contributed by Nalika Gajaweera and Neena Mahadev, 19 February 2021

Cover image: Monks reciting the Ratana Sutta (screenshot from a live telecast found on YouTube)

In this reflection on Buddhism and COVID-19, two anthropologists, Nalika Gajaweera and Neena Mahadev, explore the apotropaic practices of ritual chanting by Theravāda Buddhist monastics for protection against COVID-19 in Sri Lanka. The authors also engage a discussion of how Sinhala notions of national security (rata arakśawa kirīma) and practices of securitization are being extended beyond the domain of spiritually protective Dharmic energies to guard against the viral contagion. In addition to fears that social proximity to potential carriers of the virus may ignite clusters of contagion, the authors observe how in the case of Sri Lanka, political, medical, and religious authorities characterize COVID-19 patients as Corona “suspects” (Sinhala sakakāreyo). They have tended to do so in public discourse in ways that cast suspicion upon Muslim minorities. Official constructions of patients as sakakāreyo have seeped into the ordinary discourses concerning the virus, and have largely gone unquestioned within segments of civil society. To the authors, this is a most troubling feature of the “new normal” which has been inaugurated in Sri Lanka. Of course, the phenomenon is not unique to Sri Lanka; elsewhere, such as in the U.S., comparable populist discourses of warfare against the pandemic similarly exacerbate ethno-nationalist and religious scapegoating.

Since 2011, highly politicized subsets of Buddhist monks, primarily affiliates of an organization known as the Bodhu Bala Sena (“the Army of Buddhist Force”) and their lay followers, have unleashed vitriol and episodic violence against Sri Lankan Muslims (see Haniffa 2016, 2017, Holt 2016, McGilvray 2016). Following the horrific bombings of Easter Sunday 2019, the Sri Lankan state reignited post-war securitization practices with an eye towards the prevention of domestic terrorism. This policing especially targeted Sri Lanka’s diverse Muslim population. After a period of more than 25 years of ethnicized war, and just over 10 years of a most tenuous peace, the authors note that the ritual and discursive practices of protection within Sri Lankan Buddhism appear to once again be practically inseparable from the ethnicization of Buddhism, and nationalistic conflicts perpetuated through the scapegoating of non-Buddhist ‘Others.’

From the outskirts of Colombo in March and April 2020, Nalika observed how with the onset of the pandemic and a military-led statist response to it, streets and highways normally bustling with tuk-tuks, lorries and cars competing for road space became desolate. Stray street dogs and cats, who typically get by relying on the generosity and leftovers of office workers and security guards (a kind of dāna or almsgiving), were left to their own devices. Everything went quiet. But there was one distinct sound that perforated the Sri Lankan soundscape, earworming itself through the streets and living spaces of Sri Lankan households—that is, the throaty chanting of Buddhist monks. Local temples had been given instructions from monastic authorities to chant pirit every evening at dusk. In this time of heightened anxiety and a claustrophobic sense of enclosure, Sinhala Buddhists not only coped by exploring allopathic and Ayurvedic immune system-enhancers, but also by opening their windows to let the vibrations of the monk’s chanting traverse the air to enter and purify their domestic airspace.

We examine how for Sinhala Buddhists, pirit recitations serve to channel Dharmic energies and intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aspiration (prarthanāwa) to achieve viral inoculation through the recitations are conceived of producing a protective sonic field. But when further paired with nationalistic anxieties, the recitations can be overwrought by ideas of securitization, which appear to be charged with anti-pluralistic affects. The statist assertions of Buddhist power in Sri Lanka are engaged as sacred transmissions to act like a protective amulet against the threat of a “foreign” virus.

Beginning on March 18^th 2020, for twenty-four hours a day for a full seven days, hundreds of monks from the Asgiriya and Malwatte chapters of Sri Lanka’s Theravadin Buddhist Sangha took to the continuous recitation of the Ratana Sutta, as a spiritual offensive against the COVID-19 pandemic. The Mahasangha carried out the ceremonial chanting at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy (known as the Sri Dalada Maligawa)—the palace which houses the Lord Buddha’s sacred Tooth Relic. Sinhala Buddhists conceive of the locale as the historical centerpoint of pre-colonial sovereignty of their nation. To venerate the “Triple Gem” of the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, Buddhist monks and laity commonly chant the Ratana Sutta. In this exceptional state of Covidian-age anxiety, Buddhist monks injected their recitations with the intention of staving off and stamping out the virus. The Sri Lankan monks and officiants of the pirit ceremony noted the salience of this Sutta by relaying how their Lord Buddha’s Dharmic utterances cured a plague and a series of other misfortunes which had beset the ancient Indian capital of Vesali. In their prefacing, they were emphatic that the Buddha’s original recitation of the Sutta caused a plague to subside, suggesting historical precedence for the efficacy of their prophylactic incantations. Across Sri Lanka, Sinhala Buddhists tuned into the live telecast of this special recitation of the Ratana Sutta.

