Buddhism Christianity & Reflections on a forgotten history

Probably no other period in our country’s history has been riddled with so much ambiguity, intrigue, and confusion as the 19th century. This is particularly so with regard to an issue that continues to bedevil historians and sociologists alike: the rebellions of the Buddhist clergy against Christianisation and colonialism.   

Certain writers vouched for, if not belittled, the significance of these rebellions by comparing them with a completely different political and cultural universe: 16th century Europe. In other words, the clergy’s opposition to colonial rule and the Buddhist revival of the 19th century tended to be compared to the rise of Protestantism and, with it, the sects that concurrently opposed it and Catholicism. The problem with such a comparison is that it conceals the “contexts” that underpin religious forces.

   
The ascent of Protestantism is associated with the opposition to the excesses of the Catholic clergy in 16th century Europe. Martin Luther’s act of nailing his 95 Theses on the University of Wittenberg in 1517 was, given that, provoked by popular anger at (among other controversies) the sale of indulgences by priests.   

However, it was not solely an act of rebellion. The nailing of the Theses had as much to do with trade and commerce as it did with theology, since the Protestant Reformation was shaped, more than any other factor, by the rise of capitalism.   

Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, in a book that should be but hasn’t been published, refers to these Protestant churches as “powerful levers for the concentration of capital.” Luther’s enclaves, viewed that way, can be termed as “societies monopolia”, and their success can be explained by the fact that they were all well established, self-regulating institutions grounded in what Max Weber once referred to as “multitudes of confessors.”   

The conflicts between the peasantry and nobility during this period showed which side the Protestant leaders took, and for this reason the rebelling priests, from John of Leiden to Thomas Muntzer, rationalised their revolts in terms of opposition to both feudalism and the Reformation. Here these preachers were continuing a tradition which had begun with the Lollards of 14th century England; it was a tradition that, in the 20th century, would be continued by the Liberation Theologists.   

The conflict between the Protestant and the Catholic Church was, ergo, a conflict between two layers of an aspiring class: feudal nobility versus nascent bourgeoisie. Not unlike the transformation of the Buddhist clergy in 19th century Sri Lanka, the Protestant Church adapted to a changing political landscape: “We must distinguish,” wrote Fernand Braudel, “between the early, militant Protestantism of the 16th century and the victorious, established Protestantism of the 18th.” From the one to the other, theology had moved from the lord and his manor to the industrialist and his factory.   

What of Christianity in Britain? Regi Siriwardena, in an essay on William Blake, observed that within the rebel sects of 17th century Britain there was a rift between their affirmation of political upheaval and rejection of Enlightenment values. Referring to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Witness Against the Beast, he posited that the period from the English Civil War to the French Revolution encountered a proliferation of Dissenting sects like the Diggers, which were both revolutionary and millenarian, “millenarian” referring to a belief in a world where, inter alia, land would be shared in common, class rifts would disappear, and Christ would return.   

The Dissident sects projected an apocalyptical vision of the future that had earlier moulded the Anabaptists; consider that both Thomas Muntzer and John of Leiden shared this view of things to come, and that the latter went as far as to occupy a city (Munster) and create a theocratic State which (with its emphasis on communalism) Klaus Kautsky would later observe as sharing certain characteristics with a socialist State. More than a century after the Munster occupation, Gerard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, would create a similar “heaven on earth” in Surrey; it lasted barely a year.   

This Christianity, of and for the poor, had Evangelical, prophetic undertones, which is why its vision was at once so terrible, and yet also cathartic; the irony there was that in conceiving a Utopian future, the leaders of these sects were shaped by a fanatical view of their faith. In any case, by the 1770s the religious landscape had changed owing to the restoration of the Monarchy and Church; from the old radical Dissenting sects, there was a transition to the New Dissenters: the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Independents, the Quakers, the Congregationalists, and the Methodists, spread among areas over which the Anglican Church had once held sway (predominantly the northwest).   

