Sunday Times 2
Oxford publishes Amunugama’s ‘The Lions Roar’
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Oxford University Press has published Sarath Amunugama’s award-winning book — The Lions Roar. It is subtitled ‘Anagarika Dharmapala and the making of modern Buddhism’. The book will be released to the market at the beginning of next month.
Professor Gananath Obeyesekere has this to say about this work: “One witnesses the other side of Sarath Amunugama’s public persona expressed in this remarkable book on Anagarika Dharmapala. It is a detailed examination of Dharmapala’s complex personal and public life and the ethos in which he lived and worked. Amunugama employs little known material on the Dharmapala corpus and I for one have learnt much from reading this book and so I am sure will the larger scholarly community in South Asia and those interested in Buddhist studies everywhere.”
Prof. H.L. Seneviratne of the University of Virginia says: “In this engaging study of Anagarika Dharmapala, Amunugama uses a rich variety of sources, most importantly Dharmapala’s Diaries, to paint a novel portrait of the indefatigable reformer. The book narrates the many facets of the mission of this influential Buddhist crusader as expressed in his zealous effort to reform Buddhism in his native land, to propagate it in the world, especially in the western world, and above all, to gain Buddhist control of Buddha Gaya, the most sacred of the Buddhist sites.”
This book was first published by Vijitha Yapa Publications and won the State Literature Award in 2017.