A Gift of Dharma for 11.9.09
by Danny Fisher
Today’s quote comes to us from Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, Sri Lanka’s “Little Gandhi” and the founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement.
Dr. Ariyaratne founded Sarvodaya in 1958, inspired in equal measure by the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka and the Gandhian ethic. Today, it is the largest N.G.O. in Sri Lanka. A grassroots movement dedicated to the “sustainable empowerment” of rural Sri Lankans “through self-help and collective support, to non-violence and peace,” Sarvodaya’s 1,500 person staff benefits 15,000 villages in 34 districts throughout Sri Lanka. Their website states: “It is not as much what we do to alleviate rural poverty but the way in which we do it which makes us so effective and sustainable–through the active participation and engagement of the villagers themselves.”
Sarvodaya has also been instrumental in responding to national disasters in Sri Lanka, such as the tsunami that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Though he is perhaps less well-known in the United States than fellow socially engaged Buddhists Thich Nhat Hanh and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Dr. Ariyaratne is every bit as celebrated and revered by practitioners (and others) the world over. Among the various honors he has received for his many years of service are the Niwano Peace Prize, the Gandhi Peace Prize, and the King Beaudoin Award. In 2005, he was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I first learned about Sarvodaya and Dr. Ariyaratne through editors Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King’s book Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (State University of New York Press, 1996), which I read as an undergraduate. In a chapter of the book entitled “A.T. Ariyaratne and the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement,” George D. Bond rightly singles out Dr. Ariyaratne and Sarvodaya’s work as mold-breaking, writing: “Sarvodaya…went farther than other groups in the [nineteeth and twentieth century Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka] in arguing that Buddhist liberation involves not only individuals but also society. The Dhamma entails dual liberation; there is a necessary and dependent relation between the freedom of the individual and the freedom of society. Neither the classical Theravāda monastic interpreters nor the other reformers stressed as clearly as Sarvodaya the implications of the Dhamma for social change. Sarvodaya affirmed the world by arguing that the path to individual liberation ran through social liberation.”
As you can tell from the photograph above, I was very, very fortunate to meet Dr. Ariyaratne a couple of years ago when he visited UWest. You can read about that visit in this post.
Here’s the quote–part of something Dr. Ariyaratne said to George Bond about the “dual liberation” notion mentioned above (and found on pg. 128).
To change society we must purify ourselves, and the purification process we need is brought about by working in society.
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