A Sinhala-language study of the place of gods in Buddhism. The book takes up the concept of deities — deva — as it appears within the Buddhist tradition, and sets beside it a set of points drawn from the life of the Buddha that the author presents as warranting examination. The National Library of Sri Lanka catalogues the work under the subject headings "Gods" and "Gods, Buddhist", which is a fair summary of where its attention sits.
The author is Wickrama Senanayaka. The book was published in Colombo by S. Godage, an established Sri Lankan house that publishes across Sinhala and English in religion, history, literature and scholarship, and whose Buddhist titles range from devotional writing to textual and doctrinal study.
A note for buyers outside Sri Lanka: the text is in Sinhala throughout. There is no English translation within this title, and reading it requires Sinhala literacy. The terminology is religious and doctrinal, so a reader who uses Sinhala conversationally but not for formal or scriptural prose may find it demanding.
This will suit readers already working in Sinhala on Buddhist doctrine and its surrounding ideas — students of Buddhist studies, temple and dhamma school teachers, and private readers who follow the Sinhala religious press. It also belongs in the kind of collection built around Sri Lankan Buddhist publishing in the original language, where English-language scholarship on the same questions gives only a partial view of what is being written and read on the island.
Questions about the status of gods in a tradition that does not place a creator deity at its centre have occupied Sinhala Buddhist writing for a long time, and the devotional practices of Sri Lankan Buddhism have kept them live. This title is one author's treatment of that ground, published for a Sinhala readership at home.
- Author: Wickrama Senanayaka
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 56
- ISBN: 9789553093301
Browse the rest of our book collection.
