Sunday Punch 3

During the course of the Parliamentary debate this Tuesday on the COPE report on the Central Bank bond issue, Ratnapura District MP Vasudeva Nanayakkara revealed one of his best kept secret kinks: he loves being smothered and considers it a great blessing - provided of course, the cushioned rear belongs to the Rajapaksa powdered anatomy.

After hurling a string of offensive expletives which had Dr. Harsha de Silva advising the geriatric politician to mind his language, Vasudeva launched an attack on the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and said that everything is under the prime Minister’s ‘thattama’ or buttocks. He said, “The IGP is under the prime minister’s buttocks, the Attorney General is under the prime minister’s buttocks, those in the Bribery Department are also under the Prime Minister’s buttocks. That means the prime minister is sitting on them all. Everything is under the Prime Minister’s buttocks.”

When a Government MP posed him the question as to whether Vasu was not under the ‘thattama’ of Mahinda Rajapaksa during the past regime, he replied without a blush, “That’s okay. That was a blessing. Being under Mahinda’s buttocks was a great blessing.” foot of the Bodhi by the banks of the River Neranjana. I shall make him a beneficiary of the transcendental riches I gained and bestow it ‘pon him as his rightful inheritance.”

The Buddha then called the Venerable Sariputta and asked him to ordain the seven year old boy as a member of the Noble Order of the Sangha.

When news reached the palace, Yasodhara was aghast. She had lost her husband who had left her and their new born son to go in search of some elusive truth. Now she had lost her son too, and was left bereft of the only joy she had left in the world. She rushed to her father in law, King Suddhodana, and grieved at his feet.

Suddhodana was also perturbed to hear the news. Along with Yasodhara, he had been the guardian of the boy during Siddhartha’s absence. Now he, too, was heartbroken to learn of the void created, grieved to face the loss of hope and happiness he had found in his grandson and pained to learn he had no direct heir to succeed his throne. The King, his world turning in turmoil, went to meet the Buddha; and told him thus:

“When thou renounced the world and left the palace, it was a source of great pain to me. It was the same when my other son, Nanda, left to join thee. And now my only grandson, Rahula, whose presence in our midst – Yasodhara’s and mine - had been the only ray of sunshine to light the darkness of these palace walls, whose voice had been the only lilting melody to resound with cheer through these long hushed corridors, whose childish mischief had been the only bundle of jollity to make us laugh, even in grief, both to me and to his mother Yasodhara, has been taken away from us without our knowledge, let alone our permission. We have been left entombed even before our bodies have run cold. Now it has been done. And it’s too late to reverse fate. But bear with me when I say this: The love of a father or a mother towards a son cuts through the skin, the flesh, the sinew, the bone and even the marrow. Grant, Oh Gautama, grant me as thy sire the request I make of thee: that henceforth the Noble Ones may not confer ordination on a child without the permission of his parents.”

The Buddha readily agreed to the King’s request. Even though he, as Siddhartha, was Rahula’s father, he had no right as a Buddha to ordain minors without the consent of both parents. He had unilaterally ordained Rahula only because he was his son and because the boy had been clamouring for his inheritance and this was the only inheritance he could give him, ordination being the only coronation he could bestow. But a child was not the sole property of a single parent. A child belonged to both parents equally. And the Buddha decreed and made it a Vinaya Rule that henceforth no ordination of minors could take place unless the voluntary consent of both parents had first been obtained.

Now take the case of Vessanthara. The legendary king of the Jatakas who for certain reasons, renounced his kingdom and went into exile to the forest with his wife and two children, a son and a daughter. One day, while the wife was away deep in the woods, gathering firewood to keep the home fires burning, an old man happened to stop by at Vessantara’s hamlet. When Vessanthara had nothing to offer him in terms of hospitality as custom demanded, the old man asked the exiled king whether he could take away the two children. Hardly batting an eyelid,

Apparently one man’s punishment is another man’s fetish. And a bootiful blessing to boot. Vessanthara obliged and handed over the children to the old stranger for good.

This selfless act of a Bodhisathwa, a Buddha to be, has been hailed through centuries as a supreme act of generosity. But the poet who wrote the masterpiece, the epic Vessanthara Kaviya, whilst praising the selfless act of Vessanthara as tradition demanded, also posed the question through the mouths of the two innocent children who were so freely given away, whether Vessanthara possessed the right to do so, without first gaining the permission of his wife and the voluntary consent of his two children to go with a total stranger, whom the poet through the use of innuendo conveyed to be a rather unsavory nasty character. In modern day parlance, a gonibilla or bogeyman at best or a pedophile at worst.

The question that arises now is whether, in the backdrop of the Buddha’s tenet contained in the Vinaya Code which regulates the admittance of the laity to the Buddhist order of monks, the ordination of a small Muslim boy, only 7 years old, without the express consent of the mother who is presently abroad and, like Vessantara’s wife, gathering the monetary firewood to keep the home fires burning, is correct and in keeping with the rules of admission to the Sasana?

Secondly, the chief incumbent of the Dimbulagala Aranya has hailed the Muslim boy’s ordination as evidence of religious harmony. He said: “This is the best precedent for religious harmony and national unity.” It’s no such thing. On the contrary, done in this cavalier manner, it will only have the opposite effect and may well indeed be the flashpoint to ignite bigotry’s flares again.

It is only natural that no followers of any religion, be they Muslims or Christians, will rejoice the loss of any one of their adherents to another faith and raise their faludahs after Friday’s Jumma prayers or sip their communion wine at Sunday mass in celebration that one of their flock, a lamb at that, had been snared and sneaked over the fence and is now grazing on a different pasture of an alien faith.

Not so long ago, certain sections of the Buddhist community, led by the Bodu Bala Sena were up in arms over the conversion of Buddhists to other faiths. Churches were stormed, mosques were attacked and, in the religious violence that erupted in Beruwela in 2014, one Muslim was even killed. Now that a Muslim boy has been ordained as a Buddhist monk, and, as it transpires, even without his mother’s knowledge or permission, will it not provide the justification for adherents of religions to do the same? How will it affect Buddhist sensitivities, if Muslim Muezzins were to trumpet from the turret tops of mosques or Catholic Bishops were to proclaim from their pulpits, the news that scores of little Buddhists boys have become Islamists or Catholics?

The Buddha was the first missionary. And, during his 45 years of missionary work, he converted thousands of Hindus and Jains to Buddhism. But he did so by preaching his Dhamma and those who followed him did so only after realising the validity of his message. There were no underhand conversions.

In present day Lanka, the right to preach one’s own gospel must be allowed. But not the right to kraal small ignorant children to the fold when the mother’s slaving away abroad. And then to hail it as a historic achievement and blare the bulletin from the Chuda Manikya at the pinnacle of the stupa atop Dimbulagala Rock.