The role of myth: A reassessment

By Uditha Devapriya

A chance encounter in Galle took me to the Sudharmaramaya in Bope, near Poddala. My friend and I were accompanied, or more aptly guided, by an official from the Galle Heritage Foundation, an institution that is doing a lot to raise awareness of cultural and religious sites in the district. What transpired during the visit is for another article, but the conversation that ensued between the three of us, in my friend’s van, provoked me to reflect on an area I have been researching and studying for some time now: the role and function of myths. To this end, our guide from the GHF spoke of the Jataka Stories.

“Cultural practices vary from period to period. Take the Vessantara Kavi. It is often sung at Sinhalese funerals. But you do not see this practice in far-off villages. This custom became a practice in the cities and suburbs. It was a result of the colonial encounter, specifically the Portuguese Period. The missionaries who came here brought with them their evangelical zeal, and this had an indelible impact on Buddhist priests and preachers. Such customs and practices took a life of their own long after these missionaries left.”

In his seminal essay on Dutugemunu’s conscience, Gananath Obeyesekere remembers the Vessantara Kavi being sung in “the villages of my childhood.” This practice, he recalls, has now been replaced by gambling sessions, or as I would put it more innocuously, by fun and games, including perfectly harmless pursuits like carrom and daang.

Despite hailing from a staunchly traditional Sinhala and Buddhist urban middle-class myself, I can’t recall a single funeral at which the Vessantara Kavi were sung. It would seem that, for my generation, this practice has died out, and with it the rationale for its popularity.

What does the death of these practices mean for our culture, indeed our society? Myths have long been the subject of contentious debate. While some would contend that they reinforce values like tolerance and obedience, others would counter that they form the basis of exclusivist narratives, which have contributed much to the fragmentation and I would say downfall of this country. The Mahavamsa is the most frequently cited example for that, but as Bruce Kapferer has contended in Legends of People, Myths of State, they include even the most syncretic rituals of the south, including the suniyama.

I disagree with some of Kapferer’s conclusions, but understand, and even somewhat agree with, his premise. I would contend that it is the politicisation of these practices which has resulted in them acquiring a less than savoury character. This is true especially of rituals like the suniyama.

Yet I would also argue that in their original form, the myths buttressing these rituals were emblematic of a profoundly tolerant culture: a culture which might have been “Buddhist” or “Sinhalese” but more importantly was also deeply syncretic. I would extend that argument and, at the risk of oversimplification, note that these myths, and the customs and practices they undergirded, served to reinforce values one normally would not associate with religious rituals today, values like pluralism and inclusivity.

The central argument in Kapferer’s book is that these rituals undergird a violent streak in Sinhala and Buddhist culture. Sarath Amunugama, in his recent study of the Kohomba Kankariya, points out that Kandyan rituals, of which the Kankariya is the primus inter pares, deploy a “more measured, non-aggressive, and processional style.

” I would contend that this has been so because, unlike in the southern coastline, which confronted and in many ways suffered from as well as absorbed Western influences after the 16th century, the colonial encounter did not take place in the Kandyan regions until the early 19th century. Whatever violent streak one attributes to southern Sinhala society vis-à-vis these rituals must account for the region’s longstanding confrontations with Western colonialism.

This argument does not end here. I would add that the “violent streak” we so frequently see today in these rituals is superficial and facile. It is part of these ceremonies, but it does not form the only part, still less a crucial one. Sinhala culture is fundamentally syncretic. It has the ability to absorb any influence. It is the near extinction of this syncretic aspect that has led to that violent streak Kapferer wrote about. Obeyesekere calls this “the displacement of the Buddhist conscience”, a notion I fully agree with.

But then the question can validly be asked: what caused the displacement of the Buddhist conscience in the first place? Obeyesekere’s argument differs from Kapferer’s, though I think both can be reconciled with one another. While Kapferer discerns a link between the rituals and myths of Sinhala society and their deployment by chauvinists and racists, Obeyesekere attributes it all to modern society’s tendency to belittle those rituals and myths. He outlines two historical factors: “firstly, the development of a radical form of Buddhism geared to an emerging bourgeoisie, and secondly, the development of an intellectual Buddhism that saw the rational theosophy without a saviour or a cult.”

In contrast to other religious revivals, Obeyesekere writes, the Buddhist Revival of the 19th century did not result in the demystification of myths and rituals in Sinhala society. It led instead to a rejection of them. Here we discern faint echoes of the distinctions drawn by countless scholars of the Buddhist Revival, including George Bond, H. L. Seneviratne, and Obeyesekere himself, between an intellectualist and an emotionalist strand in Sinhala and Buddhist society.

Unlike other scholars, however, Obeyesekere argues that this rejection of myths and customs, including Buddhist folktales, had negative consequences: while earlier they had fulfilled the role of relaying to simple villagers the tenets and ethics of Buddhism, now they were being rejected as nikan kathandara, or mere stories.

My own experiences growing up, in a thoroughly traditional Sinhala Buddhist middle-class family, threw these contradictions into sharp relief, though I must hasten to add that my mother, who as a child refused to go to daham pasal and even now questions superstition, did not inculcate in me the sort of devotion to religion that my cousins and nephews are endowed with today. The more urbanised sections of my family tended to regard Buddhist folktales as part of a literary pantheon, existing apart from, and not fully within, Buddhist theology.

They studied these parables at Sunday schools and passed exams, but that was it. The more rural sections, by contrast, absorbed and imbibed them. I may be oversimplifying a little here, but it is those ruralised sections that were more amenable to political radicalism, and that became more accommodating of other communities.

These reflections, random and cursory as they are, nevertheless trouble me. What are we to make of them? Perhaps I should return to where I began. Nearing the Sudharmaramaya, the Galle Heritage Foundation official contended that myths have multiple meanings, and they are ultimately what we make of them. Perhaps it is this, rather than the supposedly violent stream undergirding them, that explains how these myths have been deployed by the most bigoted interests today. It would be a mistake to claim, as some scholars do, that from their inception they underlay if not projected a chauvinist attitude, because they did not. I believe Professor Obeyesekere should have the final word here.

“The generation of my nephews and nieces studying in Sri Lanka’s modern schools, where Buddhism is taught as a school subject, is largely unaware of the tradition of stories that nurtured the Buddhist conscience and the forms of life in which they were embedded. And where they may know, they do not understand.”

I am admittedly a sceptic, an atheist or more correctly an agnostic. One of my students, from Rakvana, once dared to take me to his village and prove the existence of gods. The sceptic in me immediately chortled, but I wonder now: has contemporary society confronted myths, or has it copped out and rejected them, as Obeyesekere suggests? I think it has rejected them, and in doing so, it has displaced that culture of tolerance which underlay our society.

It is as Martin Wickramasinghe argued: the masks of the south, like the folktales of Sinhala society, served as “correctives to and criticisms of the ways of our living and thinking.” Perhaps it is time we stopped rejecting these customs, and time we re-examined them, so that we might unearth the Buddhist conscience, and ultimately find our redemption.The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.