THE SARVODAYA MOVEMENT
In the mid-1980s, I read Joanna Macy’s Dharma and Development: Religion As a Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement. It seemed to me then that this was a sign of the future, a way of life anchored in a spiritual and ecological outlook that practiced the simple living and community development outlined by Mohandas Gandhi. This movement was a force for positive change, its influence radiating outward, and Macy informed the rest of the world about the promise of this experiment in bringing together Buddhist teachings, Gandhi’s nonviolence, and reverence for the land. Now, 40 years later, the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka still flourishes, despite ups and downs. Besides showing us a path toward a sustainable future by promoting peace and protecting the natural environment, it teaches us how a spiritual outlook can motivate us to take responsibility for each other and to act as part of a community. The story of the Sarvodaya movement is worth our attention, since it is much clearer today than it was 40 years ago how precarious and fragile our present way of life actually is.
The Origins of the Sarvodaya Idea
John Ruskin, the British social philosopher, put out a book of essays, Unto This Last, in 1862. His aim was to suggest alternatives to the capitalist system which led to social hierarchies, cut-throat competition, a mechanistic philosophy, and the degradation of work. He envisaged an egalitarian system in which work enhanced human dignity and empowered those at the bottom of the social ladder. When Gandhi read Ruskin’s essays in 1904 while living in South Africa, he was struck by how deeply the ideas resonated with him. He recognized that the good of the individual and that of the community were the same, that everyone has the right to a decent livelihood from whatever kind of work they do, and that those who work with their hands, whether farmers or craftsmen, have dignity and value. Gandhi translated Ruskin’s book into Gujarati, calling it Sarvodaya.
In South Africa, Gandhi made his first attempt to build a community based on the principles of sarvodaya, setting up a farm where all were paid the same amount. After Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, Vinoba Bhave led a movement to rectify the vast inequalities of wealth and status that plagued India based on the concept of sarvodaya. He did walks all over India to motivate land owners to give the landless gifts of land. Jayaprakash Narayan, India’s leading socialist in pre-independence days, became an advocate in the mid-1950s for the sarvodaya movement. His program was political decentralization, greater village autonomy, the allocation of land to those who actually worked the land, and the forgiveness of agricultural debts. In the political realm, he called for participatory democracy. In the 1970s, he led a student movement in Bihar advocating total revolution. But this was the last great expression of Gandhian socialism and sarvodaya ideals in India.
The Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka
It has been in Sri Lanka, not India, where the Sarvodaya movement has achieved its greatest impact, guided by Buddhist principles in the spirit of truth, nonviolence, and selflessness. Founded in 1958, it is now active in over 3,000 villages, promoting development by motivating people to better their lives through community participation. The goal is the creation of a society without poverty, affluence, and conflict that empowers and raises up those at the bottom of the social scale. Its aim is for all people and all social groups to awaken and experience wellbeing in every dimension of life. Development is carried out through volunteer activities involving the participation of those directly affected in addition to paid staff financed by organizations from abroad.
The Sarvodaya Movement achieved considerable success by the 1970s, its activities reaching into every part of Sri Lanka. Young people were trained to motivate the members of their village to carry out activities that would enable them to provide for their own basic needs: not just food, clothing, and shelter but also the enrichment of their spiritual, educational, and cultural experiences. In addition, they built facilities to enhance communications and found ways to meet their energy requirements
By the 1990s, although facing government harassment and political violence, Sarvodaya had become a large and successful organization financially supported by foreign donors. Their work extended to the promotion of peace and the settling of conflicts, the provision of appropriate technology, and programs for children at risk, older people, and the physically disabled. The overall goal was not only to satisfy material needs but also to empower people. But then the international development strategies shifted; large-scale projects became the priority and 85% of Sarvodaya’s foreign financing stopped. The result was that the organization had to depend on its own resources, as the original villages in the program helped out those still being transformed. The paid staff also had to be cut. At present, one-third of the villages have no assistance from abroad but are surviving through mutual aid and self-sustaining programs.
Sarvodaya Movement and the Modern World
Sarvodaya opposes the use of science and technology to enrich the few at the expense of rural populations. In Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya-Fusion was initiated as an information and communication technology program of Sarvodaya in 2006 for the purpose of empowering rural poor communities. It aims to enhance community life by devising programs that acknowledge and respond to people’s needs through cooperation with donors, educators, government, and business. Using advanced technology to add value to indigenous wisdom, it enables poor rural peoples to gain a hearing in the larger conversations that impact their development. This integration of modern technology with traditional life attempts to preserve the positive aspects of a much earlier era (decentralized communities, economic equality, harmony with nature, attention to basic needs) while providing access to the fruits of our recent economic and technological development (less backbreaking labor, broader horizons, greater individuality, more margin for intellectual and aesthetic development).
