She worshipped with the simple piety
of a Sinhalese Buddhist girl; with neither the cynical questioning of a more
intellectual mind, nor awareness of the innocent hypocrisy of the gatha,the chanted Pali verses, she said every day.
She had placed flowers before the small Buddha statue inside the shrine house,
finished saying her Pan Sil, the five
basic precepts and other gatha, and lit some of the small oil
lamps that had gone out on the metal lamp rack.
Her father was speaking to one of the
younger monks and her mother was with them. She wandered around, squeezing the
smooth sand with her bare toes, enjoying the silence, darkness, isolation and
the peace that the gatha had brought
to her soul.
It didn't surprise her to see him
standing beneath the bo tree, almost
like a statue, speckled shadows and moonlight dancing across his face. She
walked up slowly, smoothing her white dress and stood next to him. She noticed
he was in a 'national' suit. It made him look very young and heroic.
"I should have guessed that you
were very religious," she said. Somehow, in these white clothes that
symbolised chastity, and on the temple grounds, there was nothing wrong in a
boy and a girl talking unsolicited like this.
"I'm not."
"Oh?"
He sighed, staring up through the
black silhouettes of the tree, where the triangular Buddhist flags waved like
ghostly wraiths. His eyes were on the stars, not on the full moon.
"Buddhism is not a religion.
Look at all these nikung minnissu,
common people, who come here. They come to worship.
They don't even know the meaning of the gatha
they're saying. For them, it is a transaction.
Do good and you get ping,
spiritual credits; do bad and you get pau,
sins. If there was no benefit, none of these people would be here. Even now
they are more interested in dhanas,
almsgiving, and pujas, religious
offerings; they go home, kill cockroaches and are nasty to their neighbours.
They've lost sight of the real doctrine of Buddhism. 'Offer some flowers, say
your gatha, and all your sins are erased'. And yet they laugh at the Indians
for thinking they can wash away their sins in that river."
She looked down, hurt. He didn't seem
to notice tonight, though.
"So why are you here?"
"My parents made me come... and
I like the quietness."
"I like your 'national', it
makes you look very handsome," she said after a while.
"It's not a national," he
looked at her. His tone was firm, but still there was no anger in his eyes.
"This is the dress of the Tamils.
The Sinhalese are fools, like JR[1]
said. They don't even know their own identity and they don't care. The real National dress of this country is
something like what we wear at Kandyan weddings."
"Wow," she said slowly.
"But that makes you look like a king."
He smiled and nodded.
"It's supposed to."
"...Do you hate the
Tamils?" The way he had referred to them had seemed contemptuous, and she
had not expected that from him.
"...No," He thought about
it. "No, I don't," he repeated quietly. He seemed surprised by the
realisation.
They said nothing for a while.
"Do you believe that we will be
rewarded in the next life for the ping
we do now?" he asked.
"Yes." It had never
occurred to her to question that.
He smiled. "In a way though,
Buddhism has spread a great deal of peace where it is practiced. It's the only
'religion' that hasn't propagated violence in the world. Did you know that when
the British came here, people didn't eat meat? They didn't drink; there were no
murders; no thefts. The Suddhas,
British, couldn't understand it."
She looked at him in awe; a good
feeling that she couldn't name filled her like a glow.
"If you don't believe in ping, then why do you care for animals
so much?"
"It's a funny thing," he
said contemplatively. "I don't care because of Buddhism. I don't expect
any 'ping’, I don't want any. But if
I hadn't been brought up in a Buddhist household, I would never have been like
this." He smiled to himself.
He bent down and picked up a handful
of the silky sand. The little mound in his palm began to trickle through his
fingers, like in an hourglass, little specks of iron ore glinting in the
moonlight.
"You believe in re-incarnation
don't you?" he asked not looking at her.
"Yes. Don't you?" Her tone
was almost anxious.
He looked at her and gently shook his
head.
- From "just another bomb blast" (1999)
Copyright © Sandaruwan Madduma Bandara
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