Letters
View(s):As a consequence of good actions merit is accrued and carries over through life and the succeeding births. There are a number of ways in which merit can be achieved. According to The Bodhisattva Sutta of Mahayana fame one can transfer one-seventh of the merit of an act to a loved one who is no more, to minimize the deceased’s misery if there is any, in their new lives. Theravadin does not believe in such proportions.
Some Western scholars of Buddhism, think that the transfer of merit was a Mahayana concept developed lately and that it has nothing to do with Buddhist perceptions of karma theory. However, Anthony Barber, the Buddhist scholar, notes that merit transfer was an integral part of Buddhism practised from Buddha’s times in India. Buddhism teaches that the accumulated merit can be transferred, can be shared with others; it is reversible and the persons who receive it can be either living or dead.
The mode of transfer is simple; the doer has merely to wish that the merit gained is transferred to somebody in particular, or to ‘all beings’, the wish can be mental or expressed by words. According to the Buddha, of all actions, what really matters is thought. Transference is mainly an act of the mind. Tirokuddha Sutta – Khuddakapatha says, there is no use in crying, lamenting, feeling sad and grieving; such approaches are of no effect to the departed ones. Doing some meritorious acts like building orphanages, schools, temples, libraries, hospitals, or distributing religious books and other numerous related charitable deeds are equally profitable as offering alms.
The most popularly practised ritual is inviting the Maha Sangha to the residence of the deceased on the death anniversary, along with relatives, friends and neighbours. A large majority uses carcasses of innocent animals brutally slaughtered for food, in preparation of dishes for the Bhikkhus and participants. Those who offer meat commit a crime by aiding and abetting animal killing. It means no merit can be acquired in the process, instead, the exact opposite happens; and if transferred to the dead, obviously there could be disastrous effects. Therefore the practice of offering animal flesh at alms givings for the purpose of merit transfer should be discontinued forthwith. Buddhists should altogether refrain from offering flesh at alms.
In Dhammapada, Danda Wagga verse 129 says,
“Sabbe bayanti maccu no —Na hanneiya- na ghayate”, ‘Na Ghayate’ means NO CAUSE TO KILL.
There is a long passage in the “Lakavatara sutta”, prohibiting the consumption of flesh, killed or dead. In fact the Buddha predicted in the Sutta that later monks will “hold spurious writing to be authentic Dhamma, and will concoct their own suttas and claim that the Buddha allowed eating carcasses of dead animals.” A passage shows Buddha speaks out very forcefully against eating meat, that it is undesirable and karmically unwholesome, and is unambiguously in favour of vegetarianism. Jivaka Sutta says, meat should not be shared under three situations: when it is seen or heard or suspected that the animal has been butchered for the eater; when it is not seen or heard or alleged, in which meat can be eaten. The meat prepared for eaters do not belong to “Thricotika parisuddha” category: it is a myth created through flawed interpretations by those who are greedy for flesh: if you eat you contribute to the sin; it’s killed for you!
K.K.S. Perera
Via email
Let’s have a true May Day at least from next year!
The forgotten worker. Pic by Kanchana Kumara Ariyadasa
Year in and year out, May Days come and go but they have never been the true May Days they were meant to be – a day for the workers. The politicians hijack this day as their day of showing the strength of their party and the workers are totally eclipsed – leave alone not being commemorated, not even thought of or spoken of. What a shame! Besides this it’s celebrated – if you can call it that – in one or two cites only. What about the rest of the workers in the rest of the country? Don’t they count?
We cannot expect anything better from our politicians for they never see anything beyond the tips of their noses nor do they care if others point it out. But why do the workers sit back and take it? Why not celebrate it as it should be? Do we need the politicians to do so? No.
Therefore, at least for the next year let’s plan to have a truly workers’ day. Let the workers gather in common places with their families, have some kiribath and kavun, have some games and commemorate the best workers in any sense they feel. Each institute can gather or professional groups can gather at different places or each village can gather–no boozing and gambling which are the bane of the workers please.
Or – let’s do away with this notion of May Day altogether instead of giving another thing for politicians to steal from the common man – a day in the workers’ name where they don’t count at all.
We Sri Lankans keep grumbling about these inequities dumped on us by our politicians but hardly anyone comes forward to do something to change the situation.
Will we ever wake up?
