This is a Sinhala-language book, written and printed entirely in Sinhala, with no English text. Buyers outside Sri Lanka should be clear on that before ordering: reading it requires Sinhala.
Its subject is ditta dhammavedaniya kamma — in Buddhist teaching, kamma whose result is experienced within the present life rather than in a future one. The title translates roughly as "kamma that gives its result in this very life", and the book stays close to that single idea throughout.
Nandasena Ratnapala builds the discussion around fifty-three true-life accounts. The emphasis falls on akusala — unwholesome action — and the cases include murders, the killing of animals, and acts of violence committed during the youth insurrection of the late nineteen-eighties. Alongside these accounts, the author sets relevant suttas and stories drawn from Dhamma texts, and gives an explanation of the distinction between kusala and akusala. A Sunday Observer review of the book described the writing as light and easily understood rather than technical.
Ratnapala was a professor of sociology and formerly Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. His other published work includes The Beggar in Sri Lanka and Folklore of Sri Lanka, both of which, like this one, draw on material gathered from people's own lives and told in their own terms. That method shows here: the doctrinal frame is Buddhist, but the substance of the book is a collection of cases, set down as accounts of what people did and what followed.
The combination makes it an unusual item. It is not a scholarly treatise on kamma, nor a devotional handbook. It sits closer to documentary social writing applied to a point of Buddhist doctrine, with the recent violent history of the island supplying a good deal of its raw material. Readers who know Ratnapala's sociological books will recognise the approach; readers coming to it from Dhamma reading will find the suttas and canonical stories placed beside contemporary Sri Lankan events.
This copy is the Godage edition, published in Colombo by Godage International Publishers, who publish widely in Sinhala and in English. The book is likely to interest readers of Sinhala-language Buddhist writing, students of Ratnapala's work, and those collecting Sri Lankan social and religious writing of the post-insurrection period.
- Author: Nandasena Rathnapala
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 136
- ISBN: 9789553046673
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