Overview
Duminda Bandara Ratnayake was born on 16 June 1984 to Sinhalese Buddhist parents and lived with his mother at her parents’ small farm in Thundeniya, a hilly rural area about 16 miles by road from Kandy. In about May or June 1987, when he was three, he began to say he had been a chief monk at the Asgiriya temple in Kandy, one of the country’s largest monasteries, whose monks share with those of Malwatta the guarding of the Temple of the Tooth. He often asked to be taken there.12
He said a sudden pain in his chest had made him fall, and that monks took him to a hospital, where he died; for his death he used a word kept for monks. He also said he had owned a red car and an elephant, had taught young monks, and had friends at Malwatta. His grandfather later added that he also longed for his money bag and radio; his mother confirmed this with some embarrassment, as such things are thought unsuitable for a monk. He gave no personal name.1
Behaviour
Even before he spoke of a past life he liked to wear a cloth over his shoulder like a robe, and he asked for a monk’s robe and fan. He wanted to be called ‘podi sadhu’, little monk, visited the shrine near his house morning and evening, brought flowers, built a toy shrine, and disliked the killing of insects. He told his mother not to touch his hands, as women do not touch a monk’s. Like a monk he ate nothing after noon. He was unusually calm and did not play with other children.12
His mother took him to a nearby monk, who could get little out of him. Asked what he wanted, he chose a monk’s fan, held it before his face in the proper way and recited a stanza in Pali, the ancient language of Sinhalese Buddhism. The monk did not think his parents could have taught him this and advised a visit to Asgiriya.1
Investigation
His family took him to Asgiriya in October 1987, with a journalist from the Island newspaper. Erlendur Haraldsson interviewed his mother and grandparents in September 1988, and returned in 1989 and 1990, drawing on Godwin Samararatne’s knowledge of Buddhism and monks. The family said they had no ties with Asgiriya, had never been there before, and had no monk among their relatives. Because the 1987 visit was hard to reconstruct, the investigators gave more weight to his statements, which he had repeated for over two years.12
The journalist had decided Duminda was Ven. Rathanapala, a senior monk who died of a heart attack in 1975, but monks who knew him said he had no car, elephant, income or Malwatta ties and did not preach. The red car and money bag pointed either to a recently dead senior monk or to an abbot after the First World War, since abbots began to own cars only in the 1920s and other monks in the 1980s. Monks at Asgiriya knew of no one who had died since 1970 who fitted.1
Identification
Haraldsson compared the five abbots who served from 1921 to 1975. Only Gunnepana Saranankara, abbot from 1921 to 1929, had a red or brownish car: two elderly monks remembered it, and a villager who had known him since 1926 volunteered that it was red with a folding roof. He was one of two abbots who died of a sudden heart attack, he preached a good deal, and his chief disciple had caught an elephant in which he took a keen interest. No abbot had owned a radio, but Gunnepana alone had a gramophone, on which he played recorded chanting.1
The hospital detail was wrong: two witnesses said Gunnepana died at Asgiriya after a doctor was called, and no death certificate could be found. Haraldsson concluded that he matched five of the six main statements in his table, while no other abbot matched more than one. Teaching young monks could not decide between them, as every abbot did it.12
Visits and recognitions
At Asgiriya in 1987 Duminda went to the main temple, worshipped at the stupa, and entered the residence next to it, saying he had lived there and pointing out a bed upstairs and an old wooden box. He did not recognize himself among portraits of monks, nor Rathanapala in a photograph. Shown an old group photograph, he pointed to a monk, but witnesses disagreed about which one and what he said.1
At home, with Haraldsson present, he pointed to one monk in the photograph and said ‘This was me’. Two old monks, seen separately, identified that monk as Gunnepana; it was the first time the investigators had heard his name. As that monk sat at the centre of the picture, they set a further test with six portraits, and he chose the wrong one. On a second visit in 1989 he went to the same bed and said he had kept plates in the box; an old servant said it had once held plates. Gunnepana had lived, at least in later years, in the next building, where Duminda said nothing.1
Assessment and later life
Haraldsson thought contamination unlikely beyond general ideas about monks, since the journalist had chosen the wrong monk and the family never met anyone connected with a candidate. He noted, though, that the mother sometimes embellished the behaviour. Stanzas were recited on the radio at 5 a.m., but one Duminda knew had never been broadcast; his mother and grandmother knew it but denied teaching him. The Buddhist scholar P. D. Premasiri was struck by his clear, faultless Pali, but it could not be shown that he understood the words.12
By late 1989 his family thought he was starting to forget, and by 1990 he had begun to eat an evening meal. When the death of the Malwatta abbot was announced on the radio in 1990, he said he had known him, which was possible, as that monk had entered Malwatta in 1916. By November 1990 his mother had agreed that he would enter the monastery at the earliest permitted age. Haraldsson and Samararatne concluded that his statements mostly matched Gunnepana’s life.12