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Last Sunday morning, the nation awoke to the grim news. Sobitha, the Most Venerable Maduluwawe Sobitha Thera, was dead. Three hours before the sun rose on Lanka, the monk who had been pivotal in breaking a new dawn, had died in a Singapore hospital at the age of 73.

The firebrand monk whose charismatic spirit had inspired a nation to aspire for change, whose indomitable will had infused new life to Lanka’s comatose democracy and thus enabled her people to breathe again the fresh invigorating breaths of freedom’s air, had breathed his last. The vibrant spirit of Lanka lay stilled: and the Lankan flag lay drooped at half mast. The nation had lost its moral voice, the guardian of its liberties and the keeper of its conscience.

Though he may not have visibly possessed all the necessary attributes which would have placed him next in line to Arahantship this birth, he had — as Shakespeare wrote of Brutus — ‘the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, “This was a man.”

THE VENERABLE SOBITHA THERA: The elements are so mixed in him that Nature might say: This was a Man

He was the nation’s messiah who came adorned in the saffron robe of the Buddha at her most dismal hour to lead the people from darkness to light: the noble monk who did not take the high road to self liberation but traversed instead the lower path to dedicate this birth to the upliftment of his fellow beings, at the cost of his own quest for enlightenment.

And this Thursday evening as the sun went down on the land and a grateful nation garbed in mourning consigned the last mortal remains of the Venerable Sobitha Thera to the all consuming flames of the funeral pyre , no other monk had ever moved a president to renew the sacred vows he had made upon being elected to office as the coffined corporeal frame of Sobitha did when President Sirisena reaffirmed the testament he had made with the people of Lanka and declared : ” Before the noble mortal remains of Sobitha Thera, I pledge that I will, in accordance with his wishes and with what he envisaged, establish a just government, found a democratic society; and I will do all I can do and should do to abolish the executive presidency and to create a just social system.”

That is the legacy the venerable monk left behind. And it was won not without great peril and sacrifice. Long before Maithripala Sirisena stood up at the New Town Hall on November 21st last year and announced his intention to contest the presidential election, Sobitha Thera had been on the field preparing the ground for the unknown common candidate who would one day assume the role of David to bring down the seemingly invincible Goliath.

With his ears to the ground, his hands on the nation’s pulse and his eyes viewing the unfolding drama of mounting injustice with dismay, Sobitha Thera had discerned the time for change had arrived, that the corrupt, power drunk regime of Rajapaksa must be toppled and the country saved from the binding shackles of a tin pot dictatorship.

At a time when no man or monk would dare step out of line and give echo to the growing disgust the people silently bore for the Rajapaksa regime, Sobitha bravely stepped forth to spearhead his struggle for civil liberties using his National Movement for Just Society as his vehicle. At a time when many looked askance and stayed mute out of fear at rampaging corruption, at the breakdown of law and order, at the devaluation of the courts, at the perpetration of injustice, it was Sobitha Thera who kept the soul of Lanka alive by his almost one man crusade to rage against the dying light of Lanka’s democracy.

Throughout his life he had raised the Lion flag of Sinhala nationalism and fought for the rights of his people. But he was no crude racist. He had reacted with horror to the vicious tactics deployed by the renegade monks of the Bodu Bala Sena against the Muslim minority and condemned their vileness in no uncertain terms.

He was a Buddhist monk to the core but he was no religious bigot. When churches and mosques were attacked, he was the first to speak out of the right of all to follow their faiths unhindered even as the Buddha had exhorted his followers to practice tolerance towards all religions and creeds.

He was a political creature dedicated to serving the people but he did not belong to any political party. Though the country’s leaders canvassed his opinion and sought his advice on many occasions, he did not genuflect to their material offerings or accept political patronage but retained uncompromised his much cherished independence. Thus beholden to none but bound only to the people he served, be they Tamils, Muslims, Catholics, Burgers or Malays, he was ideally placed to rebel against all governments of whatever hue whenever they trespassed upon the weal and welfare of the masses. Thus when he saw the rights and liberties of his countrymen trampled in the dust and their freedoms threatened, he was free to wage a non violent war to arrest the nation’s decline to dictatorship and decadence.

He became the ‘solitary monk on a lonely road with a leaky umbrella’ banging out his gospel of change and though the masses still stayed dumb they were not deaf to his message. With their hopes kindled, they were only waiting for the opportunity to arrive and for the right common candidate to emerge from the wings to effectively demonstrate their outrage over the systematic assault on their freedoms.

With former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Sobitha Thera engaged in top secret hush-hush talks with a core anti Rajapaksa group of senior SLFP leaders. With the conspiratorial team all agreeing on Chandrika’s choice of Maithripala Sirisena as the common candidate, the fate of Mahinda Rajapaksa was sealed. The rest is history.

Maduluwawe Sobitha Thera was born on the 9th of May 1942, the son of Pathirage Don Peiris Appuhamy and Kuruwita Arachchige Karalinahami in Maduluwawe, Padukka. At the age of 11 he entered the Buddha Sasana and was formally ordained as a monk in 1963. He studied at the Vidyalankara Pirivena and in 1965 obtained his BA degree in History from the Sri Jayawardenapura University. Thereafter he taught at a school in Gangodawila and was soon promoted to become its deputy principal.

He burst onto the national stage during the J. R. Jayewardene years during which time he campaigned vigorously against the centralised powers of the executive presidency, the attacks on press freedom and civil liberties. The climax came with the signing of the Indo lanka Accord in 1987 which resulted in the 13th Amendment being passed. He led a massive demonstration against the Accord and on November 1st he was arrested. Though hundreds had gathered to prevent his arrest, Sobitha Thera gave himself up to the police stating, “I am prepared to meet any challenge for the sake of the people’s struggle”. Overnight he became a national figure.

