking which has been preserved intact in Sri Lanka for at least 3,000 years.

History Brohier, R.L.; Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, 2 vols.; Colombo: Government Publications Bureau, 1934. A thorough documentation of ancient Lanka's marvelous irrigation reservoir and canal system, made by a government surveyor who also had a great compassion for and interest in the Sri Lankan people. Mr. Brohier's two generalinterest works are cited above; the work cited here is a technical account mainly of interest to scholars, but readers who want to know more about the Kalawewa-to-Anuradhapura irrigation system described in the chapter "Water Water, Everywhere" can find the original technical source material between pages 11 and 17 of Volume Two. De Silva, K.M.; A History of Sri Lanka; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. This is far an away the most comprehensive, clearly written, and generally available general history of the island.

At 563 pages exclusive of appendixes and tables, this is as thick as Shogun and not quite as thrilling a read, yet well worth acquiring while in the country to read as you travel, then take home to savor.

One really needs to see the country's rich vitality before this book's full impact can be realized.

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De Silva, K.M., ed.; Sri Lanka: A Survey; London: C. Hurst & Company publishing for The Institute of Asian Affairs, Hamburg, Germany, 1977. A research document for serious scholars. Eighteen monographs by various authors on the technical aspects of Sri Lanka's government, infrastructure, demographics, and populace. Many tables and maps of use to scholars.

Ellawala, H.; Social History of Ceylon; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1969. Many people assume that Sri Lanka, being such a small island, developed a monolithic cultural and social system. The same wrong assumption is made about Ireland.

However, 2,500 years of history spread among three distinct civilizations and dozens of geographical regions, influenced by invasions both military and commercial, isn't the stuff from which a monolith is made. Too, Sri Lanka has a very different social mentality than India, which is evident to even a casual visitor within the first day of arrival. The island's cultural history is fascinating even for non-academic types, and Professor Ellawala's account is both lucid and comprehensive.

Geiger, Wilhelm; The Culture of Ceylon in Mediaeval Times; Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1960. Professor Geiger was one of the last prominent representatives of the pioneering school of Orientalism which commenced in the later nineteenth century. This book is an interpretive description of society based largely on two of the most detailed contemporary accounts of Sri Lankan history and society, the Mahavamsa and the Culavamsa (see below). This is a scholarly history in the classic European academic style. Its prime virtue is the wealth of fascinating factual details which appear elsewhere only in the work of Professor K.M. de Silva and Professor Paranavitana.

Geiger, Wilhelm; Culavamsa; London: The Pali Text Society, distributed by Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1980.

Geiger, Wilhelm, Ph.D.; Mahavamsa, or Great Chronicle of Ceylon; Colombo: Ceylon Government Information Department, 1950, reprinted (and still available) from the Government Press, Colombo, 296

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and Billing and Sons, Guildford and Esher, London. A scholarly translation of ancient Lanka's partly apocryphal and partly factual history of its ancient kings from Vijaya to Mahasena (A.D. 301).

Geiger's scholarship is superb — the Introduction runs to 63 pages, there are extensive footnotes, appendices, dictionaries of Pali terms, and so on. The Mahavamsa itself can stand alongside the world's greatest chronicles in terms of scope and the clarity of the picture it draws of royal and daily life during the period it covers. The reprinted volume is leather-bound with gold stamping and goes for the princely sum of Rs. 500 ($12.50).

Knox, Robert; An Historical Relation of Ceylon; Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, Ltd., 1981. Knox was a sailor for the British East India Tea Company who was captured by the King of Kandy in 1660. He was detained in the interior for nearly twenty years but finally escaped, made his way to London, and wrote this book about his experiences. His encyclopedic description of the island and its people, customs and costumes, paint a vivid picture of daily life at the time.

Sri Lankan cooking has changed so little the foods he describes are served virtually unchanged today. Only tea and coffee and alcohol are missing from the meals of 350 years ago.

Leach, E.R.; Pul Eliya, A Village in Ceylon; A Study in Land Tenure and Kinship; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. The agricultural village, particularly the rice village, and the family are the two most stable units in Sri Lankan society. This highly detailed study of the mechanics of farm life is mainly of interest to scholars, but is readable enough for the casual reader who wants to know the details and social structure behind the pretty countryside views one sees from the car window.

