Ven, Weligama Gnanaratane Thera ! Your should not accept any award or title that honours by the bloody hands of the Burmese junta

23-06-2008
ဆရာေတာ္ ေဝလိဂမ ဂဏနာရတနိ ေထရ အား စစ္အစုိးရက အဂၢမဟာပ႑ိတ ဘြဲ.ကုိခ်ီေျမာက္မည္ လုိ. သိရိလကၤာအမ်ဳိးသားသတင္းစာမွာ ေရးပါသည္။ စစ္အစုိးရေပးမည့္ ဘြဲ.ကုိ ၾကြေရာက္ လက္ခံဖုိ. ဆရာေတာ္ကုိ စစ္အစုိးရက ပင့္ေတာ္မူပါသည္။ဒီလုိ သံဃာေတာ္ေတြကုိ သတ္ထားတဲ့လက္နဲ. ခ်ီေျမွာက္မည့္ ဘြဲတစ္စုံတစ္ရာကုိ လက္မခံသင့္ဟု သီရိလကၤာဘုန္းဘုန္းေတြကုိ က်ဳပ္တုိ.ေျပာျပရမည့္ တာဝန္ရွိသည္။ အထူးသျဖင့္ သီရိလကၤာရွိ ျမန္မာ ဘုန္းဘုန္းေတြတုိက္ပြဲဝင္သင့္ပါေၾကာင္း တပည့္ေတာ္ ေလွ်ာက္ေတာ္မူသည္ ဘုရား၊
Myanmar(Burma).

He was invited by the Government of the Union of Myanmar to visit their country to receive this award. On this occasion, it is very appropriate to recall with gratitude the services rendered by the Maha Nayake thera to the Sasana.

The Dharmarakshita Nikaya to which the Venerable thera belongs was established by the Venerable Attudawe Siri Dharmarakhita thera who received his higher ordination in Myanmar.

Many of the most learned, pious, highly respected and well-known monks of Sri Lanka such as the Venerable Pelene Sri Vajiragnana thera, the Venerable Madihe Pannaseeha thera have been members of this Order. The Order is well-known in foreign countries.

In 1995 the Venerable Gnanaratane was appointed as the Secretary to the Sri Dharmarakshitavansa Amarapura Nikaya. He was mainly responsible for activating the Sangha Sabha (Bhikku Committee) of the Order.

He together with a few other monks and under the guidance of the Most Venerable Madihe Pannaseeha thera who was the Maha Nayake of the Nikaya at the time, was responsible for the unification of the various sects of the Order.

He is now the only surviving member of the original group of monks who took this far-sighted step to establish the Order on a very firm footing. He held the post of Secretary for 19 years and was awarded the Honorary title, ‘Vinaya Visharada Dharmakeerthi Sri’ by the Bhikku Committee in appreciation of his services. He was appointed the Anu-Nayake thera of the Nikaya in 1990.

On the demise of the late Most Venerable Madihe Pannaseeha thera, the Most Venerable Weligama Gnanaratane thera was appointed as the Maha Nayake of the Nikaye in 2003.

In addition to being the Chief Incumbent of the Ratmalane Mallikaramaya, where he resides, the Ven. Weligama Gnanaratana is also the Chief Incumbent of several other temples both in this country and in the USA. While all temples in Sri Lanka perform some social service, the Mallikaramaya is perhaps unique in having a legally registered society to do so.

Called the Sarana Padanama, it was established in 1993 with the Most Venerable Maha Nayake thera as a Patron and adviser.

It was registered under the Societies Ordinance (Reg. no. 5745) in 1997. The Maha Nayake thera continues to guide and advices the society.

Among the continuing services rendered by the Sarana Padanama are the donation of artificial limbs to members of the Armed Forces who have lost a limb on account of the continuing civil strife in the country and the organisation of medical clinics in a deprived area.

The donation of artificial limbs commenced in 1994 on the Vesak Full Moon Day and has been continued up to now on almost every Full Moon Day. By Vesak of 2008, the society had donated more than 700 artificial limbs with the support of many devotees both local and foreign.

The Sarana Padanama has been active in the time of natural disasters occurring in the country.

It has built 15 houses in a village close to the town of Galle for some of those who were affected by the tsunami of 2004.

It has helped those affected by floods, given scholarships to deserving children, assisted poor people to buy their medicines, etc.

The Sarana Padanama continues its humanitarian services.