Carlo Fonseka in Kataragama

By Uditha Devapriya

“If the duration of contact is not long enough to sustain a burn, then you don’t get burnt. This is what Alice in Wonderland said: ‘Some people get burnt because they forgot the rule that if you hold a red-hot poker for very long, you will get burnt!’”

Carlo Fonseka, Check Mate with Chrismal Warnasuriya, 2012

Prof. Carlo Fonseka always had something to quote from Shakespeare. When I first met him in 2013, he quoted Mark Antony, and recalled that time in 1953, when he and his friends left a school cricket match to watch Joseph Mankiewicz’s version of Julius Caesar at the Savoy. The second time he quoted from Romeo and Juliet, and observed that, passionately attached as Juliet may have been to Romeo, she still insisted on marrying him. I think his point there was that, ultimately, biology triumphs over sentiment.

To quote Shakespeare to make a point about our primordial urges may have been a bit off-putting. But Fonseka spent the better part of his life, and his career, proving not the infallibility, but the ultimate knowability, the reliability, of science. This didn’t win him many friends. Yet it won him many admirers, even from among his critics.

Fonseka belonged to that generation of gentle, radical thinkers who made their mark in our universities in the 1960s. Having broken away from established religion, many of them cultivated a scientific if sophisticated attitude to Buddhism, an attitude that lay a world away from the more emotive world of the Sinhalese villager.

This was around the time that anthropologists, both local and Western, began studying the twin worlds of urban and rural Buddhism: a theme that did much to revive interest not just in Sri Lanka, but also Buddhism in general, across the world.

To say Fonseka took sides in this conflict, between rural and urban Buddhism, would be taking things too far. A brilliant product of the Ceylon Medical College and an even more brilliant product of the University of Edinburg, he specialised in Physiology. In 1967 he returned to Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, with a PhD. Ratnajeevan Hoole speculates that the “erosion of the university ethos” in the country eventually disillusioned him, causing him to abandon his work in physiology in favour of other pathways.

The rift between urban and rural Buddhism – as posited by social scientists in his time – may have been what encouraged him to explore some of the more popular rites and beliefs in Sinhala society. At least two of those rites took him to Kataragama: hook-hanging and firewalking. Consuming pork and liquor, breaking every taboo in the book, he proved that physiology could explain both, in a way devotion could not.

In debunking these rituals, Fonseka risked a torrential backlash. Yet that backlash never really materialised. There are several possible reasons for this. Prime among them would be the time he worked in: a time when everything could be questioned in a spirit of free, critical inquiry, when a healthy culture of scepticism pervaded our intelligentsia.

A more tenable reason, in my view, would be the kind of audience that saw him at work in places like Kataragama. They were largely, though not only, urban and suburban. Buddhist though they were, by the 1960s they had imbibed the intellectual, philosophical, and scientific, view of Buddhism which Fonseka reinforced. Yet at the same time, they were also highly respectful of the myths and rituals of popular Buddhism.

As Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich have pointed out, though there is a line that can be drawn between rural and urban Buddhism in Sri Lanka, there is also a permeation of popular religious beliefs in the most cosmopolitan setting. Thus the most avowed rationalist can capitulate to the most ritualistic visions of his faith, as seen in the almost rush for amisa and aloka puja in every nook and corner of Colombo.

I am not an expert on Buddhism, still less on its practice in Sri Lanka, to take this discussion forward. I can only speculate that such a mishmash of popular and intellectual attitudes generated an almost Janus-faced response to Fonseka’s work. Thus, on the one hand, there was a fairly mainstream acceptance of his efforts. On the other hand, there was also a critique of what these efforts meant in the broader context of Sinhalese and Buddhist culture. Perhaps the best example of these contradictory responses came from a devotee of Kataragama, a friend who was residing in Colombo.

Of course the soles of your feet are strong enough to withstand live coals for a few seconds. He had his arguments, and they were fairly convincing. But…

A more intriguing response came from another devotee who shuttles between Kataragama and Colombo.

I won’t argue with his views. But I don’t have to prove my beliefs to anyone.

In the first instance, one discerns a reluctant acknowledgement of the validity of what Fonseka was doing (“But…”). In the second, one notices a pushback (“I have my beliefs, he had his, why should I be the one to prove mine to him?”). The reactions are palpably different: the first person displayed a sheepishness at odds with his fierce attachment to rituals, while the second was visibly irritated, almost unwilling to talk.

In both responses there is some form of admission of the truth of Fonseka’s work. I would argue, though I stand to be corrected, that these responses have been shaped by the contradictory world of urban Buddhists: they are, in essence, accepting of the myth and the myth-busting. The situation is the same in villages, which have been penetrated by the forces of modernity, development, and urbanisation. But the response there is somewhat different. A friend of mine put that in perspective the other day.

A typical urban Buddhist would offer flowers, chant pirith, and still adhere to a scientific view of Buddhism. A typical rural Buddhist would put more emotional power into his rites and ceremonies, he would be disdainful of scientific explanations.

There is very little of this sort of rural Buddhism in Sri Lanka. But I have been to some of these regions and places, and have been astounded by the attitudes I have encountered. The more urbanised villagers I have met have mostly been tolerant but sceptical of rationalist explanations of rituals. Their attitude is closer to that of the second respondent: they are respectful of other viewpoints, but don’t feel obliged to justify theirs. Indeed, often they go beyond this logic by explicitly questioning scientific reason itself.

It’s strange that that we try to prove something and then believe it’s right for all time. Look at gravitational theory, look at Newtonian physics!

We are so sure gods don’t exist, how can we be sure oxygen does?

These are not, as some would be wont to say, ramblings of unsophisticated and ignorant villagers. They reflect a particular viewpoint and worldview, a way of perceiving and responding to the environment around us. Their scepticism of scientific rationality is, in that sense, no different to our scepticism of religious belief.

At the risk of drawing too fine a line between urban and rural Buddhists here, I would say that the tendency among the former, with regard to the sort of myth-busting that Fonseka engaged in, is to accept the rationalist explanation for popular rituals while still taking part in them. The tendency among the latter is dismiss such explanations while questioning the scientific viewpoint. There is still some acknowledgement of the validity of science in Sinhala villages. Yet that is tempered by their attachment to popular beliefs.

Perhaps the easiest way of defining these divisions would be to adopt the Jathika Chintanite dichotomy of Sinhala and Olcott Buddhists. But even this is inadequate. The forebearers of Jathika Chintanaya share the same intellectual lineage as Carlo Fonseka. That they chose to reject this lineage eventually, as I contended months ago, in no way undermines the fact that they hailed from it, and in many ways still subscribe to it.

We must hence look elsewhere when examining the many, paradoxical responses that Sri Lankans have offered with regard to the work of people like Carlo Fonseka: work that, for all the criticisms of it we can bandy about, remains highly important.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at .