Founder: Dr A.T.Ariyaratna
The Sarvodaya Movement—its full name is the Lanka Jatika Sarvodaya Sramadana Movement—was founded by A.T.Ariyaratna in December 1958 in the belief that the condition of the less fortunate people of rural Sri Lanka could be greatly improved. While Gandhi used the term Sarvodaya to mean the welfare of all Ariyaratna’s reading of the Buddha’s teaching led him to reinterpret it to mean the ‘awakening of all’. By this Ariyaratna meant the awakening of all from an introverted, subjective outlook to one that embraced the whole of humanity. It was his view that the teachings of the Buddha about the four Sublime Abodes—loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity-and that concerning the four Modes of Social Conduct—the absence of desire, fear, hatred and delusion—supported this interpretation.
This was an awakening that took place on many levels including the social, economic, and political levels as well as the moral, spiritual and intellectual ones.
The term Sramadana in the movement’s full title describes its main objective. This concept means the unselfish act of sharing one’s labour, thought, efforts, ideas, and other assets and resources with the world community.
The Sarvodaya movement provides one of the clearest expressions in the form of an organized movement, of Engaged Buddhism and in particular of its ethical and social philosophy of compassion and kindness-empathy leading to selfless labour.
Concerned with the alleviation of poverty and the ills attendant upon it the movement has provided a model of non-violent revolution based on Buddhist ethics and teachings. Grounding itself on the twin pillars of agricultural collectives and altruism the movement proposed that communities should farm as a unit on communal, village farms and offer their labour selflessly—the Buddhist term for this would be dana or giving—through the medium of communal work groups known as kayiya for the betterment of the poor. As Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988:245) comment with regard to Ariyaratna’s Buddhist philosophy of selfless labour:
It was a profound vision of involvement in the world, expressed in Buddhist terms … Undoubtedly this is the major and truly significant innovation of Ariyaratna and the high point of ‘Protestant’ Buddhism—to inculcate in the laity a sense of Buddhist work for the welfare of others by the donation of selfless labour.
The Sarvodaya movement is active in more than 11,000 villages in Sri Lanka and though its basic philosophical tenets are Buddhist it is both ethnically and religiously inclusive. It also has a North American branch, the Mission of Sarvodaya, USA.
Although criticized for attempting to impose middle-class, urban, bourgeois values on the rural population of Sri Lanka the Sarvodaya movement inspired the creation of other similar groups which together have contributed significantly to the advancement of the ideals of socially Engaged Buddhism.
