What is our real pandemic?

Focus on three well-known individuals this country lost – Mangala Samaraweera, Sunil Perera and Heenmanike, the wife of Veddha Chief Uruwarige Wannila Aththo. While doing so, remember the well over 10,000 lives that have been lost due to this pandemic and we can question whether the responsibility should be placed on this virus or on how it was handled by those in the upper echelons of the country

By Surya Vishwa 

The definition of intangible heritage covers areas that range from knowledge, beliefs, traditions, cuisine. It is us human beings that carry this realm of heritage from one to another, generation after generation, through our national policies and through rules and regulations.

It is indeed sad to be talking of intangible cultural heritage in these times when we are handling a pandemic only through the infant Western science. Anyone who wants further reading on this is welcome to Google experts such as Professor B.M. Hegde, renowned cardiologist, author and scholar of both Eastern and Western science, and listen to his explanation of modern and ancient medical heritage. 

In this backdrop when we are readying to pay billions of rupees for foreign vaccines with money we do not have, this article will tackle the above theme by focusing on three well-known individuals this country lost – Mangala Samaraweera, Sunil Perera and Heenmanike, the wife of Veddha Chief Uruwarige Wannila Aththo. While doing so, we will remember the well over 10,000 lives that have been lost due to this pandemic and we can question whether the responsibility should be placed on this virus or on how it was handled by those in the upper echelons of the country. 

Would these individuals have died if we had in this pandemic times intellectuals and media who had studied about our medical heritage as much as they do about Western knowledge-based theories and solely Western science-tilted knowledge?

Would they have died if the many Allopathy and Ayurveda doctors who had gone on official study tours to China over the past years had understood the wisdom of the integrated medical system where one hospital building would hold both the Western-based science as well as the traditional medical cures under one roof and leave it to the patients to choose?

Why are we only buying COVID vaccines from China; why are we not learning how they are using their traditional medical heritage knowledge in unique ways?  

Would we have had the large numbers of deaths if we had over the past one-and-a-half years resorted to a common sense-driven solution for this pandemic akin to what Singapore did in July; declaring it as a common flu and setting about mechanisms to get people to maximise their immunity?

Of course Buddhism teaches us that life, decay and death are all part of the same coin but what we are subjecting to introspection is whether we are using our inherited knowledge for maximum benefit of humanity and if why we are not using it is linked to our blind hero worshiping of anything that is Western (thinking it to be ‘superior’).

This writer would like to surmise that the initially-mentioned Lankan personalities and the thousands of other Lankans may have lived if we had motivated and mobilised through a national system our entire population of male and female traditional physicians, numbering over 60,000 and all our Ayurveda/Siddha/Unani doctors, to be responsible for the immunity of our people. 

Would not our wedamahattayas who started researching by March last year into simple ways of eliminating this virus in its early stage been an asset to the country? Why have their skills not been used? 

Mangala Samaraweera had not much concern about the heritage of Sri Lanka which is a pity for a former Foreign Minister and he certainly would not have been familiar with the thousands of ‘ath beheth’-centric ways that Sinhala Wedakama can eliminate infection from the body.

Samaraweera died after taking both the vaccines. His death is lamented by all, including his critics. This writer sees his untimely demise as totally unnecessary and attributes it as being directly due to the serf-like manner we are hero worshipping the West through our policies and inability to use our heritage in a practical manner because we are absolute ignorant of it.

Professor Nimal de Silva in an interview with this page some months earlier spoke of the thousands of Ola leaf manuscripts we have in this country which covers broad areas of ancient knowledge just being allowed to disintegrate.

Unlike Samaraweera, Sunil Perera who had not taken the vaccine but had recovered from COVID (the recovery made in Western science-based hospitals is solely on account of the good immunity levels of the patient as there is no Western science-based COVID-19 ‘cure’) had succumbed to complications later. We do not know what his overall health condition was, but for someone to have this virus impacting them very seriously the overall body has to be affected by other health conditions such as anaemia or diabetes or heart ailments, etc.

Meanwhile, for a medicine to work fully well in the body, the heart and mind of the person should be linked to it through belief. For a person such as Sunil, remembered for his song ‘Kottamalli’ (about coriander, the miracle medicine of Lankans) and who practiced Pranayama (regulated breathing), it is subject to conjecture if the sacrifice of life would have had to happen when it did, if the macro framework offered a traditional mass-scale alternative, 

After 73 years of freeing ourselves from colonial rule if we had decolonised our minds and mainstreamed our ancient medical heritage, Deshiya Chikitsa – Sinhala Wedakama/Sri Lankan Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani, would we have led such synthetic lives and also ruined the lives of those who have a legacy of being governed by Mother Earth?

The first death in the ancient Veddha community, the aborigines of Sri Lanka, was reported with the death of Heenmanike, the wife of Veddha Chief Uruwarige Wannila Aththo who died of COVID-19 at the Peradeniya Teaching Hospital on 4 September. Could the first lady of this proud forest-linked people have died if the Veddhas were allowed to live their original authentic forest centric lives?

Although renowned researchers on the Veddha community such as Professor Kamal Waleboda are aware that the Veddhas had their own unique medical heritage is this known to the rest of the country? Is this known to policymakers?

Even to resurrect this knowledge would be impossible today because we as a nation have wiped out from our minds the need for such conservation. Our addiction to imported knowledge and goods we have bestowed on those such as the Veddhas as well and many of the younger generation of the Veddha community are today addicted to liquor or to materialistic values. 

What is our real pandemic? When will we realise it? Let those who we have allowed to be killed speak to us from the grave.