Is this what the Buddha taught?

By Tisaranee Gunasekaraon 

‘More the decline of the Buddhist Order of Sri Lanka, taller the statues.’ E.W. Adikaram (Onwards alone like a unicorn)

In November 2025, officials from the Department of Wildlife raided the home of an Anuradhapura resident. In the man’s refrigerator was a stock of illegal wild animal meat, including samba deer and armadillo, and tortoise eggs; in a room, stacks of money (including foreign currency), gold and an ivory bracelet; inside a barrel in the garden, six black tortoises.

This breaker of multiple laws was B. Jayawardane, the Chief Kapuwa (god-man) of the Sri Maha Bodhi. The wild animal meat, he said, was given to him by devotees/bought by him (the story varied) for his children/a katina dane for monks (again, the story varied). He found the tortoises loitering on the road and brought them home for their own safety; the money was, in part, his cut from the donations made by devotees to the Sri Maha Bodhi; and the ivory bracelet was from Thailand and given to him by the chief incumbent. He repeatedly asked the officials to call the Atamasthanadhipathi to confirm his tales. When the officials didn’t, he wept, asking his son to call and inform the Atamasthanadhipathi of his plight.

The man was taken into custody, even though several influential individuals contacted the wildlife officials and “attempted to put pressure on them to release the suspect and the confiscated items”. Whether these influential individuals included the then Atamasthanadhipathi Pallegama Hemaratana Thera is anyone’s guess. The kapuwa was produced before court and remanded. The case continues.

Kapuwas are familiar figures in Sri Lanka, regarded as intermediaries between devotees and gods. As the agent of a god, the kapuwa conveys the pleas of the supplicant to his divine principal and informs the supplicant of measures needed to actualise divine help.

Kapuwas in devales is a Sri Lankan normal. But what is a kapuwa (apparently there are nine of them) doing in the Sri Maha Bodhi? Of which god is he an agent of? To which god does he convey supplications and obtain responses from?

One of the best known stanzas from Dhammapada is about the animist practice of worshipping objects such as trees. “Driven only by fear, do men go for refuge to many places – to hills, woods, groves, trees, and shrines. Such, indeed, is no safe refuge… He who has gone for refuge to the Buddha, the teaching, and his Order, penetrates with transcendental wisdom the Four Noble Truths… This indeed is the safe refuge, the refuge supreme.” (Buddha Vagga)

Every religion evolves according to changing times and conditions. Buddhism in Sri Lanka is no exception. Initially, the Bodhi tree, like the stupas, was venerated as a symbolic representation of the Buddha. According to Buddhist scholar Professor M.M.J. Marasinghe, the justification for this came not from the original Pali Canon but from a commentary on the Kālinga Bodhi Jataka by Buddhaghosa Thera in 5th Century CE. “Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Kalinga Bodhi Jataka has an additional story of Venerable Ananda requesting the Buddha to leave some object to which his followers in Savatthi could pay their respects whenever he was away on his (dhamma cáriká) visits to other areas. Buddha accordingly, approves the planting of a seedling from the Sri Maha Bodhi of Buddhagaya at the entrance to the monastery at Savatthi.”

Galkande Dhammanada Thera in his sermons traces the transformation of the bo tree from an object of veneration to a granter of wishes to the psychological trauma caused by the Eelam war. The existence of kapuwas in Sri Maha Bodhi marks a new low in this process of ritualization. The bo tree has been turned to a kind of a god. This is both a grotesquery and a measure of the chasm between Sri Lankan Buddhism and what the Buddha taught. A chasm with greed as a key building block.

Feudal islands in a capitalist sea

According to the Buddha’s teachings, monks are not supposed to own anything other than the bare essentials. Even to these essentials, they are not supposed to form an attachment. “A monk should stay unsmeared by these things – alms-food, a dwelling, a place to sit and lie down, and water to wash dust from his robe, like a water-drop on a lotus.” These protocols, the Buddha explains, are not for householders; they are for monks, “Since the entire monk-practice can’t be managed by those wealthy in property”.

In contravention of this Buddhist teaching about the absolute incompatibility between monkhood and ownership of wealth, the Sri Lankan Sangha started becoming wealthy in property as the practice of endowing temples with land and irrigation works took off in 2nd century BCE. Historian R.A.L.H. Gunawardhana traces this transformation in his magisterial work, ‘Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka’. As the Sasana expanded, the number of temples and donations to temples grew. “This paved the way for the growth of monastic property and brought about a significant change in the attitude of the sangha towards wealth…” The first donations were caves and made to the entirety of the sangha, past, present and future. Then came donating land to individual monasteries. “As a result of this practice, the monastery came to represent not merely a group of resident monks but also a corporate property- owning institution. The boundary disputes between the major monasteries at the capital and, in particular, the objections raised by the Mahavihara to other monasteries being erected on what it considered its own grounds, reveal how strongly inmates of monasteries felt that the land attached to their monasteries belonged to them alone.”

As the landholdings of monasteries grew, it led, perhaps inevitably, to the practice of selling and mortgaging donated land (around the 10th century CE). “According to the Mihintale Tablets of Mahinda IV, nothing whatsoever belonging to the ‘inner monastery’ or the ‘relic shrine’ was to be given on loan not be purchased if offered for sale by monastic officials”.

