Category Archives: Buddhism

September 10, 2025 · 11:42 pm

A Zealot in USA targets Sri Lanka

Rohana R. Wasala, in The Island, 10 September 2025, with this title “The root of all evil”

Professor Michael K. Jerryson of Youngstown State University, Ohio, USA,  testified on the subject of ‘Human Rights Concerns in Sri Lanka’ before the ‘Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, House Committee on Foreign Affairs (of the U.S. House of Representatives) on June 20, 2018. While delivering his statement, Jerryson submitted a written testimony into the record. He thanked Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Bass, and other Members of the Committee  for ‘addressing a very important issue facing Sri Lanka, which is also a larger issue of peace and stability for South and South Asia today’

A file photo of a US House Committee on Foreign Affairs meeting …. graced this item but refused  to comply with  Thuppahi’s ‘request’

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August 16, 2025 · 12:53 pm

A Thoughtful Assessment of THE CEYLON JOURNAL

Dhanuka Bandara, in The Daily Mirror, 15 August 2025 … where the  title reads “The Ceylon Journal III: A Review,”  while the title here and the  highlighting are  the imprint of The Editor, Thuppahi

 The third installation of the bi-annual periodical The Ceylon Journal certainly continues the success of the two previous issues. Edited by Avishka Mario Senewiratne, The Ceylon Journal was first launched in July 2024. This unique journal, which in turn draws inspiration from Young Ceylon, a 19th-century Sri Lankan journal published by Charles Lorenz Ambrose and his friends, continues to publish immensely readable, yet well-researched and informative articles on a wide range of topics.

 

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July 4, 2025 · 7:26 pm

Biographical Paths to Lankan History via ‘Hits’ on TPS

A MEMO From Michael Roberts as Editor, Thuppahi,  July 2025

The Word Press system keeps me informed about the HITs on TPS items everyday and also assembles figures for each week. Reviewing these details provides one with a glimpse of internet viewers and their interests. As an exercise with this objective I provide figures of HITS on items carrying biographical tales.

HEREWITh, then, are the figures of such hits — HITS on bio-tales –– during the past week.

 

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April 5, 2025 · 7:33 pm

Introducing A Cutting Edge Journal: SOUTH ASIA

Michael Roberts

SOUTH ASIA has been a form of Australian exploration — in the plural form of manifold journeys and investigations — in South Asia for several decades. I was a small cog in this cluster of activities some 20 years back; but, alas, fell away. Some old partners in arms are still part of the Editorial Advisory Board; but its a fresh and bright team that is bringing the Indian subcontinent into the Aussie arena. Sri Lankan scholars and readers need to take note of this work and chip in with their own ‘commentary’ — whether in article form or as avid readers.

Check https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/csas20 …. AND/OR write to ……….. OR ……………………….. priya.chacko@adelaide.edu.au

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March 29, 2025 · 12:07 am

Nationalisms in Sri Lanka: A Bibliography Cast in 2014..

bull-mascot-team-logo-design-longhorn-133746227 Presented here at ……………………………………………………….. https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/nationalism-the-past-and-the-present-the-case-of-sri-lanka/…. & thus in need of updating.; while being dedicated to a Peradeniya University buddy -alas deceased– with whom I shared notes and thoughts during undergraduate days and thereafter in the 1970s & 1980s in Chicago: namely, Ananda Wickremeratne …

Amunugama, Sarath 1979 ‘Ideology and class interest in one of Piyadasa Siris­ena’s novels: the new image of the “Sinhala Buddhist” nationalist’ in M Roberts (ed.) Collective identities, nationalisms and protest in modern Sri Lanka, Colombo:: Marga Institute, pp 314-36

Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of Nationalism.  London: Verso

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March 26, 2025 · 10:05 pm

An Epitaph for Gananath Obeyesekere

Chandra R. De Silva, … with highlighting emphasis added by The Editor, Thuppahi

I write to add a few words to the outpouring of appreciations of Gananath Obeyesekere, a scholar whose research in anthropology, religion, myth, and cultural practices  has won him accolades across the world. I will not comment on the advances in knowledge and the discussions he provoked by his many scholarly works of which among the best known are Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Buddhism Transformed (co-author), The Work of Culture, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, and The Doomed King. There has been much written on this world renowned scholar, and there will undoubtedly be more comments by experts in the years to come.

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February 9, 2025 · 2:50 pm

An Inspiring Sri Lankan Anthropologist: Gananath Obeysekere

Laleen Jayamanne & Nammika Raby, in The Island, February 2025

“People were nourished by stories….” (Kathandarawalinne minissu jeewathwune) Gananath

“Man does not live by bread alone” Matthew 4:4

Dimuthu Saman Wettasinghe’s film Gananath Obeyesekere: In Search of Buddhist Conscienceopens with a bravura tracking shot moving past trees, water, a splash of saffron robes. These sunlit images are enfolded in a non-religious, rather melancholy male choral chant, but soon the singular voice of Professor Gananath Obeyesekere cuts through with a kind of Dionysian intensity. He tells us a story about Gauthama Buddha, as the camera encircles, at speed, what turns out to be the Kandy Lake. His tale is about a devastating war waged by the king of Kosla against the Sakya kingdom but of the Buddha’s unshakable belief that if folk get together and discuss matters in good faith (call it diplomacy), all wars could be averted. This carefully and deeply researched, imaginative, ‘Educational Film’ of 142 minutes, with its exhilaratingly dense overture and its subtle montage, is a loving tribute to an exemplary Lankan scholar/teacher and his life work (of some 70 years) as an internationally renowned Anthropologist.

The film shows Gananath’s empathetic ability to pay careful ethnographic attention to a variety of gendered states of mental distress and trauma and their traditional ritualised ecstatic expressions, especially with regard to women, well before some feminist scholars in the West began to be interested in the topic of ‘Women and Madness’ from a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic theory became methodologically important for Feminist Film Theory, which I used in my doctoral thesis on ‘Female Representation in the Lankan cinema’.

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February 5, 2025 · 12:07 pm

George Frederick van der Hoeven: A Turbulent Career … Ceylon & Australia

Nick van der Hoeven

I wanted to write about a very complex man, one of my grandfathers …. George Frederick van der Hoeven. The main reason for doing so is because history has not been kind to him, especially the unwritten verbal history within our family. Born in 1901 in Colombo Ceylon — then under British rule — Grandpa (as we called him) died here in Melbourne in 1978. I was 6 years old.

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November 6, 2024 · 11:37 pm

Parakrama Bahu’s Outreach Far …. Into China: A Lecture to Unfold

Notice re A National Trust Lecture by Prof Gamini Ranasinghe: “The prince Balaina (A son of VI Parakramabahu?) and his Clan in China and Taiwan” ………… ….. Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuIpBdlCJmU

Gamini Ranasinghe …

 

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September 19, 2024 · 1:14 pm

Democratic Processes Worldwide and Sri Lanka Today

 Ever since he addressed the failed coup of 1962 in a book-length stud,y Donald L. Horowitz has kept an eye on Sri Lankan affairs and has now unveiled a new book tackling central issues in the democratic process on a worldwide scale –with one chapter devoted to the problems TODAY in Sri Lanka ….. Editor, Thuppahi 

Donald L. Horowitz, James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus, Duke University

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