A novel by the Sri Lankan writer Jayasena Jayakody, set in the present day and built around a single figure: Rahula, a Buddhist monk, and the question of how such a life is lived in contemporary society rather than apart from it.
The story follows Rahula as he works to free himself of worldly desire while remaining among people who are still bound by theirs. He does not withdraw from them. He helps them, and in doing so he changes the minds of some who had set themselves against him. That movement — from opposition to acceptance — is the shape of the book, and it gives the novel its concern with how monastic practice meets ordinary life, with its attachments, its grievances and its resistance to anyone who seems to stand outside them.
Readers outside Sri Lanka should know before ordering that the text is in Sinhala. There is no English in it. This is a book for Sinhala readers — for Sri Lankans abroad who want contemporary fiction from home in the language it was written in, for students of the language reading at full length, and for anyone building a collection of modern Sinhala novels.
Jayasena Jayakody is a Sri Lankan novelist. The book appears under the imprint of Dayawansa Jayakody Publications, a Colombo publishing house.
Buddhist themes run through a good deal of modern Sinhala fiction, and the figure of the monk in the lay world is one that the form returns to. What distinguishes this particular treatment is its focus on a single character's steady effect on the people around him, rather than on doctrine or on the monastery as an institution. The temple trees of the title — the araliya, the flowering trees that stand in temple grounds across the island — place the reader immediately in that familiar setting.
Readers who already follow Sinhala fiction with a religious or philosophical bent will recognise the territory. Those coming to Jayakody for the first time will find a self-contained novel that needs no prior reading.
- Author: Jayasena Jayakody
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 272
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