ON OLCOTT BUDDHISTS
Two Tissas, Tissa Devendra and Tissa Amarasekera have written on Olcott Buddhists on the assumption that an Olcott Buddhist is one who has been educated at a school that gave instructions in English in the old days and established by Colonel Olcott and the Buddhist Theosophical Society (BTS), and others who followed the BTS. I had never defined an Olcott Buddhist as one who was educated in one of these schools and I wonder how they came to that conclusion. In between the articles by the two Tissas I had penned down a few sentences on Olcott Buddhists under the title "The Peace of Chandrika" on the nineteenth of May, including the following. "It is neither necessary nor sufficient to be an old pupil of a Buddhist school to become an Olcott Buddhist." Tissa Amarasekera in spite of this explanation had continued to stick to what he means by an Olcott Buddhist and not what I meant by that concept. In any event I was wondering whether there were any Tissas other than this Tissa from Colombo and that Tissa from Kandy (incidentally not Mahanuwara) when I had a telephone call from a Tissa Anonymous to ask me why I was writing on Olcott Buddhists educated at Buddhist English Schools. What is interesting is that none of these Tissas referred to those educated in the Sinhala Medium schools established by the BTS, as Olcott Buddhists. Did they unconsciously come to the conclusion that those who were educated in Sinhala Medium BTS schools could not have become Olcott Buddhists?
Tissa Devendra refers to me as a "Professor" and brackets with another "Professor" H.L. Seneviratne to whom he "replies" in a few sentences while devoting most of the article to a "reply" on Olcott Buddhists. I have no truck with H.L.Seneviratne nor with any one of the other Sociologists who ridicule Sinhala Buddhists and though not educated in Social Sciences as Susantha Goonatilake who according to himself is a well known Social Scientist, I have taken these western Social Scientist bulls by their horns more than any of these Tissas. I am not interested in the title of "Professor" though the University system refers to me in that capacity. In any event I am only an "Associate Professor" who has had no interest in publishing in the so-called journals whether internationally renowned or not, for more than fifteen years. If I have any new ideas I publish them in "The Island", "Divaina" and "Vidusara", which are my "research journals". Tissa Devendra says he is 'sadly disappointed in the prejudiced and sloppy talking of both these "professors" '. I have no brief for H. L. Seneviratne but as far as I am concerned all I have to say is that Tissa Devendra has made this "sound" statement without illustrating it by quoting a single sentence from my article. However he finds some satisfaction in what his guru Lyn Ludowyk had once said: "Professor was a term of contempt in Shakespeare's day. It meant a charlatan, a man who professed to be something he was not just like astrologer 'professors' who hang out in the byways of Maradana".
It is unfortunate that Prof. Ludowyk has apparently not said anything about the Professors of his day and whether the term Professor was used in the second half of the twentieth century also with contempt. Lyn Ludowyk would have known about evolution of languages and it is unlikely that the "shishya" Tissa Devendra did not receive that information from his guru. If Tissa Devendra was not aware of that and if he is still hanging on to the meaning given to the word "Professor" in Shakespearean times I wonder how he could make the following statement when referring to the "achievements" of the products of what he calls the Olcott Schools. " Some of us even bested elite Christian girls' schools in that, now forgotten, exhibition of English skills - spelling bees. Our students went on to become doctors, lawyers, engineers etc., and even university professors(!). Some reached that Colonial summit of excellence - the Ceylon Civil Services. This is not exhaustive but just a sampling". What a sampling of achievements indeed! From besting elite Christian girls' in spelling bees to the colonial "summit" Ceylon Civil Service through professors "like the astrologer 'professors' who hang out in the byways of Maradana" . Tissa Devendra accuses me of sloppy thinking and one is entitled to assume that he is not sloppy in his thinking.