Dr. Mareena Thaha Reffai
Dehiwala
The most important man forgotten in the madness that was May Day
A.E. Goonesinha, Father of the Labour Movement in Sri Lanka, who founded the Ceylon Labour Union in 1922 and the Ceylon Labour Party in 1928 and who fought for the labourer and gave him dignity and decency of profession and pride in his work, was totally eclipsed in this year’s May Day madness. A.E. Goonesinha fought for the rights of the workers who were totally subjugated by the British and treated like slaves. He had a social conscience. He agitated for May Day to be made a holiday so that workers could celebrate their freedom and rights as workers. The first May Day celebration in Ceylon was held under him in 1927.
So what happened this year on May 1? Suddenly all the political parties needed the workers to support their hypocritical causes. Workers who are now cast aside, who are not even given their basic rights let alone a decent salary and EPF, who are eternally referred to as ‘Yakkos’ and made to stay ‘Yakkos’ all their life were suddenly in the limelight. There was a lot of screaming and shouting and false promises made as is the name of the game, day in and day out, destroying what little the country has achieved.
Not a single politician referred to how May Day even came about in Sri Lanka. Maybe not a single politician is even aware of the facts since their education is below O’Level standard.
A.E. Goonsinha was responsible not only for the first May Day celebration in 1927 in Sri Lanka but also for the Universal Franchise in 1928 including women’s right to vote. After being the first Sinhalese Mayor of Colombo in 1943 and a Member of Parliament and Minister of State in 1947, he later was Ambassador in Indonesia and Burma. He was invited to join SWRD Bandaranaike’s party to contest the election in 1956 but declined as he did not agree with their policies. Such was the conscience of the man who was a democrat and truly dedicated to the cause of the labourer as he believed the worker is the core of a society that makes a country successful and prosperous. Only then can the country reap profits and all can benefit.
They say people deserve the government they get. So be it if this situation carries on.
J.K. Ekanayake
Colombo 7
Dengue epidemic: Back to basics needed to prevent the spread
I was alarmed to hear that in the first four months of this year over 39,000 dengue patients have been hospitalised. There may be thousands more who were treated by General Practitioners. This number is usually what we have in a year and not four months! Colombo city itself has a 100% increase with over 2000 patients.
It is pertinent to look into the causes of this massive outbreak. In the 1990s dengue fever was mainly in Colombo city and the suburbs. Colombo city had around 300 during the whole year. Last year this number was ten times higher. Even in the country the numbers rose to around 40,000. But this year in four months it has reached that number.
So from Colombo, dengue spread along the rail roads, bus routes and made pockets of dengue outbreaks where the roads or tracks ended. If one goes back and studies what happened since 1990s one will find that new pockets were created in Matara, Puttalam, Kurunegala, Kandy etc. Most of the outbreaks were the result of people travelling from those areas taking the disease back into their home towns.
It was not only patients with dengue fever who took the disease to the periphery but also the Aedes (dengue) mosquito who travelled in the railway carriages or buses. The train carriages were virtually parked in overgrown areas between Maradana and Fort. When these areas developed between 2010-2014, undergrowth was cleared although we had a running battle earlier with the CTB and railway authorities trying to get the land areas bordering the St Sebastian canal cleared. The railway passengers themselves contributed to the spread of dengue as when the trains were reaching the stations they were in the habit of throwing out the waste which included yoghurt cups, plastic bottles, shopping bags etc which disappeared in the tall grass which lined the railway track. So once they collected rain water and the grass gave enough shade and due to that the water never fully evaporated as sunlight never reached them; dengue mosquitoes laid their eggs safely.
The other main culprits were large land parcels owned by public institutions and private residences especially in Colombo 7 where the garden spaces were never ecologically managed. So were the schools and hospitals. To make things worse patients in the outstations ended up in Colombo making it a hospital city until the adults were sent to Angoda for specialized care. Still, the Lady Ridgeway hospital takes care of the serious child patients. There are many other private hospitals in the city which are also creating a hazard when it comes to dengue epidemics.
Dengue control and prevention is a duty of the local authority. The Public Health Department of the Colombo Municipal Council has a cadre of 1200: it should have around 55 Public Health Inspectors, 150 Midwives, 185 Health instructors, 55 Mosquito control Field Assistants who could have been used to inspect all the premises and land parcels in the city which number around 80,000. Unfortunately, instead of these 450 Field Officers we had only around 180 to do this work. Unfortunately all my requests to fill the vacancies fell on deaf ears at the CMC and also the Provincial Council. We still managed to use volunteers to join and allocated areas to each officer who was responsible for inspections and prevention of the spread of dengue in the area allocated to him. To supplement this work and to overcome the shortage of workers we purchased Ultra Low Volume (ULV) machines, fogging machines, spraying cans and used chemicals such as BTI, deltamethrin to spray against mosquito breeding or to get rid of adult mosquitoes. We sprayed the gabion walls which lined the canal system in Colombo with BTi. These mosquito control programmes started at 5 a.m. daily and ended around 7 p.m. It was done according to a plan and covered the whole city operating from six administrative areas and centrally.
