• When Buddhism’s essence battles its own shrine

I did not attend the recent Dalada exposition, but I passed through Kandy during those days and witnessed the long lines – thousands of pilgrims, most of them elderly, queued in fervent anticipation to glimpse what we are historically conditioned to believe are the Buddha’s relics. 

The sight left me hollowed. There they stood, not with mindfulness, but with longing; not with inquiry, but with inherited obedience. I felt an anguish no words could soothe; not at their faith, but at their unwitting bondage to the very customs the Buddha sought to dismantle. 

How tragic that what was once a luminous revolt against metaphysical speculation and priestly dominance has been embalmed in the very structures it defied. I found myself haunted by questions.

How has Buddhism – a philosophy of awakening, of radical psychological introspection – become a theatre of incense, gilded statuary, and ritualistic repetition? How did a path that dismissed metaphysical idolisation and decried the illusion of self become mired in the veneration of symbols and relics? 

Is the worship of statues, the offering of flowers, and the chanting of verses truly the Dhamma that the Buddha walked barefoot for, renounced kingdoms for, and risked his life to proclaim? Or are these merely echoes of something long since lost – a simulacrum of emancipation, reengineered through the cunning of syncretic revivalism, diluted by centuries of devotional inertia, and now marketed to the masses as consumable piety?

Brahmanical historical revisionism 

Ven. Walpola Rahula Thera, perhaps the most unflinching Theravāda scholar of the 20th century, castigated the descent of Buddhism into what he termed “pseudo-religious behaviour”. In his canonical work ‘What the Buddha Taught,’ he wrote: “The Buddha was not a god, nor did he ever make the slightest claim to divinity. The worship of Buddha images, the offering of flowers, lighting of candles, and the chanting of hymns are not Buddhist practices taught by the Buddha.” 

These acts were later accretions – symbols of devotional mimicry imported through the strategic infiltration of revitalised Hinduism. Their presence is not innocent but ideologically insidious.

The genius of Adi Shankara, the eighth century Hindu philosopher-savant, lay not merely in his metaphysical synthesis of Vedanta but in his subtle and deliberate reappropriation of Buddhism’s corpse. As Buddhism waned in the Indian subcontinent, Shankara executed what might rightly be called a cultural annexation. 

By integrating Buddhist terminology into Advaita Vedanta – Māyā, Anātman, Nirvāṇa – he obscured Buddhist ontology while reasserting the primacy of the Brahmanical order. “Brahman is real, the world is illusory; the individual self is none other than Brahman,” Shankara wrote, inverting the Buddha’s radical rejection of both eternalism and annihilationism. And in doing so, he restored the supremacy of caste, ritual, and hierarchy – all of which the Buddha had sought to dissolve.

Rahula Thera did not mince words about this historical revisionism. In lectures and essays, he observed how Buddhism’s monastic codes and egalitarian ethos were slowly replaced by Brahmanical ceremonialism. 

He thundered: “The Buddha did not set up a religion in the conventional sense. He did not create dogmas to be believed in, nor rituals to be performed... He gave us a way of life, a path to liberation through understanding.” That path, the Noble Eightfold Path, begins not with belief but with sammā diṭṭhi – right view, which requires a precise cognitive understanding of impermanence, suffering, and non-self, rather than faith in symbols or relics.

A carnival of distraction

The Buddha’s greatest psychological discovery, in my view, born a Buddhist though not rigorously practising, was not karma or rebirth, but the recognition of the root of thought itself – its arising from phassa (contact), its dependence on saññā (perception), and the way the mind constructs a false continuity of self. 

The Abhidhamma offers an intricate neuropsychological map of mental events, delineating the momentary flashes of consciousness (cittas) and their conditioning factors. It is, arguably, the most empirically daring philosophical psychology prior to modern neuroscience. Thought, in this schema, is not the expression of a self, but a conditioned phenomenon arising and passing away with astounding rapidity. 

As Rahula Thera wrote: “The idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems.”

Yet what do we now find in the majority of Buddhist temples? Not the meticulous investigation of consciousness, but a carnival of distraction. The very institutions that claim to preserve the Dhamma have become impediments to it. Political alliances, ethnic chauvinism, clerical sex scandals, commercial exploitation, and gender exclusion have overtaken spiritual enquiry. 

Monks, far from renunciants, often appear as businessmen, politicians, and cultural arbiters. Temples are expanded not for meditation halls but for car parks and wedding functions. The sangha, once a bastion of meditative discipline, is riddled with economic ambition and ideological factionalism.

Rahula Thera warned of this decline decades ago: “It is not enough to go to a temple and offer flowers, light a lamp, and recite some verses. That may be good and beautiful, but it is not the way to attain Nirvana. One must understand, one must act, one must meditate.” These words fall like a sword against the sentimental pieties that dominate contemporary Buddhist discourse.

And what of gender? The systematic exclusion of women from full ordination in many Theravāda traditions is not a reflection of the Dhamma but of cultural patriarchy. The Buddha, under pressure, did allow for the bhikkhunī sangha, and the canonical texts confirm that women are equally capable of attaining Arahatta. Yet today, senior monks and laymen alike invoke dubious Vinaya precedents to prevent women from full participation – proof not of orthodoxy but of insecurity.

Consumer capitalism has not bypassed the Dhamma; it has digested it. Meditation, once the radical deconstruction of the mind’s illusions, is now commodified as stress relief for executives. Buddhist retreats are marketed as luxury escapes. Statues of the Buddha are sold en masse, not to inspire but to decorate. 

One cannot help but recall the acerbic critique of Chögyam Trungpa, who warned of “spiritual materialism” – the appropriation of profound teachings for ego enhancement. What was once a flame of awakening is now a branded lifestyle choice. 

The need for a radical rupture

Moreover, Rahula Thera’s insistence on critical thought as the foundation of Dhamma practice stands in stark contrast to the anti-intellectualism prevalent in many Buddhist circles today. “It is always a question of knowing and seeing, and not that of believing and being blind,” he reminded us. 

But where in today’s Buddhist landscape is that critical inquiry fostered? Where are the suttas studied rigorously, the Vinaya upheld with integrity, the meditation practices engaged in with courage rather than comfort-seeking?

Many young men now enter the monastic order not from a yearning for truth, but to escape economic despair – monasticism becoming less a renunciation than a strategy for social capital, financial safety, or political clout. The robe conceals not emancipation but collapse. The Buddhist temple today demands not cosmetic reform or nostalgic sentiment but radical rupture. 

The Dhamma must be exhumed from beneath ritualistic decay, caste-guarding hierarchies, nationalistic theatre, and monastic capitalism. This task requires confronting even the most sacrosanct idols – literal and institutional – daring to speak uncomfortable truths to saffron-robed authority.

Tradition, when emptied of wisdom, becomes tyranny draped in nostalgia. Ritual, when divorced from insight, becomes theatre for the spiritually anaemic. If Buddhism is to survive with any dignity, it must be burned down to its essential truths. 

As Rahula Thera so boldly reminded us: “Religion is not for comfort, but for awakening.” If we refuse this call, then let us admit it: what we practise today is not the Buddha’s path to awakening, but a gilded mausoleum housing its forgotten corpse.

(The writer is a Senior Manager at the Sri Lanka Ports Authority [SLPA]. The views expressed are personal)