Through Sarvodaya.org comes the information that activist Dr. A.T. (Ahangamage Tudor) Ariyaratne, founding father of the socially engaged Sarvodaya Shramadana Motion — “Sri Lanka’s most broadly embedded community-based improvement group,” devoted to “the awakening of all” — and a significant inspiration for engaged Buddhists worldwide, has died. He was 92.
Born November 5, 1931, within the Galle District of Ceylon, Ariuyaratne was, because the Sarvodaya web site places it:
A former highschool instructor at Nalanda School, he performed the primary Shramadana work camp in 1958, which ultimately led to the institution of the biggest individuals’s motion within the nation. He [was] the daddy of six distinguished grownup kids and has led tens of 1000’s of “household gatherings” and meditations with tens of millions of individuals all through Sri Lanka and different elements of the world.
Ariyaratne’s work additionally included Buddhist ideas and what he referred to as “Buddhist Economics” to handle societal and particular person struggling in a holistic method.
About Ariyaratne, Buddhist instructor and local weather activist Joanna Macy has stated,
“On this voluble, diminutive dynamo I discovered a scholar-activist who took the social teachings of the Buddha severely and dared to imagine that they may encourage change within the trendy world. He had banked his life on that conviction, drawing from historical traditions to empower what he referred to as “the poorest of the poor.”
Sarvodaya states that Ariyaratne’s stays will lie at its headquarters in Moratuwa till Saturday, April twentieth, at which era a funeral procession after which remaining spiritual rites and cremation will happen.
