Suriya Arana: Ethics as cinema

by Carlo Fonseka

Without seriously offending Buddhist sentiment, questioning whether the Buddhist ethic is universally appliable is the name of the game of Somaratne Dissanayake’s daring film Suriya Arana. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates famously said that "The unexamined life is not worth living." He declared that what we most need to learn is not how nature works, but how we ought to live. If so, the most important questions in life are those of ethics, that is, questions about what is right and what is wrong and how we know the difference between them. Filmmaker SD who is himself something of a cinematic gadfly, seems to believe that an unexamined ethic is not worth practising. So he focuses his searching, playful intelligence on the natural lifestyle of a hunter called Sediris and in so doing, implicitly tests the limits of the Buddhist panchaseela (Five Precepts) in a specific environment under a particular set of circumstances. Wittingly or unwittingly, he seems to be doing nothing less than putting the Buddhist ethic to philosopher Immanuel Kant’s "Universability Test,’.

Any fool can question the universal validity of an ethic. That is easy. But to do so to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, is not at all easy. When so viewed, in creating Suriya Arana, SD has pulled off not only a spectacular feat of film-making, but also a bold exercise in ethical enquiry. He is implicitly posing the question whether given his particular circumstances, the hunter and his family could have survived had they lived by the Buddhist ethic. If not, then what?

SD should thank his lucky stars that he was born into a culture noted for its spirit of free enquiry and tolerance. This spirit manifests itself from time to time in odd ways. For example, I once heard a devout old woman loudly complaining even as she was trekking her weary way up to Siri Pada (Adam’s Peak), that imprinting his foot on the summit of that high mountain is one of the most foolish things the Buddha could have done. Everybody who heard her blasphemous remark laughed. Nobody issued a fatwa against her. That is the true spirit of Buddhist culture as I have come to understand it. At this point, the indignant reader must be wondering what on earth all this has got to do with Suriya Arana. I must ask the indignant reader’s patience. To do justice to my reading of Suriya Arana (which I should metaphorically translate as ‘Light of the Forest’ a la Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia) I have to go far afield.

Revisit

I saw Suriya Arana by invitation when it opened many weeks ago. I enjoyed it so much that I revisited it the other day. All the expected pleasures returned to me at the high points of the film. I am writing this to share my delight with kindred spirits. After all, artistic creations are the only public goods that we can enjoy to the full without diminishing other people’s capacity for enjoying them to the full. That is to say, enjoyment of artistic creations is not a zero sum game. As it happens, the main reason why Sediris the hunter is impelled to behave in the way he does in the film is that the enjoyment of landed property is a zero sum game. Sediris has to live by hunting rather than by farming because the avaricious korale (minor state official) has by hook or by crook arrogated to himself, arable land that belonged to the hunter’s family. This inordinate accumulation of wealth is the beginning of conflict in Suriya Arana - and in the world.

Buddhist solution

Buddhism personified by the other principal character in the film shrewdly, realistically, and brilliantly portrayed by Jayalath Manorathna, has a sensible approach to the resolution of the conflict and is in fact offered as the solution. (To digress for a moment: at first sight, the immense popularity of Suriya Arana and the rise of the Jathika Hela Urumaya during the same period make them appear to be two aspects of the same phenomenon. We cannot, however, make do with a first glance. As Karl Marx said, "All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided".)

Social evolution

At one level, the theme of Suriya Arana can be read as an aspect of the history of human social evolution. In a recent book called "Guns, Germs and Steel," Professor Jared Diamond adduces evidence to show that some 13,000 years ago, all continents in the world were inhabited by human beings who were hunter-gatherers using stone tools. Thereafter, some parts of the world gradually developed into literate industrial societies with metal tools; other parts developed into non-literate farming societies, and still others remained at the hunter gatherer stage with stone tools. As the continued presence of our Veddah brethren confirms, such unequal social development can occur even in different parts of a small island such as ours. In Suriya Arana the principal character Sediris is basically at the hunter-gatherer stage of human social evolution, but with one critical difference. The difference is that he has somehow acquired a gun, a kind of weapon first introduced into this country by the colonial invaders. The Bhikkhu in the film belongs to a highly literate and enlighted stage of human social evolution. The story of Suriya Arana is the story of the initial confrontation between representatives of those two stages of social evolution and the final resolution in favour of the more enlightened stage. It represents, if you like, a clash of civilisations. The whole encounter is set in a forest of enthralling beauty.