Would Gandhi have accepted this technological initiative and considered Sarvodaya-Fusion as faithful to his vision? Gandhi was opposed to machines because he thought they would make labor increasingly redundant and India already had too many idle hands. But he was not against using machines to lighten the burden for those whose labor was physically exhausting. Still, he made an important observation: only a nonviolent society could ensure that machines would not turn against their creators by giving great power to those who controlled them. This would lead to worse inequality and the production of luxury goods for the few rather than satisfying the basic needs of the majority. What would Gandhi have recommended under present conditions is unknowable, since he adapted his ideas to fit the context. He favored self-contained villages but was himself cosmopolitan and had greatly benefited from his contact with the wider world.
Building Peace
For almost 30 years, there was a brutal civil war in Sri Lanka between Sinhalese groups backed by the government and Tamils fighting for their own independent state. In 2002, Joanna Macy returned to Sri Lanka after a cease-fire agreement had been reached. She observed the efforts of the Sarvodaya founder A.T. Ariyaratne in setting up public peace meditations to alter the toxic atmosphere. He brought together ordinary Sinhalese and Tamil people to demonstrate for the peace that they desired and on Peace Samadhi Day 650,000 people participated in the meditation. Ariyaratne was warned of the dangers involved and there was a grenade attack on his home before the event. But the meditation took place and instead of bombs exploding there was a deep silence.
Macy also noted that on that same day, a ceremony was held near the ancient bodhi tree that inaugurated the Link-Up program. Sarvodaya set up cooperation between one thousand villages in the Tamil areas heavily affected by the war with the same number in the Sinhalese regions. Sinhalese people will bring materials and workers to work together with Tamil people to rebuild the villages destroyed during the war. That same day, young people from one Sinhalese and one Tamil village shared special food they had prepared with each other and then passed around the food to the people gathered there. Macy wrote that even if the cease-fire didn’t last, which turned out to be the case, she would remember the taste of sweet rice and coconut that told her what the people there wanted most: to end the fighting and to share food with each other.
The Sarvodaya movement has played a significant role in helping the country heal from almost 30 years of brutal civil war between Sinhalese groups backed by the government and Tamils fighting for their own independent state. After peace was achieved in 2009, Sarvodaya initiated a religious reconciliation project, in which religious leaders from the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities were empowered so that they could contribute to religious reconciliation through their conflict transformation skills and by implementing community reconstruction projects. Inter-religious and inter-ethnic dialogue were encouraged in order to develop greater understanding and to bring about trust. And religious leaders became more involved with youth so that they could better identify when conflicts were about to occur and take action to head them off.
A second project was the good governance and postwar reconciliation project whose aim was to assist citizens in positively engaging with each other and with the government in order to come up with solutions to current problems and heighten the stability of a peaceful and democratic Sri Lanka. The obstacles to political participation, especially for women, young people, and minorities, were reduced, while the opportunities for participating in governance at different levels were increased. There was also a focus on advancing reconciliation between different religious and ethnic groups.
Humanitarian Action
In 2022, Sri Lanka experienced an unprecedented economic crisis; even during the civil war, austerity had never hit the ordinary person this hard. Food insecurity has been at record highs due to severe inflation and people have had to cut way back on their food consumption. The dire economic situation has left the country bankrupt and debt-ridden, leading to drastically reduced government subsidies, diminishing social protection and welfare. This condition has led to protest and social unrest. The most affected groups are the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the poor.
Under these desperate circumstances that constitute a full-blown humanitarian crisis, Sarvodaya launched a national initiative in April 2022: We Are One. The goal was to guarantee food security for local communities with a target of 500,000 families over a period of one year. Key groups were singled out: pregnant and lactating mothers, elementary school children, the disabled and the widowed, senior citizens, people with medical problems, and families in marginalized and low-income areas facing especially difficult conditions. Medical response teams were organized and a long-term program of livelihood development was started to support microentrepreneurs and small businesses.
Joanna Macy’s Message
During the time she spent in Sri Lanka observing the Sarvodaya movement, Joanna Macy experienced engaged Buddhism in action. She took to heart what she saw as ordinary people in a very poor country ruled by an unresponsive elite came together and developed their own power to better their lives. People recognized that through taking action as a community they were living in harmony with their deepest wishes and following the Buddhist path. They were fulfilling their spiritual goals through working together as a community, recognizing that they exist in relation to each other and uplift themselves by listening to each other. The positive effects are that right action brings about social change, builds collective self-esteem, and brings hope as people move toward the ultimate goal of Sarvodaya, the awakening of all.
Macy applied the lessons she learned from her Sarvodaya experience as a spiritual social activist working for peace and to preserve ecological balance. In the Sarvodaya movement, community members through spiritual leadership overcame their discouragement and feelings of powerlessness to create better lives for each other and to gain wisdom. In the same spirit, Macy tried to inspire people in the more affluent parts of the world to take collective action to affect the direction of their world rather than sink into apathy and despair in the face of the vast problems that threaten the human future. This means coming together as a community and responding to the threats to our survival with a passionate commitment to acting in the present moment as we acknowledge our existence in relation to each other and our sharing the same fate. As we look for inspiration and practical examples of what is possible, the Sarvodaya movement in the spirit of Gandhi reminds us that there are already people in other parts of the world who have been experimenting to find ways toward a brighter future for a long time.
