What makes Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan...
Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast
Claim This Podcastby David Swarbrick & Nestor de Silva @ The Ceylon Press
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110 episodes
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What makes Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan...
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
3/11/2025
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Recent Episodes
June 4, 2026
Sri Lanka’s Founding Vijayan Kings Part 2 | Dancing on Knives
<p>How did Sri Lanka, barely 7 decades old, survive the death of its founding father, Vijaya, and its first recorded civil war, which erupted over the death of Vijaya’s nephew? </p>
May 26, 2026
Losing One's Head: The Jungle Diaries, Sri Lanka. A Ceylon Press Off-Grid Memoir
<p>I was besottedly watching a gluttonous troupe of toque macaque monkeys lay waste to the mangos when a passing guest, a very down to earth birdwatcher from West Hampstead, told me he had lost his head. </p><p>As he then went on to enumerate the names of several species, he had been able to photograph just that morning from beyond the pool, I realized he was rather pleased with this loss of his head. For him, it was a good thing, a very good thing indeed - an expression of extreme happiness.</p><p>I was relieved., This is after all a hotel I am running here, and happy guests are much to be preferred to decapitated ones</p><p>Would, however, that his expression of happiness was one I could so easily have adopted just then - for at the time my head had also been lost, but in no good way at all – and all thanks to the byzantine dealings with one of the country’s main governmental financial institutions.</p><p>This particular state department lives to its utmost, Hamlet’s frustrating refrain: To be or not to be. Famous throughout the island for its ability to befuddle, confuse and delay the simplest of transactions, the institution’s mastery of procrastination would have given even the great Leonardo da Vinci a run for his money as he laboured for 15 years over the Mona Lisa. </p><p>I can see this modest debate running for years and years until death or some great act of meritorious goodness moves the players on.</p><p>But waking up as I did this morning to my jungle valley teaming with early-start birds and monkeys and an unexpected pair of Grey Hornbills, and watching the light slowly shift across the hills turning them from dark green to yellow green, I felt every bit the equal of this wearisome struggle. </p><p>Inspired by the casual observations of my Hamstead guest, I’m more positively distracted by the unexpected positives involved in head loss.</p><p>As a form of death, it is of course, spectacularly graphic, and final. More than a mere killing, it is a ritual or even a passage – for by removing a head, with all its attendant and deeply personal indicators of identity, it marks the complete destruction of an individual’s personality and distinctiveness. </p><p>It is – almost - an (albeit shocking) physical embodiment of anatta. </p><p>On the long and challenging road to purification, as embodied by the Theravada Buddhists who dominate the island, anatta is one of seven stages in the spiritual journey, the last of which, the purification by knowledge and vision leads immediately (and with no little sense of relief) to Nirvana or enlightenment itself, and a final breaking of the endless painful cycle of rebirth. Or in my case, no more vacillating emails from the directors of this state institution.</p><p>The anatta stage comes more of less bang in the middle of the seven stages. To get to it you have to get through sila – the purification of virtue by bring moral discipline into your life; and citta, which purifies the mind through mediation. </p><p>As a lapsed Anglian Methodist, moral discipline is something I have been struggling to get the better of all life long. Mediation, however, is much easier and I sink into it happily most days surrounded by my five meditating schnauzers.</p><p>It’s the next stage – stage three - that is proving most difficult. For in stage three – ditti - you have to disaggregate the five things – known collectively as the skandhas - that make you who you are – your body, feelings, perceptions, consciousness and mental thoughts. </p><p>Assuming you have done all this correctly, you get to achieve anatta or non-self. You have eliminated the fixed and illusionary permeant features of your personhood. You are free from suffering. From cravings. From any need to cling to things. What bliss that will be.