The way to Koslanda
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The way to Koslanda
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The marketing of what is being sold as traditional knowledge and culture is creating a dilution of the sacred truths that formed the basis of civilization. The great scholar Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy writing in The Dance of Shiva, Fourteen Indian Essays in 1924 stated:
"Each race contributes something essential to the world's civilization in the course of its own self-expression and self-realization. The character built up in solving its own problems, in the experience of its own misfortunes, is itself a gift which each offers to the world. The essential contribution of India, then, is simply her Indianess; her great humiliation would be to substitute for this own character (sva-bhava) a cosmopolitan veneer, for then indeed she must come before the world empty-handed".
What applies to India applies equally to Sri Lanka, to Peru, Tibet, Europe – to every nation that is in its own way unique. The essential contribution of Sri Lanka is then, simply, her Sri Lanka-ness. We have so little left of the unique culture that sets us apart, that we, at Living Heritage, have devoted our time and resources to creating oases that cast a "magic bubble" over sacred regions and sacred ways of life both to preserve them and to make them accessible to those who have the heart to understand them and the spirit to seek them out. Within these oases we will teach and perpetuate the traditions that make us unique and give them to our students as tools with which to both build for the future and protect their past.
Development policies in Sri Lanka, as in most parts of the so-called developing world, assume it necessary to 'integrate' and 'assimilate' traditional people into the cultural mainstream of an industrializing society. Planning documents describe traditional beliefs and customs as "backward" and "worn-out", obstructing modernization and economic progress. The Living Heritage project at Koslanda is aimed at changing the prevailing view by celebrating traditional culture, through showing indigenous and village youth the value of their background and way of life. Pride in our heritage is something that both rural and urban youth in Sri Lanka dramatically lacks. In the blind desire to become more "westernized", the essential "Sri Lanka-ness" that makes us unique is being dissolved in the global melting pot.
