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163 13 From Controversy to Understanding More than a Century of Progress From our more theoretical considerations we now move to an on-site test case, to an occasion that shows what we have done in Sri Lanka, how we have managed to move to greater interreligious understanding and to work together to move from misapprehensions of each other to an awareness of our mutually recognized religiousness. It has taken more than a century, but the process has been both steady and promising. The process whereby persons, at the depths of their religiousness, seek to understand other persons, also at the depths of their religiousness, is not an inevitable process in human history. It is under way today, happily one can report. In chapter 1 we drew attention to a Baptist speaking openly about matters of faith among Japanese Buddhists in recent years, and suggested that such would not have been likely a century earlier. Later, in our chapter 17, we will focus more precisely on Buddhists and Baptists, particularly with reference to Sri Lanka. The particular case of Sri Lanka over the last century until now is fascinating and highly instructive in helping us to become self-conscious of issues in our inquiry, of its recent nature, and of the exhilarating possibilities before us. The month of August, the eight month of the year, the month so designated in honor of Augustus Caesar, has been an important month in the history of Sri Lanka. That we in Sri Lanka can today designate a period of time as “August,” that the related system for structuring a calendar is accepted and in wide use in this country, is noteworthy in itself. However, that to which the “month of August” refers is also known as the fifth or sixth month of the year (nikiṇi-masaya: July-August or binara-masaya: August-September) for those of us who have been nurtured in the Sinhala heritage. Calendars, concepts that represent consensus about a way to reckon time, can be divisive in human relationships. Though such a consensus has been a 16 4 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s requirement for the formation of complex civilizations—indeed, as civilizations have intermeshed in the past so have calendars—calendars, in the intermeshing of civilizations, on occasion, have collided. The seasons have meant a great deal to us, their comings and goings—again and again. We have tried our hand at reckonings: the Babylonians and ancient Egyptians had their systems; so too have the Jews, the Christians,1 and the Muslims; so, too, of course, Buddhists. And we have differed in our decisions about starting points in the reckoning of time.2 Although we have had some difficulty reaching precision in measuring what we call time, although starting points have varied, although we have calculated yearly sequences variously and have divided those units of time differently —some according to a solar year and some according to a lunar year—the units, we have come to learn, refer to one event: the orbiting of the earth and its satellite moon around the sun. The phenomenon, the appearance, has yielded itself to another interpretation, one familiar in human history, one not altogether placed aside—the period in which the sun apparently passes through the twelve signs of the zodiac, a period of reckoning reinforced by the recurrence of the seasons. We have seen “sunrise” and “sunset,” and most of us would agree have been the better for it, although we know now that the sun neither rises nor sets. Yet, I suppose, we will not soon find alternative, more immediately communicative , ways of expressing these human experiences in English. That we today classify the days, months, and years as we do in Sri Lanka is obviously not an automatic occurrence, is not inevitable. That we have two New Year observances—one according to the “Western calendar” and the other according to age-old custom—might strike a non-Jewish Westerner as a bit novel. Two ways of reckoning time have been adopted in Sri Lanka, without the one negating the other.3 The earth revolves, time passes; we are born, we live, grow old, and die; we celebrate the process, the rains, the seasons, and we discern meaning in it all. We are earthlings all—yet through our various modes of appropriating meaning we are human also. What has occurred in the “month of August”—a valid measure of time...

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