Tribute to Professor K N Jayatilleke:

Profile of a scholar, teacher, colleague and friend

As you commemorate the 40th death anniversary of Professor K N Jayatillake in Sri Lanka, from Melbourne, in Australia, I bring before you the life and times of a scholar, teacher, colleague and friend who had a great influence on my academic and personal life, as well as number of his students.

Professor Padmasiri DE SILVA

Born on November 1, 1920, Professor K N Jayatilleke completed his early education at Royal College, Colombo and pursued Indo-Aryan studies at the University

of Ceylon and in 1943 graduated with a first class. Having won the Government Scholarship, he pursued the Moral Tripos at Cambridge University. These were the days when both the brilliance and the eccentricities of Ludwig Wittgenstein pervaded the philosophical world and it was Jayatilleke’s mission to locate the empiricist and analytical philosophical trends of British philosophy, within the Buddhist tradition and he worked out the epistemological foundations of Pali Canonical thought in his book The Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge.

The late Professor Robinson described this work, which won him the degree Ph.D from London University, as a masterpiece, judged by any standards. The late Ninian Smart highlighted the importance of this worker, in a celebrated review, in the journal, Mind. The Message of the Buddha, by K N Jayatillake, edited by Ninian Smart, a posthumous publication, is a very useful introduction to Buddhism for the General Reader, which gives a bird’s eye view of basic philosophical issues.

The Principles of International Law in Buddhist Doctrine, Buddhism and the Race Question, co-author with G P Malalasekera standout as contributions to the social and political thought in Buddhism. A number of publications in the wheel series of B P S cover a range of topics: Buddhism and Science, Buddhism and peace, Buddhist Ethics and Buddhist Attitude to Other Religions.

Peradeniya University

While these contributions as a scholar are well known to the world, my response as a student, studying philosophy, based on the perennial models of mathematics and science offered by K N Jayatilleke was very complicated.

Before I entered Peradeniya University in 1953, as a student at Dharmaraja College, Stanley Jayaweera had taught me to read Jiddu Krishnamurti and I was writing poetry to the Daily News page, ‘Junior Parade’ and I was no trained to see philosophy as linguistic analysis and logic.

The intellectual life at Peradeniya inspired by Sir Ivor Jennings’s Cambridge-Oxford model, had its own trendy conversations in the university canteen, some reading Soren Kierkegaard and Jean Paul Sartre, these were the favourites of Neville Jayaweera and the late Bandula Jayawardena. With Bandula Jayawardena, I edited the first journal of philosophy in Sinhalese, Dharshana Vadaya, which had articles from E R Sarathchandra, K N Jayatilleke, Basil Mendis and Merlin Peris.

When K N invited me for tea, at the warden’s room, he ‘appeared to be saying’, that the poetry I wrote was good, but that was only for a philosopher’s coffee break! (See, Padmasiri de Silva, Explorers of Inner Space, 2008, Sarvodaya-Vishvalekha, on the Conflict Between the Aesthetic Imagination and the Engineering Intellect).

But with the passage of time, the heavy dose of analytical philosophy I received from K N did a world of good to develop the skills of writing with clarity, breaking a complex issue into parts, concentrate on developing a ‘focus’ when writing a tutorial and finding unexpected and rich insights in the Buddhist discourses.

It is also to the credit of K N Jayatilleke that he inspired a group of Buddhist scholars like P D Premasiri, David Kalupahana and Gunapala Dharmasiri, some who even disagreed with his thematic contentions in the book Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge.

In developing my Ph.D thesis at Hawaii University on Buddhist and Freudian Psychology, it was K N who suggested the theme and gave me an initial direction as a post-graduate student at Peradeniya.

He did not live to see the work published (Padmasiri de Silva, Buddhist and Freudian Psychology, 4th Edition, 2010, Shogam Publishers, Melbourne).

As a colleague and especially as Department Head, he emphasised discipline, close attention to regular teaching and examination work. It is at this stage that I need to reflect on one of the most shattering experiences of my life.

On a sunny morning (July 23, 1970) K N requested me to come to his house to moderate a set of question papers. K N was not in the best of health and half way I suggested that we should have a break and continue the next day. He said, “You people are lazy, this work must be completed today”.

