I recently visited the Dalada Maligava with my wife and son. A security guard at the front checkpoint performed a thorough search and then asked me: "Did you have a drink?" Shocked, I said, "Excuse me," thinking that he must have been joking. "Are you drunk?" he asked me again, blocking the entrance. "Sir, are you crazy?", I responded.

He then asked a second security person to smell by breath. Finally, I was allowed entry. As a Buddhist, and moreover, as the father of a toddler who accompanied me at that time in the busy town centre, I would never imagine entering a sacred place under the influence of liquor.

As I mulled over the incident, I began to see the irony behind it. At the time it occurred, I was in Sri Lanka on a Fulbright Fellowship conducting research on Buddhist scholar monks of the 19th and 20th Centuries. I travelled all around the island looking for texts and treatises, which I consider to be the traditional wealth of Buddhist history. Yet in library after library, I found books either missing or discarded. The scholar monks of the 19th Century preserved copies of texts that were two thousand years old, yet the Buddhist texts which have gone missing from our libraries are not even two centuries old.

With my keen interest in the Most Venerable Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, the founder of the Vidyodaya Buddhist College, I went to the Vidyodaya Pirivena with high expectations. I was shocked and saddened to learn from the current principal of the college that I would find nothing in the library. Not one of the many texts written by the founder of the college was available in his own library!

Moreover, I was not allowed entry to the library even to view the existing texts. While one could argue that the principal might have been suspicious of me, he was aware that eminent scholars Dr. Hema Goonatilake and Dr. Oliver Abeynayake had recommended that I consult this library. Vidyodaya was a great academic environment long after its founder’s death and anyone questing for knowledge was free to use its resources. Today, however, even a scholar cannot have access to the library.

In contrast, Vidyalankara has made an attempt to keep its library in order and I was happy to see some novices reading in the library. I am thankful to the chief incumbent at Vidyalankara, who allowed me to use the Vidyalankara library at my convenience. Unfortunately, many ancient texts are missing there, too.

We had a great tradition of Buddhist scholarship in Sri Lanka, one which these eminent scholar monks devoted their entire lives to preserving. The library was considered the treasury of the temple, used by scholars to achieve their intellectual and spiritual goals. Today’s temple libraries have casually rid themselves of valuable ancient texts and replaced them with meaningless books decorated with pretty pictures.

Other temple libraries have been transformed into alms halls in which books have become friendly premises for moths and mould. I, many times, bought old, valuable texts from booksellers on the pavement and in the bylanes of the Kandy town, from whom I learnt that Buddhist monks had sold them for a penny. How did these monks become so greedy or ignorant or both?

I saw huge temples with huge Buddha statues with empty libraries. Spirituality and the pursuit of the intellect have been invaded and overwhelmed by Sraddha!

It is a common knowledge that the great Pali scholars of the West were trained by some venerable erudite monks in Sri Lanka at the end of 19th Century. Unfortunately, many monks today in Sri Lanka know very little or do not care about these scholar monks although the heroic efforts of the latter safeguarded the tradition of Buddhist scholarship during an anxious period of Sri Lankan history. I assumed that these great scholar monks would have trained novices who also cherished that great tradition. Monks like Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, Kalukondayave Prannasekere and Valivitiye Sorata wrote books of great value that bear testimony to a rich and complex culture of monastic learning during a critical period of our history.

This begs the question: What happened to this lineage? Where did we lose it? The temple library is a much better place to achieve spiritual goals girded by intellectual rigor than the parliament, not only for monks but also for all those who are thirsty for knowledge. And yet, we have discarded the treasures of the temple library as if they were so much rubbish.

Now tell me, gentlemen, am I drunk?

Wijitha Yapa Bandara
University of Virginia