Last Chance Saloon: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 13

It is unnecessary to employ the mind reading capabilities of Descartes or The Amazing Kreskin to discern how Sri Lanka might have reacted to Gotabhaya taking the throne in 253 CE. After decades of Lambakarna kings, many eagerly pious, ruling with unremitting incompetence, Gotabhaya was nothing less than a shock.   After all, he had been one of the very same three plotters who drove the kingdom into yet another civil war just years earlier, apparently as unaccountable to good governance as any of the many earlier Lambakarna kings who ruled as if they were celestially charged to gambol their through reigns like ancient Ves dancers, leaving lakes of regicidal blood in the wake of their inopportune administration. It was as if some brooding, macho junior army officer had upended his own army, bending generals, kings and sleek courtiers to the austere new realities of a victorious coup, in the style of Jerry Rawlings or Gamal Abdel Nasser. Comparing notes with either of them would have given Gotabhaya all the validation he required.  Not that he was the sort to seek approval. Competent dictators have their moment in the sun, too, and the time was more than ripe for the arrival of Gotabhaya. His very name is still used in the country to suggest authority, command, control.   Army bases, naval ships, even an ex-president who strove with little success to aspire to his reputation – all bear the name of this stern Lambakarna king.   What he lacked in charm, charity, and religious tolerance, Gotabhaya made up for with the sort of firm government that took the fizz out of regicide. And so, around 253 or 254 CE, Gotabhaya seized the throne and, for fourteen years, ruled Sri Lanka with the proverbial rod of iron.  A deeply conservative religious man, he was unimpressed by the Vajrayana movement, a form of tantric Buddhism that was making a slim but noticeable appearance in his kingdom.  The movement was closely aligned with Mahayana Buddhism and was seen by many as incompatible with the Theravada Buddhism practised on the island since the 3rd century BCE. The king did all he could to thwart it, even banishing sixty monks for such beliefs. But what he kept out with one door slammed shut, he inadvertently let in with another, for he entrusted his sons’ education to an Indian monk named Sanghamitta, a closet follower of Vaitulya Buddhism.  The Vaitulya doctrinal strand was even more radical than the Vajrayana doctrine that Gotabhaya was so busy trying to eradicate. Like a time bomb, the impact of this private religious education on his successor was timed to go off the moment this alarming and archaic old king died. His death in 267 CE left the country deeply divided. Several ministers, blithely (and, as it turned out, suicidally) bold, refused to participate in his funeral rites.   His son and heir, Jetta Tissa I, a chip off the monstrous old block, had dozens of them rounded up, staking their impaled heads in a mournful circle around the old king’s body, a pitiless and iconic pageant of power that has haunted the island through the centuries, its most recent appearance being during the brutal JVP uprising in 1971 and 1987 when anxious neighbours calling on nearby villages might find such similar circles of horror. Even so, there is a time when a country needs tough love, or even just tough everything, and Gotabhaya’s son sought, with creditable success, to assiduously out-tough his terrifying old father.  This display of strong-armed governance under yet another king was probably what was most needed to help keep at bay the lurking regicidal and anarchic tendencies inherent in the dynasty.  Jetta Tissa’s decade-long rule is unlikely to have been an easy ride for those around him. Indeed, states The Mahavamsa Chronicle, “he came by the surname: the Cruel”.  It then, with dismay, elaborates on the steps he took to shift patronage and resources from the orbit of Theravāda Buddhism to Vaitulya Buddhism. From the perspective of the majority Theravada Buddhists, life managed to take a further turn for the worse when Mahasen, the king’s brother, took the throne in 277 CE, a succession notable for being natural.  Like his brother, Mahasen had been educated by the radical monk Sanghamitta. A twenty-seven-year reign lay ahead of the new king, who got off to a good start, commissioning what would include sixteen massive reservoirs (the largest covering an area of nearly twenty square kilometres) and two big irrigation canals.  But this did little to defray the resentment his pro-Mahayana religious policies sparked, prompting a wave of further insurrections opposing his opposition to Theravada Buddhism. Undeterred, Mahasen set about building what would become the country’s largest stupa, the Jethavanaramaya, which was, until the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the second-tallest building in the world.  To help, he ordered the plundering of the Mahavihara, the greatest Theravada Buddhist monastery in the land. Monks who resisted his Mahayana policies were pressured by various means, including attempts at starvation.  Soon enough, the trickle of angry, anguished and adamant monks fleeing to the safety of Ruhuna in the south became a flood. Ominously, they were also joined by Meghavann Abaya, the king’s chief minister, who had broodingly raised an army in their defence.  With surprising wisdom, the king drew back from the confrontation, saving his throne, making peace with the disgruntled Theravada Buddhists, and so enabling himself to enjoy a natural death in 303 CE.  Mahasen’s late compromise notwithstanding, it is notable that right across these 50 years of three uncompromisingly hardheaded kings, the vice-like hold with which they gripped their realm was rarely seriously imperilled.  Despite the unusually high amount of religious dissent they inspired, they commanded with apparent ease, shunting into the darkest of corners the unruly immoderations of family politics.  But even a run of dictators-kings has its own sell-by date, and this one came to an end when Mahasen’s son, Siri Meghavanna, inherited the throne and opted to super-change the hints of religious appeasement and kinder governance that had marked the fraying ends of his father’s choleric reign. Under him, vast sums of state revenue were set aside to repair any damage to Theravada Buddhism.  The old religion’s buildings were restored, its stupas and temples renovated and once more publicly cherished. It is a truism universally acknowledged that good things rarely come to good people. Still, in the case of King Siri Meghavanna, the aphorism rings as hollow as an elephant’s trunk in the jungle - for it was during his therapeutic reign that the greatest of all relics was to fall into his hands.  “Just,” as the late great Tommy Cooper might have said, “like that.” Few relics ever stand the real test of time.  Most end up marooned, outpaced by the culture they once represented or the geography or religion that created them: the Holy Right Hand of King Stephen of Hungary; the wailing wall of occupied Jerusalem, the sandal of Muhammad in Istanbul’s Pavilion of the Holy Mantle; John the ...