Uduwe Dhammaloka’s Gymnastics
By Shyamon Jayasinghe –March 25, 2016
Shyamon Jayasinghe
Revd. Uduwe Dhammaloka epitomises something ghastly and frightening about the future of the Sangha, namely that this great and noble institution of Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhists is, surely, cracking from within. We had, once, nationalists crying from treetops that Christian and other Western forces were subverting the Sangha. I tell them that we need not look outside. The decay is internally generated.
Revd Uduwe Dhammaloka had a big and venerating following.It is not a case of Gnasasara. Revd Uduwe Dhammaloka was indisputably an authentic monk of longstanding held in high regard. Questions were raised hush hush that he was getting too concerned about grooming himself-applying face cream and doing facials and all such glittery things. Such personal idiosyncrasies typically lead to a multitude of canards and gossip. The monk was demanding a prestigious car to go for bana, they said and the fact is he did always travel in luxury cars. It was a mandatory requirement that he should be provided with a special mike that commutes his voice into something ethereal and divinely soft. It was also rumoured that the car he travels in had special electrical light effects that represented the Buddha’s halo or budu res.
The provocation for this article, however, were not any of those charges about the once holy monk but his recent strange performance in suddenly charging that the late Revd Maduluwave Sobitha did not really die of natural causes and that he was murdered!
Hey! This is news to all of us. It was no secret that Revd Sobitha was advanced in age and that he had been battling with an acute onset of diabetes and its chronic associated ailments. The government had, with the monk’s consent, despatched him to Singapore for special treatment. And now, after months of the passing away of Revd Sobitha we have our handsome and smiling Revd Uduwe giving us a different narrative: Revd Maduluwave Sobitha -the prime mover for change of the Rajapaksa regime and the installation of ayahapalana government- had been, according to the new narrative, disappointed about the course taken by the YP government of Maitripala Sirisena and Wickremesinghe. The YP government, therefore, in true Rajapaksa style, engineered Revd Sobitha’s death. We are relieved that Revd Uduwe did not say he saw Ranil or Sirisena taking a cup of poison to give the ailing venerable monk. The latter’s death had been crafted in subtlety!