Liyanagamage, Amaradasa; The Decline of Polonnaruwa; Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1968. The Polonnaruwa era of Lankan history is one of the grandest and briefest. Lasting roughly 250 years, it is a case study in what happens when a kingdom drains its resources dry through overbuilding and maintaining an empire too great for its wealth (farmers in this case) to sustain. The Portuguese 297

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overseas and Dutch Colonial empires suffered from some of the same problems as did Polonnaruwa. This work focuses on hidden causes such as malaria as well as the more obvious causes of grandiose kings blindly attempting to outdo one another's public works.

Mendis, G.C., ed.; The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers; Documents on British Colonial Policy in Ceylon, 1796-1833, 3 vols.; London: Oxford University Press, 1956. Verbatim transcripts of correspondence, observations, and recommendations made by a commission whose edicts dramatically changed traditional Ceylonese social practices, particularly the communal labor system called rajakariya. The specific edict regarding rajakariya appears starting on page 233 of Volume III; it is a study in the obtuse high mindedness which leads to ruinous ends — as in the story of the monkeys in the chapter "Sri Lankan Folk Stories" whose witless good intentions cause more harm than good.

Mills, Lennox; Ceylon Under British Rule, 1975-1932; London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1933 and 1964. The first comprehensive history of British rule published in this century and the first since Emerson Tennant's study (q.v.) sixty years before. This book starts off with one of the most hilarious and poignant accounts of the face-to-face relationship with Kandyan royalty, and goes on from there. Yet another work geared mainly to scholars, although very informative.

One wishes writers of such books would get out of the library and walk among the people who they write about.

Obeyesekere, Gananath; Land Tenure in Village Ceylon; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Of interest mainly to scholars, this is a detailed study of the customs and unwritten laws which govern the acquisition and transfer of land from the latter British Colonial period to 1965.

Paranavitana, Senerat; The Story of Sigiri; Colombo: Lake House Publishers, Ltd., 1972. This is probably the most formidable work of scholarship to have ever been produced in Sri Lanka. Professor Paranavitana's works were my principle resource for the chapter "The 298

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Maidens of Sigiriya". By sad necessity my condensation reflects only one-tenth of his original material. Now out of print but available in the occasional used bookshop and for perusal in most libraries, The Story of Sigiri is a superb depiction of royal and Buddhist life in the early centuries of the Christian era, both in Lanka and India.

Professor Paranavitana is one of Sri Lankas greatest scholars and well worth the time to read.

Paranavitana, Senerat; Inscriptions of Ceylon; Moratuwa: Department of Archeology of Sri Lanka, 1983. For the die-hard history buff, this large volume with 42 plates describes the discovery and translation of various inscriptions cut into stone from all over ancient Lanka. The amateur (or professional) archaeologist will get a vivid idea of the depths of scholarship involved in putting together a genuinely historical account of early Lankan history, as opposed to the often apocryphal (but still delightful) chronicles like the Mahvamsa.

Available through the publisher and at the Archaeological Museum at Anuradhapura Museum — a must see even if you aren't an archaeologist.

Paranavitana, Senerat; Sinhalayo; Colombo: Lake House Publishers, Ltd., 1980. A celebratory history of the Sinhalese people and their culture. Less scholarly and thus much more accessible to the visitor, richly illustrated with line drawing in rubric, Professor Paranavitana's look at ancient Lanka is both colorful and informative.

For those who think history makes dull reading, this book will give pause for re-thought. One can almost smell what's on the cooking fires.

Pieris, P.E.; Ceylon: The Portuguese Era, 2 vols.; Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo Ltd., 1914 and 1983. Perhaps too detailed for the average reader, Professor Pieris's book is nonetheless an accurate description of economic and political history embellished with vivid descriptions of costumes and customs, battles and spices.

Pieris, P.E.; Documents Relating to the Rise of Dutch Power in Ceylon, 1602-1670 from the Translations at the India Office; London: Curzon 299

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Press, 1929 and 1973. For scholars only. A year-by-year verbatim translation of letters and diary entries by Dutch administrators regarding Ceylan. For those who love to dive deeply into history's fathoms, an excellent if tediously detailed account of how Dutch colonial administrators managed the island's economy and trade.

