By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island 

Here endeth what I write

Who love the Master for his love of us.

A little knowing, little have I told

Touching the Teacher and the Ways of Peace

Forty-five rains thereafter showed he those

In many lands and many tongues, and gave

Our Asia Light, that still is beautiful,

Conquering the world with spirit of strong grace:

All which is written in the holy Books,

And where he passed, and what proud Emperors

Carved his sweet words upon the rocks and caves:

And how – in fulness of the times – it fell

The Buddha died, the great Tathagato,

Even as a man ‘mongst men, fulfilling all:

And how a thousand thousand lakhs since then

Have trod the Path which leads whither he went:

Unto NIRVANA , where the Silence lives.

AH ! BLESSED LORD ! OH, HIGH DELIVERER !

FORGIVE THIS FEEBLE SCRIPT, WHICH DOTH THEE WRONG

MEASURING WITH LITTLE WIT THY LOFTY LOVE.

AH ! LOVER ! BROTHER ! GUIDE ! LAMP OF THE LAW !

I TAKE MY REFUGE IN THY NAME AND THEE !

I TAKE MY REFUGE IN THY LAW OF GOOD !

I TAKE MY REFUGE IN THY ORDER ! OM !

THE DEW IS ON THE LOTUS ! –  RISE GREAT SUN !

AND LIFT MY LEAF AND MIX ME WITH THE WAVE

OM MANI PADME HUM, SUNRISE COMES !

THE DEWDROP SLIPS TO THE SHINING SEA !

Edwin Arnold belonged to the group of Western intellectuals living at different times of the British Raj, who represented for us Sri Lankan islanders and Indian sub-continentals the mellowed humane face of British colonialism. They rendered yeoman service to both nations by stimulating historical and cultural awareness about themselves, which contributed to their eventual achievement of independence from foreign rule. German philologist, orientalist and great Buddhist scholar Frederick Max Muller (1823-1900), former American military officer, journalist, lawyer and theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), British Pali and Oriental scholar T.W. Rhys Davids (1843-1922), German orientalist and historian  Wilhelm Geiger (1856-1943), German educationist Marie Museus Higgins (1855-1926), and a number of other noble men and women similarly inspired by a selfless love of humanity  were of particular importance to us Sri Lankans.

Edwin Arnold, who was of the same age as Olcott, was born at Gravesend, Gravesham, Kent, England on June 10, 1832. As an undergraduate of Oxford University, he won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1852. Having earned an MA, he left Oxford to become a school teacher at King Edwards School, Birmingham. Then, Arnold went to India in 1856 as Principal of Deccan College at Poona (Pune, today). While working in India, he learned Sanskrit. Having lived a constantly active life of just over seventy years as poet, scholar, author, educator, and  journalist, he died on  March 24, 1904, in London England. Though he remained loyal to the British Empire throughout his life, he was free from the entrenched patronising or worse attitude of the average colonialist of the time towards the native imperial subjects including the Ceylonese (Sri Lankans) and treated them as equals.

The poem about ‘the life and teaching of Gautama’ (Buddha) ‘The Light of Asia or The Great Renunciation (Mahabhinishkramana)’ that Arnold composed was first published in July 1879. In his Preface to the book, he wrote that it …”is inspired by an abiding desire to aid in the better mutual knowledge of East and West. The time may come, I hope, when this book and my Indian Song of Songs”, and Indian Idylls”, will preserve the memory of one who loved India and the Indian peoples.” The Indian Song of Songs” is the English translation of the 12th century CE Sanskrit poet Jayadeva’s epic poem Gita Govinda”. Though supercharged with eroticism and replete with sensuous imagery, it is religious in terms of its central theme of Bhakti-yoga of Hinduism. (‘Bhakti-yoga/pure devotional service to Lord Krishna as the highest and most expedient means for attaining pure love for Krishna, which is the highest end of spiritual existence’ in Hinduism, as Swami Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada explains in his 1984 English interpretation of the Hindu sacred text the Gita: ‘Bhagavad-gita As It Is’.) Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda describes the amorous relationship between Krishna in the form of young Govinda and the beautiful cowherdess Radha. Krishna is the eighth incarnation of Vishnu (the Preserver and the Protector of the universe in the Hindu religion), so Govinda is another name for Vishnu. Hindus venerate Buddha as the ninth avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu. Arnold did his translation of the Gita Govinda in 1875, that is, four years before he wrote and published The Light of Asia. He also translated the Bhagavad-Gita” as The Song Celestial” (1885), which he dedicated to India at the opening, having written it, as he claimed, For England, O our India! as dear to me as She!”

This digression about Jayadeva is because I believe that Arnold’s experience with the Gita Govinda had a strong bearing on the literary quality of his own English epic poem The Light of Asia. I happened to read both The Light of Asia and the Sinhala version of the Gita Govinda entitled ‘Govingu Geeya’ done by Sinhala scholar Arisen Ahubudu about the same time during my adolescent years. At the time I didn’t know that Arnold had translated the Sanskrit poem into English (as ‘The Indian Song of Songs’) before he crafted the English poem about the life and philosophy of the Buddha. Ahubudu provided each Sanskrit stanza in Sinhala transliteration with the Sinhala interpretation following it. Jayadeva’s poem is rich in sensuous imagery; his frequent use of alliteration and assonance enhances its enchanting musicality. Through his rarely matched mastery of the Sinhala language Ahubudu produces an authentic translation of the original Sanskrit text. That Arnold’s familiarity with Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda influenced his composition of The Light of Asia, was something I was able to discern as a mature reader of the English poem years later. (As I write this, I have open before me a copy of The Light of Asia locally published in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) by the M.D. Gunasena & Co. Ltd, Colombo in 1954, which my father bought for me in Kandy for two rupees in 1962. It is the very copy that I read at 15+) that I am using here now after sixty-one years!