One does not need much imagination to sense the racial memories and historical overtones that 5D has. evoked in Suriya Arana. To me, Sediris represents pre-Buddhist Lanka characterised by primitive animistic cults and belief in yaksas and yaksinis. He also brings to mind King Devanampiya Tissa of that era, who was on a hunting expedition on the Missaka Pabbatta (modern Mihintale) when he first met Emperor Asoka’s son Venerable Mahinda who brought Buddhism to our country. As recorded in Chapter 14 of the Mahavamsa, which I have just looked up, King Tissa was giving chase to a stag, when from out of the blue he heard Venerable Mahinda’s voice saying, "Come, Tissa". The king’s killing pursuit was thereby effectively subverted. In Suriya Arana there is a variation on this theme. Even as Venerable Mahinda prevented Tissa from violating the first precept of Buddhism, so the Bhikkhu in Suriya Arana is uncompromising in his insistence that animals have a right to live as much as we do. For Venerable Mahinda, converting King Tissa to Buddhism was a piece of cake. For one thing, subsisting as he did on a royal diet, he was well nourished and therefore amenable to rational discourse. Indeed, there and then, he willingly submitted himself to what Reverend Walpola Rahula has called ‘The first intelligence test recorded in history’. For another, King Tissa was armed only with a bow and arrow.

Sediris in the film is a horse of another colour. He is an angry, dispossessed hunter with a gun. His major problem was the survival of himself and his family. He seems to believe that the meek shall inherit the land only if they fight for it. So, unlike Venerable Mahinda, the Bhikkhu in Suriya Arana is compelled to have recourse, as the last resort, to non-spiritual coercive means in order to restrain Sediris. He actually temporarily paralyses Sediris by means of a deftly applied martial art. (There seems to be a lesson here for the Jathika Hela Urumaya: bana preaching alone may not suffice to guide the government to righteousness if not a dharma rajaya; a degree of judiciously applied coercive force or at least a threat of force may also be necessary).

Hunter’s ethic

The hunter’s role is played with incredible verve and power by the versatile artistic personality answering to the un-Sinhala non-Buddhist name of Jackson Anthony. The hunter lives by a code of ethics which is perhaps best expressed in Ernest Hemingway’s one sentence credo: "What is moral is what you feel good after; and what is immoral is what you feel bad after". All can see that in the film, Sediris’s natural lifestyle is a standing violation of the panchaseela. He kills animals. He steals. He cohabits with two women. He lies. He partakes of inebriating drink. But all can see that given his life situation, he is behaving in the way he does, because he is driven by the biological imperative to survive and to perpetuate his genes. His behaviour is a continuous adjustment to the pressures operating in his changing external environment. His way of life is certainly not noble; but he is, in my opinion, and in Rousseau’s phrase, ‘a noble savage’. He was born free and equal in dignity to all of us, into the hunter-gatherer stage of human social evolution. And his behaviour is largely determined by the norms of the society into which he did not choose to be born.

Bigamy

His social behaviour is understandable, if not ennobling and wholly defensible. He kills animals only for food, otherwise he has a general reverence for life. He steals a robe from the forest monk only to enact a gimmick designed to frighten off the villagers from the forest, which is the sole resource available to him, to keep himself and his family alive. He tells lies in pursuit of the same aim. By drinking toddy occasionally he is no doubt seeking what Aldous Huxley memorably called ‘chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood’. And why does he cohabit with two women? I have no expert opinion to offer. So let me quote Cardinal Sin of Manila, confessor to Imelda Marcos: "If a man has four wives, that is polygamy; if he has two wives it is bigamy; and if he has only one wife, it is monotony".

