OLCOTT BUDDHISTS, LANGUAGE AND LOGIC
Mr. Tissa Devendra says he is rather tired of waiting for my final say on Olcott Buddhists. As far as I am concerned there is no final say on anything as my ideas are evolving all the time. Before people like Mr. Devendra jump to conclusions I must add that all the time does not mean that I am awake twenty four hours a day and it is only a way of expression. However, when I say my ideas evolve Mr. Devendra or anybody else does not have to wait until my death to know my "final say" as such. Anybody who could identify the theme of my ideas on a particular subject should be in a position to find out what I have to say on that particular subject at a given time during which the theme remains the same. In a world of "anicca" not only themes but the world itself being a theme changes but we do not go as far as that in our day to day analysis. The evolution of ideas is not something peculiar to me but true in general as far as any thinking being is concerned. Mr. Devendra has said his parting words but if he is of the opinion that I have not said enough of Olcott Buddhists then he is wrong. I have written enough for any intelligent person whether Olcott Buddhist or not to understand what is meant by an Olcott Buddhist. However, I would be adding any developments along the general theme in time to come but they would be confined mainly to details, as long as the theme is not changed. I must also add that theme change is not a paradigm shift and that the latter in turn is not a change in the hypotheses as some people seem to believe.
I have described an Olcott Buddhist in my column that appeared on the 23rd of June 2004. I had said: "The Olcott Buddhists have separated religion from culture and profession and we find many of them practicing their Christian professions while being Buddhists by religion". I had also said previously that it was neither necessary nor sufficient for one to attend a BTS school whether English or Sinhala medium in order to become an Olcott Buddhist. Mr. Devendra had come to the conclusion that an Olcott Buddhist was one who had studied at an English medium school established by Colonel Olcott and the BTS or by some others following the lead given by them.
I had never said in any one of my articles either to "The Island" or to "Irida Divaina" that Olcott Buddhists were those who were educated in Olcott Schools as defined by Mr. Devendra. (It has to be emphasised that I never mentioned of any Olcott Schools as such.) It may be that Mr. Devendra has said his parting words. However, he or any other could still quote a single sentence, if any, from any one of the articles mentioned above where I had described an Olcott Buddhist the way he has understood. Mr. Devendra has imagined something and then replied to it. Of course he is free to do so and I enjoyed reading Devendra in English. However, I am somewhat disappointed that he has not given me an opportunity to enjoy his Sinhala writing by replying those articles in Sinhala in the "Irida Divaina" which he has said is read by him.
Let me quote him on his knowledge of Sinhala as an apparent reply to Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera the "fellow Nalandian". "Let me tell him (Amarasekera) that I do know Sinhala [I could not have escaped it in my Olcott Schools!] and I do read the "Irida Divaina" and other Sinhala Newspapers. I replied to his English articles in this paper, not the entire corpus of his writings but only to defend that Nalin-endangered species OBs, to which I thought I believed." Now whether Olcott Buddhists as understood by him were Nalin-endangered or not, Mr. Devendra could have replied to me in Sinhala as I have written on Olcott Buddhists mainly in Sinhala. He did not have to reply to my "entire corpus" of writings but at least he could have replied to what I had written in Sinhala on Olcott Buddhists. This person who knows his Sinhala learnt at what he calls the Olcott Schools, and calls himself a Rajan (doesn't it sound like a Trinitian) has shown some reluctance to write in Sinhala. I have not come across Mr. Tissa Devendra writing letters to the editor in Sinhala and I wonder why? It may be that I have missed his articles in Sinhala newspapers though I read more Sinhala newspapers than English newspapers.
If Mr. Devendra had taken up creative writing in English and/or Sinhala, he could have done well as his two articles amply demonstrate. In his parting words he says: " N de S's cheap jibe that the BTS English schools served only the "urban elite" could only be made by a person who never had the privilege of studying at an "Olcott School". In every one of these schools the boys from rural village homes [traditionally Buddhist, of course] outnumbered by far the few town dwellers. This is a fact that he can easily verify from the records of these schools". Now I do not have to verify this fact for number of reasons. Firstly I have never said that the BTS English schools served only the "urban elite". Mr. Devendra has departed making claims attributing to me "statements" that I never made. Mr. Devendra could come back and substantiate his claims. Secondly one does not have to be educated in a BTS English school to know that the village boys (and girls) outnumbered the town dwellers in these schools. It is an inference one could easily make from the demographical distributions and the attitudes of the town folk, the majority of whom would not have sent their offspring to the "Olcott Schools". Even Professor Malalasekera who made a tremendous contribution to the development of these schools preferred to send his sons to a government school. It has to be mentioned that there are some prominent "old boys" of the "Olcott Schools" who got their sons admitted to the same government school and Christian schools instead to their "alma mater", after they became town dwellers as a result of the education they received at the former schools and subsequently at the Christian University at Colombo/Peradeniya. Thirdly though I did not have the "privilege" of attending a BTS English school I had my education up to grade three in a BTS Sinhala school in Panadura, where my mother was a teacher. Further, my father unlike Mr. Devendra's father who was a Principal of a BTS English school and had "fraternal relationship with his BTS Sinhala school Principals", had served as the head teacher in a number BTS Sinhala schools and had a very good first hand knowledge of the latter schools. To my knowledge those days BTS Sinhala school heads were not called Principals and they were called headmaster, head teacher, "loku mahattaya" or "Pradhanacharya". Even after leaving the BTS Sinhala school I had gone to the BTS head office in Pitakotuwa (or Kolomba) and from the conversations of my father and other school teachers even as a schoolboy I had some knowledge of the BTS and its school system.
