There have hardly been any instances of corruption by rulers, officials and businessmen mentioned in the early history of Sri Lanka, probably, because almost all lived virtuous, simple and contented lives, influenced by the tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism, living within their means, with whatever they got as their due.
This was also because royalty was well endowed with wealth owning all the land, officials being well looked after by kings and, for instance, the people given land to cultivate, paddy cultivators having to give the king only one-sixth of the produce as tax, as part of an efficient system of overall taxation by which all those who earned income in all other ways were also taxed.
There is, however, an instance of attempted cheating, amounting corruption, in Serivanija Jathaka in early Buddhist literature where a greedy hawker buying old pots and pans had, by cheating a poor family, been attempting to commit an act of corruption.
“Now in that city there was a decayed family. Once they had been rich merchants, but by the time of our story they had lost all the sons and brothers and all the wealth. The sole survivors were a girl and her grandmother and they got their living by working for hire. Nevertheless, they had got in their house the golden bowl out of which in the old days the great merchant, the head of the family, used to eat; but it had been thrown among the pots and pans, and having been long out of use, was grimed over with dirt, so that the two women did not know that it was gold. To the door of this house came the greedy hawker on his round crying, “Water pots to sell! Water pots to sell!” And the damsel, when she knew he was there, said to the grandmother, “Oh, do buy me a trinket, grandmother.”
“We’re very poor, dear, what can we offer in exchange for it!”
“Why here’s this bowl which is no good to us. Let us change that for it.”
The old woman had the hawker brought in and seated, and gave him the bowl saying, “Take this, sir, and be so good as to give your sister something or other in exchange.”
The hawker took the bowl in his hand, turned it over, and, suspecting it was gold, scratched a line on the back of it with a needle, whereby he knew for certain that it was gold. Then, thinking that he would get the pot without giving anything whatever for it to the woman, he cried, “What’s the value of this pray! Why it isn’t worth half a farthing!” And therewithal threw the bowl on the ground, rose up from his seat, and left the house. Now, as it had been agreed between the two hawkers that the one might try the streets which the other had already been into, the Bodhisatta came into that same street and appeared at the door of the house, crying, “Water pots to sell!” once again the damsel made the same request of her grandmother; and the old woman replied, “My dear, the first hawker threw our bowl on the ground and flung out of the house. What have we got left to offer now!
“Oh, but the hawker was a harsh-spoken man grandmother dear; while this one looks a kind man, speaks kindly. Very likely he would take it. “Call him in then.” So he came into the house, and they gave him a seat and put the bowl into his hands. Seeing the bowl was gold he said, “Mother, the bowl is worth a hundred thousand pieces …” says ‘The Jataka or the Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births’ Volume I translated into English by Sir Robert Chalmers, BA Oriel College Oxford University and British Governor of Ceylon, among various Oxford and Cambridge University Professors.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe can be compared, mutatis mutandis, to the hawker who was the Bodhisatta and the greedy hawker who tried to cheat the poor family to those who are greedy for political power to enjoy corruptly earned limitless wealth leading luxury lives, depriving the people of at least the meal of rice, five sprats, dhal and green leaves, and are suffering helplessly, being in the situation of the girl and her grandmother, who had lost all their wealth, mercilessly abusing the noble quality of the poor of bearing even the pangs of hunger silently. As Thorstein Veblen in his landmark thesis ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’ says sports is far down in the list of priority human needs.
Those who practise plain living and high thinking never resort to corruption. There is a Sanskrit sloka that goes as Ahara, nidra, bhaya, maithnancha; Samanya methadpusupithnaranam, … and so on which means that food, sleep, fear and copulation are common to both animals and human beings; it is Dharma, meaning the law, that distinguishes man from animal.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe was elected by Parliament, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, not as a mere stop gap scarecrow, as some had been earlier, but in a grave economic crisis akin to the one in which William Pitt the Younger was brought in, in Britain, to tide over such a crisis experienced by the United Kingdom so long ago as the 1780s due to the American War, when the National Debt stood at nearly an unprecedented 250,000,000 Pounds Sterling, to solve which William Pitt known as Pitt the Younger as Tory Prime Minister from 1783 to 1801 and 1804 to 1806 carried through important fiscal and tariff reforms.
“King Pandukabhaya made suitable provision for the sanitary services of the capital city Anuradhapura. He is said to have appointed five hundred chandalas for cleaning the streets of the city, two hundred for cleaning the sewers, one hundred and fifty chandalas to bear the dead and as many chandalas to be watchers in the cemetery,” says Prof. S. Paranavitana in University of Ceylon ‘A Concise History of Ceylon’.
There is no mention of corruption practised by supervisors of the chandala sanitary labourers as happened very much later i.e. around after 1990 when part of the fee paid for washing and cleaning buses at a certain bus depot in the Western Province was taken by the supervisor. A very amiable young man from the village who plucked coconuts, jackfruit, mangos etc. by climbing trees in daytime and washed and cleaned buses at night at a piece rate, when asked why buses are not washed and cleaned properly confided that the supervisor gets him to wash twenty buses instead of ten which he can wash and clean well and pockets half the amount paid.
Provision in the law during the time of ancient Sinhala kings to impose fines on irrigation officials who delayed releasing water to paddy fields, mentioned in University of Ceylon ‘A Concise History of Ceylon’ as happens today and present Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera, recently, vowing to have the law on and condignly punish officials who delayed issuing fertilizer vouchers to paddy farmers, smack of the prevalence of some corruption and, perhaps, sabotage by officials, then and now.
Chandra Edirisuriya