Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c7.47

c7.47

No man was independent of another. Take the case of a nindagama; the villagers held lands of the proprietor for their own use, on condition of cultivating the mutteṭṭuva, or proprietor's special field; for this, one tenant, in respect of his paṅguva or share, had to supply cattle for ploughing and threshing, or perhaps one gave cattle for ploughing and another for threshing; there might be others to attend to the irrigation; others for ploughing, sowing and watching; others for threshing-floor service; and others for storing the crop; and so in every case, there was a remarkable inter-relation of parts of the social organism. The Sinhalese are now supposed to be incapable of concerted action and unfitted for self-government; and perhaps the ‘educated’ (which usually means denationalised) classes are so; but it may well be doubted whether the men who were capable of working together successfully so complex an arrangement, and indeed, ordering all the details of their cultivation by mutual arrangement, and who have possessed their Parish Councils from a time antedating the witanagemots of England, are not as capable of self-government as are a people whose Parish Councils are but a thing of yesterday and who seem to have lost the sense of communal interests and capacity for concerted action in small matters. The capacity has now been half destroyed, with the destruction of the society through which it was expressed; but surely it is there still. Observe how remarkably the different parts of the social organism were fitted and dovetailed together; there was a place for every man, and no man could be spared; class distinctions were not invidious, nor emphasized by difference of culture. “Their ordinary Plowmen and Husbandmen do speak elegantly, and are full of complement. And there is no difference between the ability and speech of a Country-man and a Courtier.” A Sinhalese proverb runs, ‘Take a Ploughman from the Plough and wash off his dirt, and he is fit to rule a kingdom.’ “This was spoken,” says Knox, “of the People of Cande Uda . . . because of the Civility, Understanding and Gravity of the poorest men among them.” This, in the words of Okakura,[*] is the “spiritual feudalism whereby caste makes a peasant in all his poverty one of the aristocrats of humanity.” Honour, pride, *noblesse oblige*, are of the caste idea. But Buddha saw all men as one and proclaimed the equality and brotherhood of all. Christ's position in the West was similar. In neither place has the teaching been accepted. The Western forms of caste are less rigid but more sordid than the Eastern; that is all that can be said.