How should we talk about tradition?

 When we talk about traditional learning, we should focus on what it does for us as a type of education. Our language should be rich in imagery and terms that evoke the fruits of this path: we should share insights, poetry, art and wisdom – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

• Insights, poetry, art, wisdom, emotions and realisations…

By Iraj De Alwis

Tradition encompasses emotions, insights, art, wisdom emotions and realisations and this could be described as keeping the equilibrium of society if approached in a harmonious manner.  

One of my granduncles, born in the late 1920s, was a businessman and devout Buddhist. He had a nurtured love of Sinhala music, was a principal donor of the village festivals, a student of the most venerable Madihe Pannaseeha Thero and a patron of the Vajiragnana Temple. 

When he was a young student of the Panadura Sri Sumangala College he was an ardent supporter of the LSSP. After school, he got a job at the Hirdaramani Group and by his late twenties he had set up his own small weaving mill. He made a lot of money.  

Gradually his heart shifted, and he came to believe in S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. My uncle was a family and community man: he piled all his relatives and the workers into a few large busses and took them to all corners of the island. He had five sisters who were teachers, and few of them taught at the Vajiragnana Sunday school. He gathered all their families regularly for evenings of Sinhala music in his home. They often talked about Buddhism. My mother’s youth was lit with learning, adventure and joy. Listening to her stories is like watching wholesome Avurudu advertisements set in rural pastoral idyll. 

The Indian historian Partha Chatterjee observes that under British colonialism, the world of the colonised was split into two realms. Unlike the French or the Spanish who sought to convert the colonised wholesale into their language, culture and faith, the British took a more cautious approach. 

Unnerved by the near loss of their Indian colony during the great Mutiny of 1857, they were not too keen on imposing their ideas deep into our world. They were focused primarily on making money: setting up an economy of extraction, forced labour on plantations, and their tax revenues. We were forced to admit their superiority in the realms of politics, economics and technology. 

This external realm outside our homes was shaped by their rules. But at home and in our minds, in the internal realm, we gathered together those parts of our world that were from pre-colonial times and we created a realm that looked more familiar. Our food, religion, music, poetry, stories, astrology, medicine, dress, social customs, and language were placed in this realm. Often, women who had no place in the colonial economy and ended up staying home were often tasked with maintaining this realm.

We went out in shoes, or trousers, or a coat with a vetti (and yes until the 1930s or so Sinhalese men wore vettis and not sarongs in public) to work in the institutions of the coloniser, and came home to put on our sarongs and feel more ourselves. We see this pattern in Sri Lanka when we look at the Buddhist or Hindu revival movements of the late 19th century. 

Over time this inner realm became less and less of something we live in and we take nourishment from and cultivate, and more and more symbolic. We talked about the things of this realm, like the food, the faith or the language as something that is essentially us: that was naturally and fundamentally us. The things we had to do in the external realm, at work, at our Western modelled school, or in the city of Colombo, were things that were not really us. We had to endure or embrace it to survive and succeed materially. But, in this inner realm we proclaimed that we could access who we truly are.

Now in the 21st century we find ourselves in a strange place. The competition of the external world is so acute that from childhood we are trained to survive it, and almost no time is devoted to those inherited traditions of the inner realm. We only glimpse it when we watch something on TV, sit down to some rice and curry, go to a wedding or the temple, and when we see political tamashas. 

What did we lose and when the things of this inner realm? When did it become more a symbol that we talked about than an actual presence in our lives? The children of that granduncle became business people: not one of them became a teacher. Some moved abroad. All of their children studied in English. When he died the musical gatherings ended. When his sisters died the Dharma discussions ended. Money became the centre of conversation, and sometimes cricket or politics. Sinhalese identity appeared only on two issues: marriage and politics. 

Who is to blame for this? My granduncle who tried to have success in both realms, to have both money and cultural activities? His children who were forced to adapt to an even more competitive external realm? His grandchildren who only saw glimpses of a fading traditional world already preserved in a reduced way? Perhaps blame is not the point. I think we should ask ourselves what we lost when, the things of the inner realm and how it became something that was just symbolic. 

Recently at my mother’s insistence, I went to meet a young astrologer, the daughter of a very kind and devoted practitioner of astrology. What struck me in our conversations (outside some uncanny observations about my character) was how attentive this lady was to my emotional state. She wanted to know why I had come to see her. Her predictions for the next two years admitted my shortcomings, soothed my anxieties, and gave me a frame of mind to quietly work and cultivate. I left thinking that this was more of a counselling session. This was a glimpse into how the ancient art of Astrology was carried out traditionally; as a planetary guide to soothe out the rough edges of life. 

The Sinhala and Tamil languages are rich in a vocabulary and insightful concepts to observe our emotional and cognitive patterns. Sri Lanka’s Deshiya Chikitsa (Sinhala Wedakama) and the overall Ayurvedic systems focus on a holistic approach to caring for the body combining nourishment, prevention and treatment. Poetry and novels mould our languages into a medium for mindful and subtle expression. Religious traditions ranging from Hindu Bhakti traditions to Abdhidharmic thought challenge the student to cultivate emotional and intellectual depth. 

These systems of traditional learning are meant to make its students more aware of their minds, their hearts, their bodies, the people around them and their environment. By studying them, embodying them we are to become more perceptive, mindful and self-centred. And having studied them, we cultivate these traditions and offer them to others for their benefit.

Which brings me finally to the question of language. Very often I hear the way we talk about these traditional forms of learning and I find them to be counter-productive. We still talk about traditional learning as something that is truly us – it is our essential self always at the risk of being lost to modernity. We have to defend it. 

Defend: what a verb! Not learn it or embody it, but defend it. How we are still stuck in an outdated way of speaking. We grasp and cling to it as a symbol of certainty as before the dizzying speed of life today. No wonder that younger generations do not connect to traditional learning. Their lives are modern: many grow up now in the vast sea of urbanity around our capital far from traditional life. Why would they find a sense of self in traditional things? And many now hear the spectre of ethnic division in this way of speaking.

When we talk about traditional learning, we should focus on what it does for us as a type of education. Our language should be rich in imagery and terms that evoke the fruits of this path: we should share insights, poetry, art and wisdom. We should speak of emotions and realisations. We should speak of mistakes and journeys. Personal stories help. 

Our language should be vivid with what we learn from engaging studies of Sinhala or Tamil literature, Ayurveda, music or religious philosophy. And we should stay clear of ways of speaking that are about grasping for some essential true traditional self. Especially when these systems teach us that self and identity are illusions or as we say invalid-cognitions (klishta-manas). 

(Iraj De Alwis teaches history and literature. He has completed an MA in literature from Harvard University and a BA in history from Middlebury College, Vermont.)