In The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson makes this observation the nature of the new sects and the regions “taken over” by them:   

“In the mid-18th century the Presbyterians and Independents... were strongest in the south-west, in the industrial north, in London, and in East Anglia. The Baptists contested some of these strongholds... Thus the Presbyterians and Independents would appear to have been strongest in the commercial and wool manufacturing centres, while the Baptists held ground in areas where petty tradesmen, small farmers and rural labourers must have made up a part of their congregations.”   

The Dissident sects had their biggest following among tradesmen and artisans. The most “rational” the sect (as with the Quakers and the Unitarians), the more “capitalist” its congregation: Robert Tombs in The English and Their History writes that the Quakers, despite its small following (“less than 20,000” according to Thompson), produced the biggest names in British business, including Barclay and Cadbury.   

The Anglican Church, meanwhile, tried to win back the congregation it had lost, to no avail: they were always losing their base, especially to the Methodists, who had captured rural England with their inimitable style of preaching. It comes to no surprise that with industrialisation, abolitionism, and colonialism (all of which were supported, given the changing geopolitical realities, by the new denominations), these sects began to “export” their doctrines to the new slave societies, the plantation enclaves.   This was true of Sri Lanka as well. After the British colonisation of 1796, there was an influx of missionaries from the old and new sects. They came in a particular order: the Baptists in 1812, the Wesleyans in 1814, the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians in 1816, and the Church Missionaries in 1818. Their objective was to revive the missionary schools which had fallen into disrepair; in this, though, they had to keep up with a hostile attitude from colonial officials, who were naturally more interested in the administration of the country than the education of its locals.   

Left to their own devices, the new denominations competed with each other and “won” localities for themselves. (For this reason, they can be considered as the first English international schools in the country.) 

The Baptists, the first to come, established their headquarters in Colombo, and then extended their activities eastward through Hanwella (1819) to Matale (1835), while the CMS was established in Kandy (1818), Baddegama (1819), and Kotte (1823). By far the most popular sect was the Wesleyan; owing to its novel tactics, it won a mass following in the littoral areas. 
Within two decades, the region from Colombo and Galle to Matara had become populated by their missions: Moratuwa, Panadura, Kalutara, Ambalangoda, Weligama, and beyond.   
But then the Catholics, suppressed under the Dutch, regained their former strongholds, particularly after the Central School Commission of 1841 broke the Anglican Church’s monopoly over education. It was through their schools that the Catholic priests expanded their activities. In this they played a secondary role, as agents of Westernisation.   

Protestantism obviously had an impact on Sinhalese Buddhist society. Despite the later resurgence of Catholicism, it was the Protestants and Evangelical wing of the Anglican Church which first put heart, soul, and body to “convert the heathens.”   

But as Kitsiri Malalgoda has noted in Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, the efforts of the missionaries would have amounted to nothing if locals were not so impassive as to allow even bana maduwas to be used by them for their work; these locals were only “genuinely puzzled” when requests for the use of missionary schoolhouses for their preaching were turned down. 
The truth is that they had viewed their faith and that of the missionaries as similar; Daniel Gogerly pondered on this confusion when he wrote that “the Buddhists look on their own religion and that of the Christians as identical.”   

Obviously that was to the advantage of the Evangelical sects, more than the Catholic or the old Anglican Church. However, these priests, no matter how zealous they would have been, were handicapped by their ignorance of the vernacular. Even their attempts at translating the Bible to Sinhala and Tamil were woefully limited, not least because of the complexity of the languages they were translating the texts to. 

This, ironically, was what fuelled the response of the Buddhist clergy to Christianisation and colonialism, which, as will be shown next week, was different in political, cultural, and religious terms from the revolts of the Dissenters of 16th century Europe.   

The writings of Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, Fernand Braudel, Regi Siriwardena, E. P. Thompson, Robert Tombs, and Kitsiri Malalgoda were used for this article.

The truth is that they had viewed their faith and that of the missionaries as similar; Daniel Gogerly wrote that “the Buddhists look on their own religion and that of the Christians as identical.”