Jeune Street

Robert Kaplan often writes about war, and his articles tend to focus on geopolitics and military — bordering on their glorification. For those reasons I usually find them difficult to stomach. But his recent piece on Kandy, Sri Lanka, is brilliant. Kandy is the spiritual heart of Sri Lankan Buddhism and it is an achingly beautiful city that has been peaceful amidst the tragic civil war. The painful irony, of course, is that its spiritual significance has been a touchstone for violence. The civil war has pitted the minority Hindu Tamils against the majority Buddhist Sinhalese.

Sri Lanka is in general a less panicky, less frantic, less intrusive version of India. Only rarely are you hassled. And Kandy, up in the hills, away from the crowded coastal highway, is a concentrated version of the country’s charms.

Alas, when you fall in love with a place, you encounter its history, which is often tragic. In fact, Kandy has remained seedily quaint, its monuments and ambience unravaged by mass tourism, only because Sri Lanka has experienced more than a quarter century of civil war between ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists and Hindu Tamils. And the origins and conduct of that savage conflict have drawn, in many ways, from the same emotional wellsprings as the tradition of worship at Kandy’s tranquil Buddhist shrines.

I was in Kandy three years ago, during a brief ceasefire (which broke down while I was there). Like Kaplan, I found it difficult to fully understand that I was visiting a country at war with itself. I collaborated with Tamils and Sinhalese, who worked closely with each other — all of them with intimate knowledge of the prejudices and nationalisms that were destroying the lives of their fellow citizens. Kandy was an oasis, both spiritually and naturally.

Kaplan’s piece reminded me that the sources of violence and destruction are deeply rooted in identities and beliefs. In all of its serenity, Kandy was at epicentre of Sri Lanka’s conflict. Religion was at the heart of the war, and it will also need to be at the heart of the peace:

Even if the artistic grandeur of Kandy has helped form the emotional source of Buddhist nationalism, which has proved itself as bloody as other religious nationalisms, Kandy’s religious monuments also offer a much deeper lesson: the affinity—rather than the hostility—between Buddhism and Hinduism. Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka from India as part of the missionary activity of the great Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C. And later eras of Indian history would witness an amalgamation of Buddhist teachings into Hinduism. A few miles from Kandy, deep in the forest amid glistening fields of tea, I saw statues of the Buddha and of Hindu gods under the same roofs, together in their dusky magnificence.