Roberts, Michael; Caste Conflict and Elite Formation in Sri Lanka, 1500-1931; Colombo: Lake House Publishers, 1982. An academic but thorough account of the Sri Lankan caste system as it changed under Colonial rule and carried forward into our own time. For those interested in why the caste system has slowly broken down in Sri Lanka yet remains so rigidly strong in India, this work is a mandatory read.

De Silva, Colvin; Ceylon Under the British Occupation, 1795-1833; Colombo, The Colombo Apothecaries Co., Ltd., 1962. A detailed look at the mechanics of British colonial rule and the society which the British tried to reform into its own image for its own economic benefit. A truly dismal story saved only by the vitality of the Sri Lankan people themselves, who turned a fossil of a country upon the British departure in 1948 into the fascinating island one visits today. It takes an empire to ruin a country like Ceylon, and it takes a great native people to turn the ruins back into their own culture again.

Stroup, Herbert; Like a Great River; New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

This history of the Hindu faith is both comprehensive and easy to read. A great virtue is the author's delving into the folklore background of Hindu beliefs and gods. Indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the doctrines of the most complex religion in the world.

Tennent, James Emerson; Ceylon, An Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and Topographical, 2 vols.; Dehiwala, Sri Lanka: Tisara Prakasakayo, Ltd., 1859 and 1977. If ever there was a poetic encyclopedia, this is it. Tennent was a nineteenth-century colonial administrator who traversed and catalogued virtually every political district and geographical region of Ceylon. This work is so 300

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abundantly detailed it defies description, so here is a sample paragraph: "The jackal in the low country hunts in packs, headed by a leader, and these audacious prowlers have been seen to assault and pull down a deer. The small number of hares in the districts they infest is ascribed to their depredations. An excrescence is sometimes found on the head of the lead jackal, consisting of a small horny cone about half an inch in length, and concealed by a tuft of hair. This the natives call Narri-comboo, and they aver that this "Jackal's Horn" only grows on the head of the leader of the pack. The Singhalese and the Tamils alike regard it as a talisman and believe that its fortunate possessor can command by its instrumentality the realisation of every wish, and that if stolen or lost by him, will invariably return of its own accord. Those who have jewels to conceal rest in perfect security if along with them they can deposit a Narri-comboo, fully convinced that its presence is an effectual safeguard against robbers."

Vimalananda, Tennakoon; The British Intrigue in the Kingdom of Ceylon; Colombo: Gunasena & Co., Ltd., 1973. Five hundred forty-three pages of original documents reprinted verbatim. Of interest mainly to scholars, but casual readers will delight at the vivid and detailed picture painted of daily life during the British Colonial period. As it is almost totally British in focus, there is little to be learned of life among the Ceylonese in this work, but as a magnifying glass held up to the machinations of the British it is superb. There is a great deal of polite phrases to superiors that read "I have had the honour to receive your letter of ...", but not many examples of "honour" in deeds to the natives.

Political Affairs Guneratna, Malinga; For a Sovereign State; Ratmalana, Sri Lanka: Sarvodaya Book Publishing Services, 1988. If you want to understand the sheer paranoia about Tamils which infects many Sinhalese, this is the book to read. At once grandiose and self-pitying, it is an excellent study in the mind of a man whose unexamined fears reflect those of

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many Sinhalese. It reads like an elaborate justification for the racist policies of Sirimavo Bandaranaike.

Hyndman, Patricia; Sri Lanka, Serendipity Under Siege; Nottingham, England: Spokesman Publications, Bertrand Russell House, Gamble Street, 1988. Even-handed and carefully researched description of the causes and effects of the Sinhalese/Tamil conflict between the 1983 riots and 1987. A lucid analysis of terrorism as practiced by both sides. Especially good on the long-term consequences these events may have on democratic pluralism in Sri Lanka.

Jiggins, Janice; Caste and Family in the Politics of the Sinhalese, 1947-1976; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. A highly detailed examination of the relationship of old-line castes and changing voting patters during a time when the caste system is slowly breaking down due to economic change. Its surprisingly good writing raises it above the level of scholarly material and is excellent for anyone interested in the Sri Lankan caste system and the manner in which family bonds affect governmental decisions.

