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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
The Monk At The End Of The World | Waiting For The Barbarians in Sri Lanka
As two competing groups of pre-wedding photoshoot parties assemble optimistically around the hotel and its gardens, it’s an unreadable monk at the end of the world that suddenly comes to mind; and with him, the barbarians in Cavafy’s unforgettable poem, Waiting for the Barbarians.
Do we control our fates, or is it all predestined?
In Sri Lanka, both views jostle for ascendancy; but the decisive evidence is plain to see. It's all about what you do. Nothing is inevitable. Lord Buddha himself pulled no punches. “Work out your own salvation,” he declared. Even so, given the island's history – distant past and near present, it would be all too understandable to sigh rather a lot and assert it's all fated. Not just fated – but sorrowful too.
After all, the island’s ancient kings had a terrible habit of murdering one another with giddy abandon, plunging the state into long bouts of civil war; the Cholas destroyed the island’s 1500-year-old kingdom utterly in 993 CE; Europeans then seized the land for over 500 years. And when independence came, it brought with it decades of civil war, war, political instability, corruption and even a devastating tsunami. And then, of course, there was COVID and Donald Trump.
So being fatalistic about the future is more than a little understandable.
Sri Lankans have put up with it all, and still more – and yet the country comes through it.
And it does so as it has a sort of unbudgeable inner resilience, a deft sense of irony, and surely, lurking deep down – a belief that things will eventually get better so long as everyone keeps doing more or less the right things.
Life may seem uncontrollably terrible, a blow merely waiting to happen – that’s not really the deal. The barbarians the CP Cavafy immortalised in his famous poem as a perfect blame doll may seem to take centre stage on this island, but they amount to paper tigers, mere excuses for not just buggering on.
“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?” wrote Cavafy in 1898
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
1898, when Cavafy wrote the poem, turned out to be a most auspicious year for faraway Sri Lanka, but presented a perfect example of how the island has a habit of not waiting for barbarians of any sort.
As he sat there, six thousand kilometres away in Alexandria, Cavafy – that deeply private, and oddly cosmopolitan Greek poet - penned his remarkable poem in the very same year when James Taylor started Sri Lanka's first tea estate, near Kandy – marking the birth of the tea industry in Ceylon.
Taylor’s botanical initiative, little considered of much importance at the time, proved instrumental in helping the island recover from a devastating plant pandemic that wiped out Ceylon's booming coffee industry in the late 19th century.
The disaster was triggered by a small fungus that erupted like boils across coffee leaves and led, inexorably, to the plant’s death. It caused total financial devastation across the island, widespread bankruptcies, a banking collapse, and destitution. In under 20 years, the pestilence drove coffee production from a peak of 100 million pounds of coffee in 1970 to just 5 million in 1889.
Put another way, on the very eve of calamity, when the school of predetermined fatalism had maximum headroom, the country was quietly preparing not for excuses or even barbarians but for its rebirth. It was getting on with things, regardless. From just a couple of dozen kilos of tea sold on international markets in the 1890s, production steadily soared and now accounts for 2% of GDP, with over $1.3 billion in revenue.
In truth, despite all expectations, Sri Lankans have never been much good at merely waiting for the bemoaning. They have, throughout their history, had enough of them to know it's never best to just hang around and wait for others to sort things out. You have to do it yourself. Or at least you have to try.
All this comes to mind as I sit here sipping my early morning tea, my 5 philosopher schnauzers stirring in ever more elaborate yoga poses around me in their accustomed way, as I look out over the unimpeded forests and jungle that fold across the hills and valleys stretching out from my bedroom terrace.
And amongst the almost unsortable scramble of mountains, one central valley can be traced, sliding down from my ivory tower to Kurunegala and the start of the great central and northern plains of the island that run, flat and low and unimpeded, all the way to Jaffna in the north.
Framing it are a multitude of hills, bigger, smaller, stretching out like great green waves – and bringing to mind nothing less than that wonderful American film - 2012 - that captured the destruction of the world, its fall due to global warming, volcanic explosions, and rising sea levels.
The film, an epic disaster of the most engaging kind, follows the travails of various characters as they struggle to survive earthquakes, volcanos, and megatsunamis. Like the best of all-out misery films, you sit on the very edge of your seat watching the ruination of mankind, heartened by the knowledge that when it is all over, you can get back home to a bedtime hot chocolate and a cognac.
Naturally, the disaster was wholly predictable to its much-abused protagonists, nerd heroes, who cleverly linked crust displacement theory with the cataclysms that were all too obvious to anyone who knew much about the Mayan Long Count calendar predictions.
