Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c3.6

c3.6

This book is not primarily intended as a work of scholarship, but is written first of all for the Sinhalese people, as a memorial of a period which at present they are not willing to understand. The ‘educated’ Sinhalese of to-day, after, on the one hand, a century of foreign government, and of education in which the national culture has been completely ignored, and, on the other hand, an equal period of subservient and obsequious imitation of foreign manners, have little reason to be proud of their present achievement in the Art of Living. Evidence of shallow thought is everywhere to be seen in an exaltation of the present age at the expense of the past. It is, however, only in an effort to realise the ideals of this very past, and of the past of India, that there lies the possibility of a true regeneration and revitalising of the national life of the Sinhalese people. This book, then, is written first of all as a contribution to the understanding of this past.