Video: Live telecast of a special recitation of the Ratana Sutta performed at Sri Dalada Maligawa

A week prior to the public broadcast, the state had imposed an all-island curfew enforced by the military and the police, which included the closure of grocery stores, pharmacies and public spaces. The airport was closed, a mandatory quarantine of all international travelers was imposed, and all travel between districts was restricted. At the end of the seventh day of chanting, officials took the holy water (pirit paen) by helicopter and sprinkled it over the island.    

Pirit paen is water ritually infused with the energetics of the monks’ Dharmic chantings. It is striking how sound is converted—and indeed transduced, into materialized blessings through ritual processes. To transduce is “to convert (something, such as energy or a message) into another form; e.g, sense organs transduce physical energy into a nervous signal” (Merriam-Webster online). Harshana Rambukwella (2020) observes that with the pandemic, a “patriotic science” has been enlivened in Sri Lanka, as seen when a Sri Lankan medical doctor validated the efficacy of Buddhist chanting to protect human health. The doctor publicly averred that scientific studies provide evidence that pirit water (pirit paen) is transformed on a molecular level (ibid). We argue that the televised and live recitations of pirit serve as a kind of “sonic protection”—a phenomenon that Jim Sykes (2018) has demonstrated a long history which is both of ritual and political relevance across a variety of religious and secular domains in Sri Lanka. Long before the onset of the pandemic too, there have been a number micro-politically salient conflicts over the sounds of religious difference in Sri Lanka, wherein different communities spar over the sanctity of the soundscape. In episodes of religious conflict in Sri Lanka’s modern history, various religious actors have episodically installed loudspeakers in sites that sometimes impinge upon the sacred and sonic space of others (Mahadev 2019, n.d., Sykes 2018). Indeed, religious “noise” has often been a profound site of “cultural struggle” (Roberts 1990).

Cases of COVID-19 inched up to double digits in Sri Lanka within a week of the militarized curfew in 2019. A decade earlier, during the war’s “final solution” in 2009, then President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother Gotabaya Rajapaska - who led the Ministry of Defense and the tri-military forces - were credited for bringing a crushing defeat to the LTTE insurgents. After some years in the political limelight for defending Sri Lankan sovereignty, the brothers were ousted from electoral politics for a multi-year stint. But they resumed power in November 2019 when Gotabaya was newly inaugurated as Sri Lanka’s President, and former president Mahinda Rajapaska was elected as Prime Minister. In the aftermath of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, the pair had won the election on a platform of re-securitizing the nation from foreign threats, and by promising majoritarian nationalist members of their constituency that they would take up various measures to protect Buddhism from encroachments by people of other religions.

The discursive tools that state actors deployed to govern under the new “War on COVID-19” shared much in common with the old “War on Terror.” Nationalistic and populist discourses proliferated paranoically in Sri Lanka with the onset of the pandemic. If during Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war years, Tamils and Christians were the ethno-linguist and religious Others that threatened the righteous society of the Sinhalese Buddhist nation-state (Gajaweera 2020), then the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had produced a renewed discourse of the Muslim Other. Within these revised post-war nationalist discourses, Muslims were characterized as “super spreaders” of the virus (Silva 2020), much as Hindutva nationalists in India levelled allegations of Muslims’ involvement in “Corona jihad”. Reportedly, Sri Lankan police arrested somewhere between 22,000 to 60,000 people between mid-March and mid-May of 2020 for defying the nationwide curfew. While these authoritarian measures might have appeared to keep numbers relatively low in Sri Lanka for a time, these measures were extended in various draconian ways to impinge especially upon minorities. In addition, xenophobic rumors alleging that Muslims were going to the hospital in droves with the intent to afflict other people with the virus proliferated in Sri Lanka.

Despite initially low numbers of infections, the Sri Lankan state placed a nationwide moratorium on all funerary burials of deaths caused by COVID-19 - in the face of World Health Organization (WHO) regulations to respect fundamental rights and scientific evidence that burials are permissible. A government mandate for cremation of all of those who succumbed to COVID-19 was being extended in ways that Sri Lankan Muslims felt to be a direct and intentional impingement upon their dearly-held sharia funerary injunctions for Islamic burial (janazah). Political authorities’ argued against Muslim petitioners, claiming that the injunction on burials was not discriminatory, but rather had been instituted to stave off viral infection through ground-water contamination (a claim that experts say are groundless). Under the circumstances Sri Lankan Muslims remain unconvinced by the injunction (Silva 2020). Staunch and over-broad enforcement of the mandate sparked protests among Sri Lankan Muslim communities in various locales through the country in recent months. The controversy prompted renewed protest after the forced cremation of a two-month year old infant born to a Muslim family. For Sri Lankan Muslims, the incident has painfully brought to the fore feelings of exclusion and estrangement from their homeland.

