Today marks the 157th birth anniversary of Sir Anagarika Dharmapala

The 157th birth anniversary of Sir Anagarika Dharmapala is commemorated today.

Born to a devout Buddhist family in 1864, David Hewivitarne became Anagarika Dharmapala, the leading light of the Buddhist Renaissance Movement in Sri Lanka.

As a child, Dharmapala was sent to Christian missionary schools, where his education, if comprehensive by European standards, showed little respect for Buddhism.

By the age of nineteen, he had mastered the rudiments of Christian theology and knew more than half the Bible by heart, the knowledge he used to highlight the hypocrisy he perceived in his missionary instructors.

When a mob of Sri Lankan Catholics attacked a Buddhist procession in 1883, Dharmapala left school and turned his intellectual pursuits to Buddhism instead.

Soon afterward Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky, founders of the Theosophical Society in New York, arrived in Sri Lanka and filed suit on behalf of the Buddhists who were injured in the attack.

Dharmapala, who felt that the Society’s aims were identical to those of a Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka, became a member. Madame Blavatsky took the young man under her tutelage, and he remained her loyal supporter for the rest of his life.175t