"Spirituality"

"In our village life we never saw a separate spirituality from our day to day life. Our physical labour is beautifully connected to the spirituality. Our farmers never considered insects & others living beings that live on the Earth as enemies & neither were they separated from them. Before embarking on their work in the paddy field they performed a pooja."


(December, 04, Paris, France, Sri Lanka Guardian) Curiously most of our Asian languages do not have a word to denote “spirituality”! When the present writer started translating French & English texts into his mother language, finding that there is no synonym for “spirituality,” in Sinhalese he wondered whether his mother language was so poor. At the same time he thought of the history & richness of it & understood that it is not a shortcoming of his language.

Finally he could comprehend the sociological cause for the absence of a word for “spirituality.” In most of the eastern languages there is no synonym for “spirituality,” because in the oriental society there was no dichotomy between Secularity & Spirituality. These two poles in the East became one. The present writer heard from a Lama that there is no synonym for this word in Tibetan language either. Neither in Sanskrit nor in Pali have we found a similar word. Then we can understand that it is not a paucity of these languages.

In the oriental society people did not separate things as they did in the West. We know that in Cartesian philosophy every thing is separated. Every thing is dichotomized.

“Cogito, ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). By postulating this, René Descartes established a separated Thinker in the body. He did not see the Inter-existence & interconnectedness of the Universe.

I would like to take you to the Chapter on Religion of the famous masterpiece of Khalil Gibran: The Prophet:

-And an old priest said, "Speak to us of Religion."
And he said:

Have I spoken this day of aught else?

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection?

Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?"

All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.”

In our village life we never saw a separate spirituality from our day to day life. Our physical labour is beautifully connected to the spirituality. Our farmers never considered insects & others living beings that live on the Earth as enemies & neither were they separated from them. Before embarking on their work in the paddy field they performed a pooja. With the “modern scientific knowledge” every thing became an enemy to defeat! We tried in vain to defeat & conquer our mother Earth. Our Scientists were boasting of their conquering Nature. Today we witness the adverse results of this folly.
Nature turns against us!

Therefore we should learn how to UNLEARN what we were being taught for a long period of time now. To Unlearn is not easy because our Ego does not allow us to do this. We are conditioned by our formal education based on dichotomy.

Our ancestors respected, venerated mother Earth, They never considered that the Earth & they are separated. They knew that both were inseparable. They were not greedy to grab what ever our Mother Earth offers us so generously. But with modern science Human beings began to violate our mother. The greediness of man knows no limitation. A forest equal to the whole surface of Switzerland is vanishing from the Earth per day! The Sahara spreads to bordering countries in search of water! Amazon rain forests begin to die by dryness.

The Buddha taught us to transform our THRISHNA, craving into generosity. We have to embark on this transformation process so that our children will be able survive a catastrophe!

Let us not separate spirituality from our daily life!

(Bhikkhu Mandawala Pannawansa Thero is well known Buddhist monk born in Sri Lanka, currently lives in France. Contact Email- pannawansa@aol.com)