The indignant reader may ask whether I am writing a film review or perverse rubbish. Believe me, I have myself had misgivings about the film reviews I write. But Dr. Lester James Peiris, one of the greatest living masters of the cinema, assures me that modern film criticism requires the critic to ‘read’ the film and record his impressions and what I am doing is just what the doctor ordered. This, of course, makes film criticism fair game for anybody with any degree of ignorance about the art of the film. That, however, is not my problem.

Theravada Buddhism

Truth to tell, for all his violations of the panchaseela, Sediris does not strike one as a wicked man. Before he encountered the Bhikkhu and his acolyte in the forest, he had adjusted himself as best he could to his environment. He lived by supplying high quality protein to his family and to those who are averse from killing animals, but not averse to eating flesh. He is a wonderful parent, and spends a lot of time with his ten-year old son Tikira inducting him to the practice and ethics of life in the jungle.

(How I wish I had spent as much time with my son when he was ten years old). He cared for his other woman too, and didn’t treat her after she’ had served his purpose like ‘a squashed cabbage leaf’ in the way Professor Higgins treated Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play Pygmalion. I think that the serious purpose of Suriya Arana is to suggest that when all is said and done, the most exalting ethical rule we must endeavour to conform to is compassion for all sentient beings. It is a rule as excellent as it is difficult to live up to. SD does not disguise the fact that in his judgement, the rule is best enshrined in Theravada Buddhism.

I should not wish to give the impression that Suriya Arana is a very cerebral film entirely devoted to transcendental ethics. Nothing could be further from the reality. Set in a forest of breathtaking beauty, sensitively and superlatively captured by Channa Deshapriya’s camera, the film is full of life and fun and laughter and animals. There are deer and pigs and elephants and bats and birds and a horse and a bear and a snake and a porcupine and even a real tiger. The story unfolds smoothly with a touch of surrealism. For instance, there is a tiger in a forest in this country. Again, the Bhikkhu and his acolyte the Samanera, appear to materialise in the forest from nowhere. But who cares? For the point of the film, how they came to be there is irrelevant. Rohana Weerasinghe provides the musical score and the one song in the film is already a hit among the kids. Unsurprisingly, kids with their parents are flocking in droves to see the film.

The glittering stars in Suriya Arana are the two little kids Dasun Madusanka, 9, who is acolyte to the Bhikkhu and Sajitha Anuththara, 10, son to the hunter (In real life too, Sajitha is Jackson’s son). Quite spontaneously, the two kids are attracted to each other and get on like a house on fire. They are wonderful to watch. Like the hunter Sediris, his highly intelligent son Tikira has a mind of his own. I doubt whether he has heard of the Nuremberg Trials, but he seems to have felt intuitively, that every person is responsible for his own acts no matter who gives the orders. That must be why he has no qualms about disobeying his father’s order, which is calculated to get the Bhikkhu and Tikira’s dear friend the Samanera, stung by a poisonous snake. Contrary to his father’s wicked order, he releases the poisonous snake not into the dwelling of the Bhikkhu, but into the open forest. And he is determined to lie to his father that he carried out his order to the letter. His younger and utterly innocent and not-so smart friend the Samanera with his conventional monastic training, is quite certain that it is always -wrong to lie. By a single dismissive justifying remark, Tikira tells the Samanera that there are worse things on earth than lies. For example, killing. (By the way, speaking schematically, revolution is a killing game; democracy is a lying game. I choose democracy because killing is worse than lying). However that may be, parents concerned about teaching their kids essential, practical ethics rather than hypocritical conventional morality ought to take their kids to see Suriya Arana. They will be hugely entertained and subtly enlightened.