Martyred thus the firebrand monk had earned his spurs; and, having won the respect and trust of the Lankan public for his independent stance and integrity, was placed in the ideal position twenty years later to spearhead the civil movement for social justice to successfully bring down a regime that seemed indestructible. The moral dimension he gave to the joint opposition campaign was indispensable to its ultimate triumph. It was the people’s movement that swayed the masses and brought final victory, not politicians and their parties who wrought regime change.

Last month Samantha Power, US permanent representative to the United Nations, speaking at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit in Mexico City, gave due credit to Lanka’s civil society. Towards the end of her speech she referred to the experience of Lanka and declared, “It shows us the profound costs of impunity and corruption. It shows how a determined and persistent civil society that would not give up can swing the pendulum back toward greater accountability and transparency.”

It was the determination and persistence of Sobitha Thera who refused to give up even when the night seemed darkest, that finally caused the pendulum to swing. He inspired civil society to rise, he gave voice to articulate their concerns, he gave leadership to the civil struggle for liberation and demonstrated that, though the road may be long and arduous, justice triumphs in the end. Mohandas Gandhi had brought down the British Empire with his strict adherence to the Jain and Buddhist code of ahimsa. Sobitha, on a lesser scale, employed the same tenet to bring down a corrupt regime.

And like the Mahatma, when the cup of victory filled to the brim had been proffered to him to sip, the monk Sobitha didn’t linger long to imbibe it to its dregs. He did not wait for curtain calls, claimed no credit, and wanted no kudos for being king remover and king installer. He had achieved his social mission to return society to the path of justice and equality and now that the task was done, he returned to the solitude of his Naga Viharaya in Kotte to tend once more to his temple flock and discharge his duties as a disciple of the Buddha.

The applause had to come from others, however belated. As President Sirisena, in grateful acknowledgement to the role Sobitha Thera had performed to make him president, humbly declared in his eulogy at Sobitha Thera’s funeral on Thursday, “I am here today as the President and Ranil Wickremesinghe heads a coalition government solely due to Sobitha Thera who was the architect of the foundation and the guiding principles which made it all possible.

The Government too did not fail to accord Sobitha a funeral that merited his stature, even though the monk himself had expressly stated his wish to be interred without any fanfare. In a television interview he had stated thus: “Hand over my body to the Akshidana Sangamaya so that they could take any organs necessary and bury the rest. I don’t want hundreds of thousands spent on a casket and funeral paraphernalia nor do I want a plethora of committees appointed to organise my funeral. Why do we need to spend so much money on them? What good will such things bring to me? My body is a ‘mala kuna’ and that’s how it should be treated. I am against all of this unnecessary nonsense”.

But despite this request, no government could have ignored the public demand to honour those worthy of honour. Had the Government abided by the Thera’s wishes, the same forces who condemn now would have turned and accused the Government of according a pauper’s funeral to a monk to whom the nation owed an irreparable debt. And what had been the cold preserve to send off presidents, prime ministers and important political leaders to their sepulchres was opened to honour one who had renounced all the baubles of a materialistic world.

As Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe stated in his condolence message: “This is the first time that a normal civilian is being honoured with funeral services with full State Honours. This is deserved by the late Most Venerable Thera. Even on his death bed he spoke to me about pressing on with the job of establishing the much needed social justice. Alas, he passed away before we could achieve it.”

How reassured Sobitha Thera would have been to hear such words uttered in public by both President Maithripala and Prime Minister Ranil of their determination to ensure that his labours had not been in vain. After the presidential election had been won by Maithripala Sirisena, Sobitha Thera became a detached spectator of the action on the political playing field. He did not seem too happy with what he saw — but neither did he think it proper for him to meddle in lay affairs. He chose to adopt the silence of the wise and gave the new president and new national government time to find their footing on the political quagmire.

But in March the lethargy of the new administration to effectively crackdown on corruption which had been the main election battle cry and its delay in reforming the executive presidency, which would have taxed even the patience of a sage, drove him to break his silence and to declare to the president, “we blew and blew the grate for years, now the griddle’s hot, go burn the rotiya’.

Then again in July, aghast at the President’s decision to grant nomination to the Rajapaksa and his rebels to contest the August general elections, he advised the public who could not afford to emigrate and settle down abroad, to at least apply for visas to hell. He exhorted the people not to cast their ballots for the corrupt, persons with racing interests, bookies, ethanol dealers and owners of taverns and that only suitable persons must be elected to parliament. He would have been grieved not only to find a great number of voters had ignored his call but that the SLFP had even sent to Parliament some undesirables who had lost at the hustings through the national list.

Perhaps that was why he stated at his last television interview on August 28th that he had many miles to go and many promises to keep before he could sleep. And now though his death certificate may state the reason of his death has been the onset of pneumonia following heart surgery, an orphaned nation must wonder whether he instead died of a broken heart. To assuage the nation of its fears and strengthen its belief that the ideals which the late thera strove to see realised in his lifetime are achieved, the present government must, in the words of Ranil Wickremesinghe, ‘breathe life into the words of Sobitha Thera and create a society in which social justice prevails’.

And all those ministers and deputy ministers who attended the Thera’s funeral dutifully clad in their Poya-best, ata-sil white attire in keeping with the funeral dress code, must ensure that they conduct themselves in so scrupulous a manner that their actions do not transgress the unwritten code of conduct expected to be followed by all who hold high office in the vanguard of the Sobitha Thera envisaged ‘Yahapalana’ government.
May the noble Sobitha Thera attain Nirvana.