It carries an introductory essay under the title ‘The Buddha and His Teaching’ written by Dr G.P. Malalasekera of the University of Peradeniya. But it says nothing about the story of Buddha’s life except that he ‘was a human being who found supreme Enlightenment…’.  I noticed its lopsidedness as an introduction to the book even at that young age. Obviously, the professor had not written it for The Light of Asia, but the publishers must have added it to make the publication seem more appealing and more accessible to the local reader.  The whole essay is about Buddha’s teaching according to the Theravada tradition. This was what we were taught at school for the Buddhism subject in the Sinhala medium. As we were learning English as a second language then, it was a big thing for me to be able to read Dr Malalasekera’s learned  writing about Buddhism and understand it just as much as Arnold’s poem. However, the phrase ‘The Buddha and his teaching’ well describes the subject of Arnold’s The Light of Asia, which is mentioned in different words in several places in the text, including the final passage of the poem quoted at the opening of this essay: ‘Touching the Teacher and the Ways of Peace’; he lived and died ‘Even as a man ‘mongst men’. Arnold says as much of the Buddha’s life as of his teaching, as truthfully as he managed to understand it, shifting through the inevitable hyperbole that traditionally embellishes the historical narration of his life story, and the deliberate mystification that distorts the meaning of his profound doctrinal concepts.

The same edition contains Arnold’s own original Preface to his poem, which starts: ‘In the following Poem I have sought, by the medium of an imaginary Buddhist votary, to depict the life and character and indicate the philosophy of that noble hero and reformer, Prince Gautama of India, the founder of Buddhism.’ According to him, though little or nothing was known in Europe of ‘this great faith of Asia’ it had existed during twenty-four centuries, and at his time, surpassed in the number of its followers and the area of its prevalence, any other form of creed. Though Buddhism had for the most part had disappeared from India, the land of its birth, ‘the mark of Gautama’s sublime teaching is stamped ineffaceably upon modern Brahmanism, and the most characteristic habits and convictions of the Hindus are clearly due to the benign influence of Buddha’s precepts’. 

‘More than a third of mankind… owe their moral and religious ideas to this illustrious prince; whose personality, though imperfectly revealed in the existing sources of information, cannot but appear the highest, gentlest, holiest, and most beneficent, with one exception, in the history of Thought….’ (I could infer who Arnold meant by this exception, but I thought that in his heart of hearts, he would have avoided that reservation, for his assertion sounded like nothing more than a concession to the dominant Christian sensitivities of his society.) Arnold quite rightly points out that though Gautama has been accorded superhuman status, he disapproved of ritual and ‘declared himself, even when on the threshold of Nirvana, to be only what all other men might become – the love and gratitude of Asia, disobeying his mandate, have given him fervent worship’. (The phrase ‘on the threshold of Nirvana’ means, in more mundane words, ‘on his deathbed’; ‘on the threshold of Parinirvana’ is the usual way to put it. To put what Arnold hints at here differently: Siddhartha Gautama did not preach a religious system of ritual worship.) But  ‘Forests of flowers are daily laid upon his stainless shrines, and countless millions of lips daily repeat the formula ‘I take refuge in the Buddha!’ Arnold observes with quiet adoration for the Sage whose memory still induces feelings of such pious devotion in the hearts of his followers.  

Arnold stresses the historicity of the Buddha: ‘The Buddha of this poem – if, as need not be doubted, he really existed – was born on the borders of Nepaul about 620 B.C., and died about 543 B.C. at Kusinagara in Oudh.’ (These place names respectively are: Nepal, Kushinagar and Awadh or Avadh, today.) About the timeless relevance of Buddha’s teaching, he says: ‘… this venerable religion … has in it the eternity of a universal hope, the immortality of a boundless love, an indestructible element of faith in final good, and the proudest assertion ever made of human freedom.’ 

What Arnold next says in his original Preface has a message of vital importance to those who are concerned about the survival of the Buddha Sasana in Sri Lanka: ‘The extravaganzas which disfigure the record and practice of Buddhism are to be referred to that inevitable degradation which priesthoods always inflict upon great ideas committed to their charge. The power and sublimity of Gautama’s original doctrines should be estimated by their influence, not by their interpreters; nor by that innocent but lazy and ceremonious church which has arisen on the foundations of the Buddhistic Brotherhood or Sangha”.’  Incidentally, it would be timely to consider whether or not ‘innocent but lazy and ceremonious’ is a good description of the present day Buddhist church  (= the clerical officialdom/the Mahanayake, Anunatake, Adhikarana Sangha Nayake, ……system) in Sri Lanka. 

Arnold has put his poem into the mouth of an imaginary Buddhist devotee ‘because, to appreciate the spirit of Asiatic thoughts, they should be regarded from the Oriental point of view; and neither miracles which consecrate this record, nor the philosophy which it embodies could have been otherwise so naturally reproduced. The doctrine of Transmigration, for instance – startling to modern minds – was established and thoroughly accepted by the Hindus of Buddha’s time…..’ (Arnold is here referring to the then prevalent Western attitude to the idea of reincarnation or rebirth, which Hindus of the pre-Christian Buddha’s time took for granted, as Hindus and Buddhists still do.) He confesses that his exposition of the Buddha’s ancient doctrine is necessarily incomplete, since, in conformity with rules of poetic art, he has to pass by many philosophically most important matters developed over Gautama’s long ministry. But he would consider his purpose achieved, if he succeeded in communicating ‘any just conception ……of the lofty character of this noble prince, and of the general purport of his doctrines…’

To be continued