Age of the Demons

 New Vistas On the Early History of Sri Lanka by Wijaya Dissanayake According to the prevailing myths and legends, as recorded in the chronicles of ancient Sri Lanka and India, Sri Lanka was not an abode where human beings lived before the arrival of North Indian settlers around 500 BCE [1], represented by their leader Vijaya. The indigenous inhabitants of the island are described in the local chronicles variously as non-human yakkas, rakshasas, avaruddakas, pisaches (categories of demons according to the commentaries) and the nagas [2], a group that arrived later-described in terms of that confuse scholars even today and often translated...

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INDIAN WRITERS 1

All imaginative writing in India has had its origin in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, ten-thousand-year old epics of India.  An author picked up an incident or a character out of one of or the other and created a new wok with it, similar to Shakespeare’s transmutation of Holinshed’s Chronicle or Plutarch’s Lives. Kalidasa (1)’s Shakuntala (fifth century AD), one of the world’s masterpieces, was developed out of an incident in the Mahabharata. Apart from this type of work, many ancient writers dedicated their lives to the rewriting of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata according to their own genius. Tulasidas wrote the Mahabharata...

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LI: ACCOMMODATE ALL LIVING BEINGS AND ALL THINGS

Awake at Work by Michael Carroll In ancient China around 500 BCE, thousands of burdensome social rituals dominated people’s lives. When to bow, what brocade to wear, how to address a government official, what ceremony to conduct, even what ornament to rest by the fireplace, and much, much more were all dictated by a rigid social code called li. Through the centuries many Chinese citizens had learned to perform these rituals mechanically, turning ancient custom into worthless and often oppressive ceremony. Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher from that time, found such mindless rituals deeply damaging to Chinese society. LI: ORIGINALLY...

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CIA, FREE CEYLON & SWRD

CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] of U.S. A. part 1 AN ACCIDENTAL SPY by Phillip Knightley                            Who assassinated President  John F. Kennedy? Twenty years later I was in Washington working on a documentary film about the exploits of the notorious British traitor Kim Philby, the British Secret Intelligence Service officer who was, all along, an agent of the KGB. The film crew and I had traveled to Virginia to have lunch with Harry Rositzke, former head of the Soviet Bloc division...

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