We conducted the Green star house to house inspection programme which was an innovative idea at that time winning an international award and also written and published as a ‘Best Practice’ by UNCHS and WHO.
Unfortunately, all these programmes have been stopped due to some unknown reason. Only the interiors of houses are sprayed when 95 % of the breeding takes place outside the four walls. The PHI in the suburbs also have copied Colombo’s above idea and this may be one reason why we have so many dengue mosquitoes and patients today. Even the inspections have been done only when Mosquito control weeks have been announced by the Ministry of Health. Police and service personnel have been deployed to help but it is not an efficient way of handling the situation.
So what should we do now?
1) We must have dedicated staff
(2 officers with at least 2 volunteers) say for around 50-75 premises in a street who will meet the residents, create awareness and check these same premises and lands throughout the year. They will know exactly where to look for mosquito breeding in their allocated area as it is difficult to find the larvae which could breed in one teaspoon full of water. “Detect & Destroy” should be their motto. This is far better than sending officers to unknown terrain to look for breeding spots which will be fruitless.
2) All vacancies for PHI, Midwives, Health Instructors and Field assistants should be filled immediately. There are enough A/L qualified youth who could fill these vacancies easily. This will enhance the capacity of the dengue control team. There may be vacancies for Solid Waste Management Overseers in The Municipal Engineer’s Department who also could be co-opted for this work as waste is one of the main contributors for dengue mosquito breeding.
3) The chemical/BTI spraying programmes should be re-started. The internal spraying should be stopped as that strategy is used in Malaria control where the mosquitoes rest inside the houses. This internal spraying will cause more harm than good as the residents will be breathing the chemicals and that could create respiratory diseases and also the food could be contaminated.
4) The shramadana programmes of yesteryear should be re started as soon as the waste dumping issue is settled in the country. This is very important in slum and shanty areas in the city where 60% of the city’s population live.
5) All yards and bus stands where public transport vehicles are parked should be fumigated and kept clear of mosquito breeding places.
If we do these above mentioned things and keep the city clean I am sure we can prevent the spread of dengue from Colombo to other parts of the country. One must not forget that most of the permanent residents of Colombo by now would have been victims of dengue even without their knowledge as dengue fever can pass off as an ordinary fever. A study done in Wanathamulla a few years ago showed that 95% of the children under 5 years of age had dengue antibodies in their blood showing that they had already contracted dengue. This means they had immunity against the dengue virus circulating at that time. But in the distant and virgin areas and towns the people would not have come into contact with the dengue virus the disease yet and they are prone to going down with the disease easily.
The Ministries of Health, Housing, Urban Development & Transport, Western Provincial Council and the Colombo Municipal Council should get together to implement the above programme.
Dr. Pradeep Kariyawasam
Former Chief Medical Officer of Health, Colombo.
New Zealand, where even rivers have human rights!
This is no fiction. The New Zealand Legislature passed Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act No. 7 of 2017 which came into operation on receiving the Royal Assent as recently as March 20, 2017. Section 14 of the Act declares ‘Te Awa Tupa is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities as a legal person.”
The Whanganui river is 180 miles long and some tribes of the Maori people who are the original settlers of New Zealand, contend that their rights are intrinsically interwoven with the rights of the river. They even think that the river is their ancestor. Section 12 of the Act defines Te Awa Tupua as “ an indivisible and living whole, comprising the Whanganui river from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements”.
The Act of Parliament is a sequel to a long drawn-out litigation and contentious issues which arose in several Royal Commissions of Inquiry between the Crown and the Maoris, at least from 1938.
The Act makes provision for the appointment of two guardians, one from the Crown and one from the Maori Groups for the effective implementataion of the provisions of the Act (Section 20).
If a river has human rights, it would naturaly have copyrights too. One would wonder if such a law was applicable in Austria, the Danube…er…should I call Mr. Danube would have successfully sued Johann Strauss for aping the melodious music springing from the running waters..!
Justice Ranjit Dheeraratne
Kalutara
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