Ven.Madihe a gentle and extraordinary Buddhaputra

Venerable Dhammavihari
It is with a deep sense of grief in my heart that I talk to you on this occasion of the passing away of our Mahanayaka Thera. I am deeply grieved for more reasons than one. He is eight years my senior and I have known him for more than seventy years of my life. In 1990, when at the age of seventy, I sought ordination under him as a monk, I had the good luck to have him appointed as my preceptor or Senior Tutor.

In my younger days, both as a student at the University in the early forties and as a teacher at the University thereafter, I have very closely known his impeccable religiousness and his very deep sense of national consciousness. It is true to say that he rose much above the expectations of his erudite teacher, the very renowned Pelene Siri Vajiranana Mahanayaka Thera who had built up the then well sought-after edifice of the Vajiraramaya at Bambalapitiya. As a young student at the then known University College, I did myself benefit a great deal through my close associations with him. We need no historians, from within the universities or outside, to tell us that some of the well-groomed statesmen of the day, no matter to whatever degree they perfected themselves, like Dudley Senanayake, J. R. Jayewardene, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike grew to stature under the tutelage of that great mentor, Pelene Siri Vajiranana. They do not appear to have learned everything they needed. These great men of the day, we recollect with great lament as we look around today, always felt they had something more to learn from such sources of religious inspiration than what they knew.

Placed in the midst of that holy of holies at Vajiraramaya, the young Pannasiha Thera was growing up to be a sharp and brilliant student of Buddhism. He was also becoming an expert on the statistics of every area of his interests, changes in demographic patterns, utilization of human resources, land development and the economy of the land etc. etc.

To this brilliant young Pannasiha Thera Buddhism was well and truly the national and cultural heritage, which Sri Lanka had inherited from its large-hearted good neighbour of North India. Buddhism had immensely enriched nearly the whole of Asia, more than two thousand years ago, including Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq in the west, the whole of Mongolia in the north, China, Korea and Japan in the Far East and many regions of South Asia, to name only a few. I respect him highly as a thorough student of the history of this area. He has had and maintained more than Professorial standing in the subject, I assure you.

It has been a national tragedy, caused often by ill informed political theorists of mushroom-like origin that the Mahanayaka Thera has been branded at times a racist. The greater tragedy in his own life had been that he had stepped in to play the role of the indispensable Defender of the Faith for Buddhism when the current rulers of Sri Lanka failed time and again to possess the necessary vim and vigour for that task. It is indeed a stupid usage of the neo-social-scientists to use the scandalous word Chauvinism in association with him. We forgive them, for they know not what they do, not even what they say.

But his genuine interest in the social and cultural well-being of the people of this land is evident in many areas of the life activities of our Nayaka Thera. As a serious student of Buddhism, he firmly believed in the dictum as laid down in Buddhism that alcohol, served to humans as an accompaniment to social elitism in five star hotels in the city on days of festivity or in the