I will come back to these "achievements" later in this series of articles on Olcott Buddhists but let me first deal with Susantha Goonatilake the eminent Social Scientist. I am compelled to go into this first as I am writing on Social Science. Surely Olcott Buddhist is not a concept in western Mathematics or western Mathematical Physics in which I have a smattering of knowledge and which I sell for a living in the University, and what I write including Jathika Chinthanaya is only popular social commentary and not social science according to SG. I wonder whether SG has read and understood "Mage Lokaya", "Vidya Kathandara" or the articles I write to "Vidusara", or even an article such as "The Logic of Change" that appeared in "The Midweek Review" of "The Island" a few weeks ago. They may be popular but they are not only social commentary though when I sell Mathematics even at the university I do not fail to wrap them in social science wrapping paper. I must say that I am not writing to a few academics eminent or otherwise and I have no habit of writing in the jargon peculiar to the academics. The so called genre of academic writing with references and quotations from other academic "papers" and books is not for me and I am happy with my popular writings, with occasional quotations from the popular articles of Devendras and Goonatilakes.
However, even with my smattering of knowledge that I have acquired in western Mathematics and western Mathematical Physics I have found that except for the quotations and references the so-called academic papers in most of the social sciences, especially in Sociology are popular stuff. Unlike papers in western Mathematics and western Mathematical Physics anybody, including nobodies and somebodies, with some skills in English Language, not to mention besting girls schools elite Christian or otherwise in spelling bees, is in a position to understand these works. One does not need a degree or a training in Sociology to understand Weber's Protestant Ethic or Foucault's Sexuality. However, the same cannot be said of Dirac's Quantum Mechanics. Even those who are supposed to be Philosophers of Science would not find the latter easy going and SG who like Dirac has a first degree in Engineering, and who talks a lot on Quantum Physics could try his hands at reading Dirac in order to get at what I am trying to say. However, I must admit that there is a difference between Dirac and Susantha Goonatilake. Paul Dirac who graduated with a first class went from Engineering to Mathematical Physics. Susantha Goonatilake went from Engineering to Sociology.
Susantha Goonatilake has written on Social Science: Social Non - Sense on 26th May in the "Midweek Review" of "The Island". I agree with him on what he has written on social non-sense. Most of the personalities he has mentioned in his article on the above subject do not deserve even a mentioning. However, it is difficult to ignore the fact that western social sciences that tried to limp behind western Physics have failed miserably. The Social Non Sense stem from this fact and the postmodernist literature whether in Sociology or English Literary Criticism reflect the poverty of western social science theories. In fact it would be a good exercise to find out what theories are there in western Sociology. In Sociology there may be concepts whether popular or not but are there any theories that one can talk of? Olcott Buddhists is only a concept and I know that it is not a theory. I have formulated that concept in order to understand a group of Sinhala people living among us and their cultural ancestors. It is only an identification and is not a general concept that could be applied in any society. It does not explain how this group came into existence and is not a theory. Western sociology does not have general abstract theories such as the gravitational theory or the theory of evolution except in the case of Marxism.
General theories were most probably created for the first time in Vedic India though they were not as abstract as the western theories. In the west the general abstract theories first came into existence during the time of Galileo in what is known today as Physical Sciences. We in the Jathika Chinthanaya school explain these facts using the concept of Chinthanaya which according to the Sociologist of Knowledge SG, is popular. After the Physical Sciences the so-called Biological Sciences had their turn of creating general abstract theories modeled on the theories in Physical Sciences. The Social Sciences had only a set of concepts and may be a set of specific concrete theories and not general abstract theories until Marx who took up the challenge of formulating latter type of theories. It is not only to distinguish his socialism from those of others that he called his system scientific socialism. He based his system in the model of Physical Sciences and thought that his theories had the predictive power as, say for example, the theory of gravitation. It was after Marx that western Social Sciences got their "grand narratives" if I may use a concept of the postmodernists.
The grand narratives or general theories were a product of western modernity that commenced in the fifteenth century according to the Jathika Chinthanaya school. Western modernity blossomed in the eighteenth century contrary to some western sociologists who take that to be the period during which western modernity came into existence. Postmodernity is only a development of modernity and there is hardly any qualitative difference between the so-called modern and the postmodern periods. In fact when it comes to knowledge, whether it is sociology of knowledge SG could tell us, the so-called postmodernity could be considered as a "return" to the mainstream descriptive social sciences from the prescriptive social sciences of Karl Marx. If the postmodernists have no solutions to the problems of the society unlike Marx, it is due to this particular nature of postmodernist social sciences. Western sociology in spite of its grandeur claims has remained in the main a descriptive discipline more than an analytic science with abstract general theories.
(To be continued)
Professor Nalin de Silva
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