In fact, for them, the end of the world was so foreseeable you could have sent out invitations with an exact time and date. Fatalists had rarely had it so good.
The barbarians, or at least their natural world equivalents, had arrived. Enormous waves rocked the planet; tsunamis devoured farms and cities without prejudice; people fled only to be drowned; America, of course, was almost destroyed – as were most other nations - but not quite all lands. Some bits of earth cleverly rearranged themselves above the vastly swollen sea levels, offering a future to the few humans who survived.
These survivors included the wealthy who had paid $1 billion to hitch a ride aboard an Ark – and the then Queen of England with her corgis.
But amid all this apocalyptic annihilation, one very curious scene stood out like a huge question mark.
For there, high up in the Himalayas, was a monastery, a Buddhist monastery, of course. And in this monastery lived what appears to be a single monk.
He had that benign, kind, gentle, wise face that Hollywood always gives any monk it likes. And it likes a lot. All the way down Hollywood Boulevard, America’s gaffers and thespians, key grips. Directors and producers have a remarkable fondness for Buddhist monks.
The monk in the film 2012 looked rather like the Dalai Lama himself – sagacious, calm, welcoming: a face to come home to forever.
Living up there by himself in utter isolation didn't seem to have inconvenienced him in any way. The cinematography suggests, through tiny touches, that this monk had a fine life, doing just what he wanted.
He's well dressed, well fed, and seems as if he had just stepped out of lunch, prayers, or a pleasant meditation to participate in the end of the world.
Standing beside the monastery bell tower, he surveys the surrounding Himalayas, the mountains covered in snow that go on and on and on, as if they could never end - so high, so snowy, so far away, so far above everything.
Though not, it soon appears, that far above the end of the world.
For eventually, over the tops of these, the greatest mountains on earth, come the titanic waves, just like the barbarians were meant to, but didn’t.
They tumble over, sweeping down into the next valley and then up into the next mountain, up, down, up, down, getting ever closer to our learned hermit. And what does he do?
He's got three options, I guess.
He could run, you know, panic, but he's a wise monk, so of course he’s not going to do that.
Two, he could stand there and rather stoically be obliterated. And that's what you expect him to do.
Yet he doesn’t do that either.
He chooses a third option. What I call the Sri Lankan option.
He rings the monastery bell. Its deep, sonorous, plangent peal echoes over the last valley in this, the highest corner of the world, even as the great waves find their final, terrible deciding way to him.
And that, of course, is it -
Finis.
Exitus.
The End
The unavoidable tsunami sweeps both monk and bell away as easily as you might toss back your forelock when meeting the Emperor of Japan or swat a fly.
And ever since then, I've always wondered why he did that. Why did the nice monk ring the lonely bell?
Or put more practically, what was going on in the scriptwriter's mind that he imagined was going on in the monk's mind to ring the bell?
Was it that the monk in question was just a bit of a drama queen who wanted to make more of this catastrophe?
Or was it something far more credible? Was he perhaps exercising self-determination in the face of an apparent immovable fate?
Did he, my fond mind raced on to consider, did he think that the end of the world needed to be recognised properly? Even if, by ringing the bell to achieve that, there was no one but himself around ever to witness it.
If so – and I like to think this was so – the monk was exhibiting the purest form of self-determination – the very opposite of the Cavafy’s Roman citizens were so unwilling to practice in the face of the barbarians?
As I sit here looking at these gorgeous Sri Lankan hills and mountains, I imagine a great tsunami of water tumbling over them.
Unlike the monk, however, I don’t have a bell to ring, but I'm sure I could improvise. Bang the bed head—ad lib Abba songs. Play a suitable alarm sound on my mobile phone.
I hope I would not just go down into the darkness, unacknowledging all that was happening, least of all myself, or my world.
Like the monk, I aim to be up to the occasion when the last waves come.
For unlike Cavafy’s idle and nonchalant citizens waiting for the barbarians, there is nothing existentially empty about how the monk at the end of the world chooses to move on to the next stage, finding, amongst a multitude of dead ends and excuses for doing nothing, his own little bit of personal wriggle room – the bell – which he rings. Loudly.
I would strive to like that Hollywood monk. Like Sri Lanka in fact – not to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas recommended, but nor to “go gentle into that good night”.
I’d ring my own version of the bell. Perhaps to God tell – Hey! I’m on my way, or to say, albeit to no one and nothing in particular, but these green jungle hills, the tall blue sky and myself – So here I am. I am Here.
Or, as Mel Gibson’s Mayan hunter put it more atavistically, “I am Jaguar Paw. This is my forest. And I am not afraid.”
That much, much though it is, little though it seems, I could do.