Item drawing on Lindy Warrell’s Work …. circulated by Kumar Kirinde
Tomorrow, 18th August, is the first day of the Esala Perahera, the annual religious and cultural festival held in Kandy, Sri Lanka. This historic procession is conducted to pay homage to the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha, which is enshrined at the Sri Dalada Maligawa (Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic). Accordingly attached is a copy of an interesting article by LINDY WARRELL, entitled ‘Historicising the Cosmogony*: Naming the Asala Perahara in Buddhist Sri Lanka,’ published in the Australian Journal of Anthropology in 1990.
To give you an idea of what this article is about, given below is the extract of the first para.
“The Asala Perahara in Sri Lanka is a ritual complex which annually commemorates the Buddha in a series of spectacular elephant processions through the streets, culminating in a Great Procession (Maha Perahera) on the night of the full moon of Asala in the Sinhalese lunar calendar. Significantly, there is no origin myth for the Asala Perahara. However, as I argue, the name ‘Asala’ immanently orders this ritual complex to commemorate the choice made by Gautama Buddha. To renounce his worldly form as Prince Siddhartha to found Buddhism as a major world religion. Consequently, the Asala Perahara is the ritual enactment of the Cosmic premise of the present in Sinhalese Buddhist life: in its name it historicizes the cosmogony.”
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* Cosmogony refers to the study of the origin and development of the universe, the solar system, or any specific celestial system. It encompasses both scientific models, like the Big Bang Theory, and mythological or philosophical creation stories that explain how reality came to be. (Google AI).
** Dr Lindy Warrell was a teacher at the Dept of Anthropology, Adelaide University, at this stage, a department founded by Professor Bruce Kapferer.