</p><p>Nagasena, a Buddhist sage who lived in nearby India around 150 BCE, equated the process to taking a chariot apart. Or, in the case of me and this bothersome government institution, taking it apart again and again and again. The chariot, Nagasena explained to an enquiring Greek king, Menander, has no independent nature of its own. Once you have removed its axles, wheels, and reins, the chariot simply vanishes. So too does the soul – once you have removed those the five things that make you who you are.</p><p>You might – if pressed - say that removing your head achieves much the same sort of thing. I am not sure that either I or the eminent officers of the financial institution that is busy sending me contradictory emails is very far along the journey to anatta. Wer still have quite a way to go.</p><p>Every time we seem to get to closure another bit of the symbolic chariot is discovered or rediscovered and the process defaults back to Stage One.</p><p>Yet decapitation has form in Sri Lankan history and almost every Sri Lankan, officers of the state or not, will know of the story of, an early king who ruled Anuradhapura from 247 to 249 CE - Siri Sangha Bodhi.</p><p>Sri Lanka’s famous Mahavaṃsa Chroncile, an epic poem written in the 5th or 6th centuries CE and covering its history since 543 BCE, took this particular king to heart, despite his criminal role in a conspiracy to murder an earlier king.</p><p>He was, the ancient chronicler noted, “a righteous hero” who’s heart was “much shaken with pity”. Not just pity it seems, but extraordinary self-sacrifice too. For this king, in an act of anatomical wonder, severed his own head from his body in order to allow a beggar to collect the reward offered for his death.</p><p>Legend though it might be, this extreme expression of self-effacement underlines the humility that so marks out much of any study of Sri Lankan’s kings. </p><p>Though probably no better or worse than their royal counterparts anywhere else in the world, Sri Lanka’s kings were, by virtue of being Buddhist, unusually preoccupied with the importance of doing – however late in the day – acts of meretricious goodness. A good record in this department did not of itself lead to Niviana - but it was said to help ensure a favourable rebirth in the next cycle. It might help you avoid reappearing in the realm of animals, the realm of Hungry Ghosts or worst of all, the Realm of Naraka –hell itself.</p><p>Siri Sangha Bodhi’s death, and that of his wife - who died of shock on discovering the body - so tormented Gothabhaya, the king who had placed the bounty on his head, that the repentant monarch fastened a skull made of gold to his dead predecessor prior to an extravagant cremation ceremony.</p><p>No archaeological evidence has yet been uncovered to validate the story through numerous temples across Sri Lanka tell the tale in wall frescos and statues – mostly notably in the temple at Attanagalla some 45 miles from me here at The Flame Tree Estate where a stunning set of paintings by H Medis Silva decorates every inch of the inner temple.</p><p>Collectively the frescos are wonderful depiction of a story that has, despite its dreadful beginnings, the happiest of endings for Siri Sangha Bodhi was destined to move immediately to Nirvana and Buddhahood following his self-decapitation. Non self has got him to where he most wanted to be. </p><p>Non-self is a personal goal I chase and cherish when dealing with most government departments, not just the one that has come to mind today – and with the Bank of Ceylon – and even, come to think of it, the kamikaze drivers of Sri Lanka’ s big red busses. </p><p>“Practice humility and patience,” advised Vincent de Paul, a catholic saint who had escaped slavery. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, put the process more directly: "Humility,” she advised, “is attentive patience." Taking in how measured and beautiful are the wild parts of this island, spaces that stetch about ...</p>
May 24, 2026
On Being Absolutely Still: The Jungle Diaries, Sri Lanka. A Ceylon Press Off-Grid Memoir
