Gananath Obeyesekere

Gananath Obeyesekere (born February 2, 1930) is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and has done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka.

Quotes

• Sri Lankan monks and educated laypersons found the Western interpretation of Buddhism especially appealing in their fight against the Protestant and Catholic missions. Soon the indigenous scholarship, strongly influenced by Western critical methods, carried on into the present day a rational view of Buddhism, treating the mythic, cultic, devotional elements as inessential to the religion, as accretions or interpolations superadded to a pristine, pure form of Buddhism. Concomitantly, the folk beliefs of ordinary peasants were viewed as animism, or superstitions, unworthy of the rational theosophy of old religion. 25
  • quoted from Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• I try to point out in several of my works, including Wisdom Transformed, and in this book, that in some sense the Buddhism that we now believe in is the colonial product. It is a product of Western theories and translators of Buddhist text, who came in the nineteenth century. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but it led to a transformation of ethics, a transformation of the way we look at the world in Sri Lanka, and it is foolish to deny this colonial impact.
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