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Transforming the Land

Interview with Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne

In 1958 , Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, a teacher at Nalanda College in Colombo, Sri Lanka, took a group of students and teachers to an impoverished village and helped the villagers fix it up. This was the beginning of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, which is now the largest people's organization in Sri Lanka and has helped transform 15,000 villages into self-governing, sustainable communities. The movement is based on Buddhist and Gandhian principles that promote nonviolence, social justice and ecological values. Sarvodaya is Sanskrit for "the awakening of all," and Shramadana means to donate effort. Dr. Ariyaratne is the recipient of numerous international prizes and honors for his work in peacemaking and village development.

SGI Quarterly: What inspired you to begin the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement?

A. T. Ariyaratne: When I, along with some of my colleagues on the teaching staff of Nalanda College, started the movement which is now popular nationally and internationally as the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka, we had three objectives in mind. One: Our concern for the poor and powerless people at the lowest level of society; two: Our strong belief that our students who were from affluent classes in society should learn about these people while they are still at school; and three: These students should live among these people and serve them during vacations in whatever way they could and also learn from them.

Youth at the Sarvodaya Meditation Centre [© Sarvodaya Shramadana]

Of course I always believed that as a Buddhist I would have learned to serve the poor in my previous lives and therefore it is a karmic practice. And of course there were many obstacles to this work from different vested interests such as educational bureaucrats, from high-caste people who thought that we should not mix with low-caste people, certain politicians who did not like our popularity, and most of all from those who were jealous of us. We practiced the Buddha's teachings of metta (loving kindness) and practiced equanimity, and we've been able to survive and sustain ourselves for 52 years.

SGIQ: What are the core beliefs of your movement, and how do these relate to ecology?

AA: Nalanda College was a leading Buddhist educational institution in Sri Lanka, and we who pioneered the movement were Buddhists. So naturally we were inspired by the teachings of the Buddha, and we strongly believed that the Buddha's teachings could be applied to modern-day development rather than follow the development goals and methods followed by the West on purely materialistic lines. Right from the inception of the movement we had in mind both economic and spiritual development.

In the Maha Mangala Sutra, the Buddha mentioned three auspicious factors that influence our personality building. They are the environment in which we live, the karma we have inherited from past births and the control and purification of our mind. So, in the movement, we always gave priority and importance to the preservation and enrichment of the environment, abstinence from doing evil, doing good and purification of the mind. In our work, meditation plays an important role.

Distributing goods at an internally displaced persons camp [© Sarvodaya Shramadana]

The Sarvodaya movement begins work in a village with a program to satisfy 10 basic needs of people. The first of these needs is a clean and beautiful environment, both physically and psychologically. Other basic needs are those pertaining to water, clothing, food, shelter, health care, energy requirements, communication, education and spiritual and cultural needs. Ours is a holistic and integrated approach to welfare, peace and development.

SGIQ: How does the Sarvodaya movement work?

AA: Sarvodaya is now active in 15,000 villages. In each village the people are inspired to start work on basic need satisfaction programs based on their self-reliance, community participation and always doing things scientifically. A series of Shramadana (gift of labor) camps help villages build a community spirit and even identify those with community leadership. These leaders get trained for varying periods of time in Sarvodaya Development Education Institutes which are spread out in all districts of the country. On their return to the village they organize the village community into various groupings like children's groups, youth groups, women's groups, farmers' groups and so on, and relate them to their basic need satisfaction programs. Finally they form themselves into a village Sarvodaya Shramadana Society, and the movement helps them improve the village economy. The final stage is to start self-governance at village level. Sarvodaya has the ideal of transforming the country into a commonwealth of village republics.

SGIQ: How do you account for the effectiveness of your movement in putting lofty ideals and values into practice?

AA: Sarvodaya did not start with a series of theories. It started with the problems that individuals, families, rural and urban communities faced. It then went on to understand national and global problems. In each instance it tried to solve the problems it faced by using their own resources, labor and technologies. So over a period of five decades a clear Sarvodaya theory and practice evolved. Sarvodaya (the awakening of all) developed programs that help awaken human personalities, families, rural and urban communities, the national community and the world community. To achieve each of these goals we have developed different programs.

Though our organization is founded on Buddhist principles, all these principles are found in other religions also. We are absolutely nonsectarian. When people get together to achieve an objective that improves their livelihood, religion need not come into prominence as long as our moral code is clean and pure.

To build a more tolerant and sustainable society we have to simultaneously transform our consciousness, the economy and the power relationships. Sarvodaya has been working on these three fronts so that a critical mass of spiritual consciousness is created that transcends man-made barriers of racial and national divisions; a more fair and just economy that works for all is created, and political power relationships are transformed into more community-based participatory governance.

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