Sri Lankan Muslims’ fears of victimization by a majoritarian nationalist and exclusionary state were exacerbated in the wake of the aforementioned Easter Sunday bombings of 2019. Following the tragedy, all nine of Sri Lanka’s Muslim Ministers of Parliament were forced to resign under pressure placed upon them by Sinhala Buddhist political activists. That pressure was fortified by an activist monk of the Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS), Reverend Athurliya Rathana Thero, who staged a campaign to demand the ministerial resignations. The monk undertook a highly publicized “fast unto death” in front of the sacred Temple of the Tooth (Sri Dalada Maligawa). Media spectacles such as the monk’s served to construe Sri Lanka’s Muslim populations as a non-native threat to the Buddhist moral moorings of Sri Lanka, and to the very existence of Buddhism itself.

However, the authors note that despite overarching inclinations inscribed by the majoritarian nationalist state to address religious plurality as a “problem,” and despite the pandemic-like spread of paranoias, various segments of the Sinhala Buddhist population do strive to make more careful discernments. After the Easter Sunday bombings, there were active campaigns by groups of Catholic and Buddhist leaders and inter-faith activists to dissuade the public from scapegoating the Muslim population of Sri Lanka. In a stretch of coastal villages in which Neena has had longstanding associations through her fieldwork, some of her Sinhala Buddhist interlocutors expressed the desire to retain amicable relations to those Muslims who have had an established presence in proximity to their own village communities. Following the bombings, and after the onset of the pandemic, she found that some Sinhala people in the rural coastal milieus frequently characterize the Muslims who live in their midst as “ahinsakay”—which is typically translated into English as “innocent” or “harmless.” The colloquial Sinhala term ahinsakay is derived from the Pāli/Sanskrit term, ahimsa. Its usage by Sinhala Buddhists in this context implies that they consider “known” Muslims to be, like them, oriented to non-violence.

Even still, in the context of COVID-19 there have been strong inclinations in Sri Lanka towards Islamophobic sentiments which dovetail with the logic of achieving viral protection through Buddhist devotions. Buddhist sound modalities are deployed to guard against viral transmission, and we suggest, are implicitly or explicitly extended also to guard against incursion by “suspect” minorities who are deemed to be deliberately inviting in contagion to destabilize the nation. Examining the ideas of security (arakśawa kirīma) and national security (rata arakśawa kirīma), brings to the surface projections of a Sinhala Buddhist imagined community which exclusionary statist discourses recurrently fashion as an insular and islanded one in need of protection.

Nalika Gajaweera writes based on observations during a period of lockdown in Sri Lanka, and her present locale in California, while Neena Mahadev writes from Singapore, based on conversations with several interlocutors in Sri Lanka. Neena would like to thank Thushari Dinusha Sunnadeniyage for her helpful contributions, members of OMNIA Institute for Contextual Leadership for providing their insights and for their localized engagements in peace-making efforts, and for support from the Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund for the Study of Comparative Religion from Yale-NUS College.

Works Cited

Gajaweera, Nalika. 2020. “The Mothers of the Righteous Society: Lay Buddhist Women as Agents of the Sinhala Nationalist Imaginary.” Journal of Global Buddhism, Vol. 21. pp. 187-204.  

Haniffa, Farzana. 2016. “Stories in the Aftermath of Aluthgama,” in Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities: Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka, Holt (ed). Oxford University Press.

—. 2017. “Who Gave These Fellows This Strength?: Muslims and the Bodhu Bala Sena in Postwar Sri Lanka.” Sri Lanka: The Struggle for Peace in the Aftermath of War, Amarasingham and Bass, ed. Hurst Publishers. 109-127.

Holt, John C. (ed). 2016. Introduction. Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities: Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka. Oxford University Press.

Ismail, Adilah. 2021. “On Living and Dying as a Muslim in Sri Lanka,” A Life of Saturdays, Feb 4. Accessed February 8, 2021.

Mahadev, Neena. 2019. “Karma and Grace: Rivalrous Reckoning of Fortune and Misfortune.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

—. n.d., Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religion Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka. Book manuscript in progress.

McGilvray, Dennis. 2016. “Rethinking Muslim Identity in Sri Lanka,” in Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities: Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka, Holt (ed). Oxford University Press.

Rambukwella, Harshana. 2020. Patriotic Science: the Coronavirus Pandemic, Nationalism, and Indigeneity. University of Zurich Political Geography blog, June 3, 2020.

Roberts, Michael Roberts. 1990. ‘Noise as Cultural Struggle: Tom-Tom Beating, the British, and Communal Disturbances in Sri Lanka, 1880s – 1930s,’ in Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia. Delhi, Veena Das (ed). Oxford India Press. pp. 240 – 285.

Roy, Arundhati. 2020. “The Pandemic is a Portal.” Financial Times. April 4, 2020.

Silva, Tudor Kalinga. 2020. “Identity, Infection, and Fear: A Preliminary Analysis of COVID-19 Drivers and Responses in Sri Lanka.” International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), Colombo.

Sykes, Jim. 2018. The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Postwar Sri Lanka. Oxford University Press.

 

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the blog editorial team or the Asia Research Institute.

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