Of course I agreed, and after completing this task, I went to the university library. About two hours later, I received the most unexpected news of the death of K N Jayatillake and perhaps I am the person who saw him last! That night I had very little sleep and this experience was very traumatic.

Outstanding writings

Fortunately, I was able to share my disturbing feelings with my wife Kalyani and mellowed down, as the days passed. Perhaps number of decades back, events of this sort, shifted my interest from philosophy to counselling. By his death, in addition to what I learnt from him, while living, he turned my attention to the deepest message of the Buddha. My current work on grief counselling has struck new pastures for a philosopher.

The last thing to remember: K N as a friend. One of his students described the situation well: “Some people are like mangoes, some are like coconuts, mangoes are very sweet at the first bite, but then you come to see the hard seed. Others are like coconuts, if you break through the hard exterior you discover the sweet coconut water. Jayatilleke belongs to the latter category”. As I described K N, in one of my earlier reviews of his life and work, (Philosophy East and West,April, 1968), like J L Austin the British philosopher, his way of speech was ‘dry and slow’ but ‘very clear with all edges sharply defined.’

To have succeeded Professor K N Jayatilleke to the Chair of Philosophy (1980-89) was a great honour and an equally great challenge for me. This account I have written is a small tribute to an exceptionally committed individual, to a person who apart from his outstanding writings, had a vision also as how the world can be changed.

I conclude this piece of writing with a poem written by me to the Daily News on a Buddhist theme - “it is tragic to be robbed off in the brilliance of life”.

Electric red paper lanterns

Blaze in the labyrinth of bamboo leaves,

Suddenly, a lanter catches fire,

Half-burnt the candle falls down,

It’s tragic to be robbed off in the brilliance of life.

(This theme has also has been captured in a poignant way in a short story by G B. Senanayake).

Postscript: Responses, Criticisms and Charting New Territory

The importance of Jayatilleke’s interpretation of Buddhist scriptures may be seen in terms of those who had strong disagreements, those who made important internal criticisms, those who developed his theme and most important, those who explored fresh pastures for Buddhism.

Among the radical critics of the Wittgenstinian interpretation of Buddhism was my one time student and colleague A D P Kalansuriya, among those who further developed K N’s writings on ethics was an excellent Ph.D dissertation on Buddhist Ethics by P.D. Premasiri, those who basically followed K N’s empiricist stance on Buddhism but made significant internal criticism of Jayatilleka’s writings was David Kalupahana, who explored the terrain of The Buddha’s Philosophy of Language (Sarvodaya) Vishvalekha, 1999), a very insightful monograph, which he personally gave me, when I met him in Melbourne, Asanga Tilakaratne, who has published his Ph.D dissertation submitted to Hawaii University, also makes a critical examination of Jayatilleke’s celebrated analysis of the Buddha’s silence on the unanswered questions. Among K N’s student’s Gunapala Dharmasiri, well-known for his Buddhist Critique of Theism, has ventured into fresh territory, a Buddhist critique of the practice of medicine, Vijitha Rajapakse contributed research on the Philosophy of Religion and the late Regington Rajapakse, Buddhist perspectives on the puzzles about the ‘self’ in Buddhism.

The Future: Fresh Pastures for Buddhist Philosophy

In my own life and work I have sought new pastures for Buddhist philosophy, first qualifying and practising as a counsellor (An Introduction to Mindfulness-Based Counselling, Sarvodaya-Vishvalekha, 2008). But more recently my personal interest nurtured by the practice of meditation points towards the need to develop Buddhism as a ‘Contemplative Philosophy’. We need a Buddhist philosophy for the ‘rough road’ - a world crushed by the tsunami, tornado, earthquake and floods.

Martha Nussbaum, a leading philosopher in the West, says “an education in common human weakness and vulnerability should be a profound part of the education of the children.” The most important, we need to develop the art of ‘transformative dialogue’, a theme I developed at a panel on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, The Parliament of World’s Religions, Melbourne, 2009. We are living at a time when around the world, we have highly polarised debates, but we need to develop the art of ‘sitting side by side, and listening to each other’, as important issues are not merely composed of two opposing sides - the one or the other, it is more like a crystal with many sides.

We need to admire his wife Patricia Jayatillake, who has stood by him through life and death. She has chartered out her own life with the two daughters and remained steadfast and energetic all along these forty years after Professor Jayatilleke’s death.