Having born and nurtured in Panadura, I have had the good fortune of learning directly from my grandparents of the Panadura Vaadaya and its consequences and also observing the life patterns of the descendants of some of those who were instrumental in organising the Vaadaya. As a child and a young person I had been to Rankoth Viharaya, Panadura and had observed the benches in the "Dhrmashalawa", that were not found in the other temples in and around the town. At our home very often there were discussions on the Panadura Vaadaya, including the strategies adopted by the Bhikkus which are not found in many books written on it, between my father and his friends not to mention some relatives as well, and it could be said that we imbibed the "spirit" of the Panadura Vaadaya with mother's milk. It is this "spirit" that had driven me to call for a second Panadura Vaadaya in the past, especially in the "Irida Divaina", which Mr. Devendra, who reads the paper, would not have missed. However, I have now realised that the second Panadura Vaadaya has been on for sometime in the Sinhala newspapers and especially with the bill on the prevention of conversions, another dimension would be added to it with a discussion on the human rights as dictated by the western Christian states, that have been described as secular states by the western Political Scientists and their imitators including the Olcott Buddhists according to my definition. I am happy that I have contributed even in a small way towards the second Panadura Vaadaya.
In one of my articles I had said that "Olcott Buddhists had been there before Colonel Olcott arrived". Mr. Devendra the man who is very much concerned about western logic, I wonder why, has gone to town in more than one sense after reading that sentence. Let us listen to him who goes on to question my credentials as a Mathematician, though I have never described me as such. I know that in spite of teaching western Mathematics (and Science) for more than sixty years in our Christian Universities, we have not produced a single Mathematician (or a Scientist) and in any event I would not call myself a western Mathematician or a Mathematical Physicist, though I teach these subjects for a living. Mr. Devendra says: " Let me hasten to deny that neither I, nor my fellow Rajan Tissa Amerasekera, belong to that category which predated the birth of our parents. By the same "logic" the great Anagarika could be described as a "Nalin de Silva Buddhist" !! I would have expected a mathematician to have striven for greater accuracy in his definitions. If he would only have made this strange posthumous definition clear at the beginning I would never have launched on my defense of Olcott schools- thus, inadvertently, giving N de S an excuse to belabour those great institutions."
Let me state at the outset I have no idea of belabouring what Mr. Devendra calls Olcott Schools. I never referred to these schools in my articles on Olcott Buddhists either in Sinhala or English, as I had a different concept of an Olcott Buddhist. I may not have defined an Olcott Buddhist in the articles but that does not mean that I had not described what is meant by an Olcott Buddhist. It is true that in teaching western Mathematics I am forced to define concepts as the students come across them. However outside the class I do not define concepts for the simple reason that it is futile to engage in such an exercise. In fact having defined a concept according to the wish of the westerners, I tell my students that defining concepts is a meaningless exercise. Outside the class I only describe or explain the concepts according to the Sinhala Buddhist tradition. Definitions follow from the linear Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya from which I broke away nearly twenty years ago. One has to define a concept using other definitions and when those other concepts have to be defined one has to make use of still other definitions finally ending up with a "First Concept" that has no definition. That is the western Christian tradition and I have no truck with that method of defining concepts, though I attended government schools for more than ten years. Strangely the person who first made me to question the validity of definitions was a Christian by religion as well as by culture who taught me Chemistry in what was then known as the fourth form in one of the government schools I attended. When the students in the class failed to give a satisfactory definition of an acid by his standards he asked the class to explain definition. When the poor fourth formers failed to come up with an answer he asked them to define explanation! Of course I did not understand the implications of those two questions at that time but later it helped me to go back to the cyclic Chinthanaya of our ancestors. I do not have to give a definition of an Olcott Buddhist even to an Olcott Buddhist whom I have described in my articles.
(To be continued)
Professor Nalin de Silva
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