<p>On Being Absolutely Still</p><p>A bird is calling.</p><p>The sun has just started to light the more distant taller hills, but the ones nearest me remain in a deep blue shade as it is still barely 6 am – bang in the very middle of The Blessed Time, that moment from say 5 to 6.30 am - the golden 90 minutes, before the signs of any other humans really emerge. Just me, 5 dogs and the Sri Lankan jungle.</p><p>I mean to eke it out in spirit at least until as late as possible. Key to this is staying in my pyjamas until midday, and only then breaking my fast. By then, Dissanayake will have prepared his magical sugar-coated crocodile buns, shaped like croissants, infused with cinnamon, a treasure to unfurl.</p><p>But that's all still to come. For right now, it's awfully hard to move at all, lest I miss something, sitting here, looking out over these waves of green hills and valleys, like a guardsman who has woken up having misspent the night sleeping above the defensive entrance gates of some remote and tiny city. </p><p>From here, from this balcony beyond my bedroom doors, you get a sense of the first hills of Sri Lanka as you approach it from the north.</p><p>And I love that sense of all that lies beyond. The whole of what is called the Rajarata stretches out – reaches from my bedroom - all the way to Jaffna with the occasional interruption of a rocky outcrop like Sigiriya or, further to the east, the Knuckles. </p><p>But that aside, the Rajarata’s huge, great, broad, flat, low coconut-dotted plain goes all the way from the bottom of these hills right up to the beaches of Jaffna, Manar, Delft Island, to Negombo on the west, to Trincomalee on the east. For this is an island you can touch from side to side, top to bottom, just within your head.</p><p>You get a sense of all that from right here, sitting on this particular hill, a watcher, watching. And now, at least, in some small part, a watcher equipped with a few facts and a rudimentary map of history.</p><p>It's no longer just nameless, unknown, unrelatable hills and valleys that stretch out beyond me here. I know the names of the trees that cover them. I know what they do at different times of the year. I know what's been planted recently and what is much older.</p><p>I know whether a house deep in the valley is new or merely enlarged. I know when the temple will broadcast its mournful Poya prayers. When the Imman will sing. When the bread van goes past on invisible jungle roads, playing a piece of Beethoven to tell its customers it's time to buy a loaf.</p><p>. And I know too where I sit in relation to where everyone else on this island is, the towns, the capital, the many old, discarded capitals, the forts. I sit on the ramparts of the hill country watching. Most of all, I know how little I know.</p><p>Which makes it all the more comforting to merely watch those lucky wild beasts that have no mind but now. The many Toque Macaque monkeys feasting on young jak just beyond my window. A pair of iridescent blue kingfishers combing the adjacent amphitheatre. And out into the deeper jungle below, flocks of parrots, mostly plum-headed or emerald collared ones that like to bait the eagles.</p><p>I remember Beata reading a book in Oxford called I am no one doing nothing, a somewhat Buddhist tome about just being. That title's stuck with me. And, when I think of it now, as I sit here, the light slowly beginning to light up newer sections of the hills and valleys in front of me, I see what Emily Dickinson meant – “I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd banish us – you know!"</p><p>Trying to be nobody is much harder than trying to be someone, like moving imperceptibly across an abyss; the slower you go, the more you see.</p><p>Given all that has come before, this challenge of just being is addictive. I was so busy all the way through my twenties, my thirties and forties, rushing around, going to films and restaurants and holidays and buying stuff, and having dinner parties and opinions, talking and talking and working.</p><p>Yet life is really what you best hear when you're absolutely still. </p><p>It’s the hardest of all skills, one that eluded my busy mother, even as she lay dying, over 3 long years, making lists in her head – of her favourite curries, or golf courses, recounting the jackals at Tollygunge, the different dishes that made up rice feats in downtown Jakarta or the little stations on the way to Ooty.</p><p>Each was an invitation to relive the experience, to stay busy despite being paralysed – but even then, I thought, there ought to be more to life than just living – or reliving. Some tick or method for putting all that activity into perspective and fathom what it was all for and why. And even whether any of it did any good to anyone else.</p><p>I envy the pious with their apparently strong beliefs, balancing religious devotion with family or civic duty and levelling the whole formula with the Gifts of the Spirit – though it seems something of a blasphemy to ever believe anyone can ever define a god, still less what a god might want or order.</p><p>Which leaves just faith, unrooted now in these most secular of times, scrambling to establish itself on something other than the obsessions of our times – perhaps for me here on these jungle hills and the slow arranging day.<br></p>
110 total episodes available
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