O'Ballance, Edgar; The Cyanide War — Tamil Insurrection in Sri Lanka, 1973-1988; London: Brassey's (UK) Ltd., 1988. As its inflammatory (and misleading) title hints, this is a purely journalistic account of the Tamil insurrection. Confined to surface-only narratives of events as they unfold, O'Ballance's book is useful for keeping track of chronologies and names, but provides no insight beyond actionreaction blow-counterblow reportage. No insights into the psychology of the participants, and no sense of the historical roots leading to the unrestrained killings of today.

Ponnanbalam, Satchi; Sri Lanka: National Question and the Tamil Liberation Struggle; London: Tamil Information Centre, 1983 (11 Beulah Road, Thornton Heath, Surrey, Great Britain). A history of the Tamil movement for self-governance told from the point of view of a Tamil driven from Sri Lanka by what he feels to be an oppressive government. This comprehensive history is vital to any reader who wishes to look at both sides of the Tamil Liberation issue. The author 302

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makes no pretense at even-handedness, but if the reader looks beyond Marxist cant and an undercurrent of self-pity throughout, there is in this work a cogent but definitely one-sided argument for an independent Tamil state.

Suriyakumaran, C., The Anguish of '83 — Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis and the Way Out; Colombo: K.V.G. de Silva, Ltd, 1990. A solutions approach to the Sinhalese-Tamil crisis written by a Tamil who proposed concrete solutions rather than political manifestos and behind the scenes backstabbing. The book originated as a series of articles in Sri Lankan newspapers from 1983 through 1990 and is among the most up-to-date works dealing with the subject. Lucidly written and an excellent read for those interested in the potential for a peaceful resolution to the island's ethnic troubles.

Wilson, A. Jeyaratnam; The Breakup of Sri Lanka; London: C. Hurst & Company, 1988.A comprehensive history of the origins and progress of the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict from the arrival of the British in 1795, with most of the material concentrating on developments between Independence in 1948 and 1988. Not an easy read, but of real use to those interested in a detailed look at the personalities and events which have led to the political turmoil today.

Travel and Tourism Disanayaka, J.B.; Say It in Sinhala; Colombo: Lake House Publishers, 1974. An inexpensive yet very useful phrase book. One learns Sinhala as a child learns any language, vowel by vowel, consonant by consonant. The archaic phonetic transcription system used makes it difficult to learn correct pronunciation. The reader who will be staying on in Sri Lanka for any length of time should find a tutor to teach the basic pronunciation patterns.

Wheeler, Tony and Noble, John; Sri Lanka, A Travel Survival Kit; Berkeley, California: Lonely Planet Publications. The dozens of Travel Survival Kit books are invaluable how-to guides on the nuts and bolts 303

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of getting to and around the countries on their list. Though some hotels or restaurants or transportation information may have changed by the time you arrive in Sri Lanka (or wherever their books may lead you), by and large the information is priceless and much of it unobtainable locally. Each Travel Survival Kit is updated periodically; the most recent Sri Lanka update is 1990. With all due respect for American Express, Travel Survival Kits are an item of which you can definitively say, "Don't leave home without it." Available in any good bookstore, or by mail from: Lonely Planet Publications, P.O. Box 2001A, Berkeley, CA 94702.

Multiple authors; Sri Lanka; Insight Guides, Prentice Hall Press, 1987.

The Insight Guides and Travel Survival Kits should go with the traveler as a husband-and-wife team. Each gives the reader much of what the other does not. The Insight Guide to Sri Lanka is far more detailed on matters of history, cultural background, and detailed descriptions of the sights one sees, whereas Tony Wheeler's books are invaluable how-to references. As with the Travel Survival Kits, Insight periodically updates their books. Available in almost any decent-sized bookstore, or on order from: Prentice Hall Press, Gulf & Western Bldg., One Gulf & Western Plaza, New York, NY 10023.

Zoysa, Neela de, and Raheem, Ryhana; Sinharaja, A Rain Forest in Sri Lanka; Colombo: Royal Norwegian Development Corporation, 1987 and 1990. The Sinharaja ("Royal Lion") is the only remaining undisturbed rain forest in Sri Lanka. A naturalist's paradise, it is penetrated by very few trails and is not a place recommended for the inexperienced hiker/naturalist (innumerable leeches are the least of the problems). Nonetheless, one of the least visited yet most beautiful sections of a country already well supplied with beauty. Marvelous flowers, animals, and snakes, and the wild cardamom turns a dull fire-boiled rice into olfactory heaven.

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