Transgressions bred more transgressions. As historian Amaradasa Liyanagamage points out, “There is little doubt that by the fourteenth century the concept of private property in the order had taken root… It is therefore quite probable that property interests of these viharas and the desire of their incumbents to retain these temporalities within their own family circles, was a further factor which determined the nature of admission to the order” (Society, State, and Religion in Pre-Modern Sri Lanka).

As transgressions grew, so did the need to deal with the resultant cognitive dissonance. Walpola Rahula Thera records one instructive example. “The Buddha had prohibited bhikkus from accepting male or female slaves… But with the increase of monks and temporalities, slaves came to be employed in monasteries. A passage in Samantapāsādikā clearly says that kings gave slaves to monasteries, and that they should not be admitted into the Order of the Sangha, but that they could be admitted after they were freed. As the acceptance of slaves was against the injunction of the Buddha, the Majjima-nikaya Commentary (by Buddhaghosa Thera) laid down that it was not proper to accept slaves as such, but it was proper to accept them when one says: ‘I offer a kappiya-kāraka, I offer an ārāmika” (History of Buddhism in Ceylon).

Many monastery properties still function as feudal fiefs of chief incumbents. A case in point was provided by journalist Tissa Gunatillaka in his June 25, 2023 article in the Divaina. Tittawelpota, a Sinhala village in Pallebedda, Embilipitiya, is treated as the property of Sankhapala Rajamaha Viharaya. According to villager H.D. Wimalasena, “We have been in possession of this land since times of ancient kings… But now we cannot cut a tree in our land. If we cut a tree we must give one quarter to the temple. We cannot write a deed to a child. If we do that we must get the temple’s permission. If we sell a piece of land, we must give one quarter to the temple. Sankhapala (temple) charges taxes.”

Greed, taught the Buddha, was a “great flood” and sensuality “a bog hard to cross over”. Be it taxing inhabitants of traditional villages or installing kapuwas in Sri Maha Bodhi, the motivating factor is greed, the need to accumulate more and more wealth. The longer we ignore this toxin, the faster it will claim what is left of the Gautama Buddha’s Sasana.

Capitalism celebrating its orgies in temples

In May 2026, the Supreme Court delivered a historic judgement for environmental justice. A three-judge bench headed by Janak de Silva ruled that the large scale deforestation in the Nakolagane area constitute a significant violation of the fundamental rights of the public.

The judgement was also important for the light it cast on a taboo subject, traditional temple properties. For the land in question belonged to Nakolagane Purana Rajamaha Viharaya in Kurunegala. The offender was the chief incumbent of the temple, Walathwawe Rahula Thera. He had ordered the clearing of 1,500 acres of forest land, erected an illegal electric fence around the cleared area and transferred it to private companies and individuals.

The monk argued that the land was private property because it was granted to the temple under an ancient royal decree (sannasa). The court rejected that argument stating that temple property is held in trust for the public and Sasana. The monk was found guilty of violating the National Environmental Act and the Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance. A number of state officials were found culpable for not using their legal authority to stop the illegal activities of the monk. The court ordered the Director General of Wildlife Conservation to restore the cleared area to its original state and the chief incumbent to pay for this reforestation in full from his private funds.

Here we have the classic case of a chief incumbent of a temple exploiting land granted to the temple by ancient monarchs to generate a very capitalist profit and doing so in total violation of not just morality and tradition but also laws and regulations.

Today there’s much talk about reforming the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance to introduce a monk court for monks (Sanghadhikaranaya). But nothing is said about changing the property rights granted to monks by this colonial law in total violation of the Vinaya. The ordinance introduced a category called controlling viharadhipati and handed over the management of temple properties (other than certain named exceptions) to the chief incumbent of each temple. Any trustee of such temple properties would also be appointed by the chief incumbent, thereby cementing his absolute control.    According to the ordinance, all chief incumbents and trustees are subject to supervision by the Public Trustee. That check and balance is in theory only. In practice, most chief incumbents treat temple properties as private property, using ancient grants and the colonial ordinance as justification, leasing or selling them at will. The possibility that some of the entrepreneurial monks have registered their temple holdings as limited liability companies cannot be disregarded. Using the robe as sword and shield they ignore, violate, bend or creep under laws and regulations aided by authorities who prefer to look the other way.

Caste discrimination within the Sasana is no secret. Each temple is also the property of a certain caste/castes. That feudalist inequality is joined by the classic capitalist inequality of economic class. There exists within the Sasana a clear distinction between poor and rich temples/monks. After the late Atamasthanadhipathi Pallegama Sirinivasa Thera passed away, the wife of a businessman in Anuradhapura filed a case in the Magistrate’s Court claiming the ownership of a piece of land in the New Town worth Rs 100 million, arguing that it was given to her by the late monk via a deed of gift.

The connection between an Atamasthanadhipathi owning such wealth and the installation of kapuwas in Sri Maha Bodhi to exploit the ignorance and the gullibility of the faithful need not be belaboured. And when feudal power and monetary power marry, what comes forth is a behemoth too big even for the political class to contend with, as we saw and continue to see regarding the Pallegama Hemaratana case.

Sri Lankans like to boast that the Buddha’s teachings in their pristine form exists only in this country. They do in books and in the practice of a small minority of monks and lay people. But the Buddhism that is dominant in Sri Lanka is the near antithesis of what the Buddha taught. We can build a temple on every hilltop, an āranya in every forest and a Buddha statue in every street corner but none of these can hide the putrid reek emanating from the slow murder of a great faith.

–This article was originally featured on groundviews.org