> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Sri Lankan Buddhist Monks Turn to Demon Mahasona - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/sri-lankan-buddhist-monks-turn-to-demon-mahasona/ - Published: 2026-10-21T06:13:49.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-21T06:20:31.000Z - Author: Jaffna Monitor - Tags: JM Exclusive, October 2026 **COLOMBO, Sri Lanka —** The figure is small and roughly shaped: a human form pressed out of clay, with a round head, a narrow trunk and short limbs, laid on a strip of banana leaf. Beside it, on a woven mat, sits a basket of red flowers. The photograph, released on Wednesday by followers of a Buddhist monk, shows the effigy used in a ceremony held on Tuesday night in Viharamahadevi Park, Colombo’s largest public park. There, exorcists brought from the southern district of Matara performed a Mahason pideniya, an offering to [Mahasona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha%5FSona?ref=jaffnamonitor.com), the demon of the graveyard and one of the most feared figures in Sinhala folklore. The park has been occupied since Oct. 16 by Buddhist monks demanding the release of Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, a nationalist monk sent back to prison this month. In a Sinhala-language statement issued Wednesday morning, the monastery of Pitiduwe Siridhamma (Siri Samanthabhadra), said he had given the exorcists instructions and led the ceremony. The exorcists, the statement said, drove needles into “the unrighteous.” It said the rite aimed to sweep away “the wicked who harm the country and the nation,” establish fairness and justice, and hand the country over “to the infinite power of nature” to rescue it from anarchy. It did not say whom it counted among the wicked. For most of the week, the monks in the park have chanted pirith, Pali verses of protection recited at Buddhist ceremonies across the island. The canon from which those verses come teaches that hatred ends with non-hatred. [One of its oldest discourses](https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html?ref=jaffnamonitor.com) lists spells for subduing spirits at the cremation ground among the practices the Buddha is praised for avoiding. The monks want President Anura Kumara Dissanayake to free Gnanasara, the general secretary of the Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Power Force, a group that Muslim leaders and rights organizations have accused for more than a decade of stirring hostility toward Muslims. His supporters say the state has humiliated a monk. The government says the courts have ruled and it will not intervene. Gnanasara’s imprisonment goes back to 2016\. At the Homagama Magistrate’s Court that year, he disrupted a hearing on the disappearance of Prageeth Ekneligoda, a cartoonist and journalist who vanished in January 2010\. In August 2018, the Court of Appeal convicted him on four counts of contempt of court and sentenced him to six years of rigorous imprisonment. He served about nine months before President Maithripala Sirisena pardoned him on May 23, 2019\. Sandya Ekneligoda, the missing journalist’s wife, and the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo research group, challenged the pardon in the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case in October 2023. On Sept. 10, the court ruled the pardon invalid. According to the police, prison officials who went to his temple in Rajagiriya the next day did not find him there. On Oct. 5, after he was brought before the Court of Appeal on a warrant, the court ordered him to serve the rest of his sentence. He faces a second term. In January 2025, a Colombo magistrate sentenced him to nine months of simple imprisonment over remarks at a news conference that the court found had promoted discord between Muslims and Sinhalese. The Colombo High Court has rejected his appeal. Gnanasara founded the Bodu Bala Sena in 2012\. In June 2014, he addressed a rally in the southwestern town of Aluthgama shortly before mobs attacked Muslim homes and shops there. In 2021, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed him to lead a presidential task force on a “One Country, One Law” policy. His followers regard him as a defender of Buddhism against what they describe as encroachment by other faiths. The sit-in grew out of a dispute over clothing. When Gnanasara appeared at the Colombo High Court on Oct. 6 in civilian dress instead of saffron robes, senior monks protested. The cabinet spokesman, Nalinda Jayatissa, said the Prisons Ordinance required it and that the same rule applied to all 63 Buddhist monks then serving prison sentences. The Kotte Sangha Sabha, the monastic body to which Gnanasara belongs, told the prisons commissioner that only the clergy could decide whether a monk gives up his robes, and that it knew of no grave breach of monastic discipline on his part. After Mr. Dissanayake met representatives of the three main monastic orders, the government proposed changing prison rules to let jailed monks wear robes when they leave prison for court. The protesters were not satisfied. A march under the banner “Justice for the Robe” left the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy on Oct. 10 and covered about 75 miles to the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo, arriving on Oct. 15\. Marchers said they were praying that the president would be freed from mithya drishti, a Buddhist term for wrong views. On Oct. 16, after talks with the secretary of the Ministry of Buddhasasana failed, the monks moved into Viharamahadevi Park and clashed with the police over a shelter they tried to put up. Two days later, one of their leaders, Balangoda Kassapa, told supporters that protesters might seek to elect a new president if Mr. Dissanayake refused a pardon. The president’s legal director, W. M. Wijebandara, said on Sunday that the government would neither reverse the verdict nor grant a pardon, and that the law could not be set aside under public or political pressure. Speaking the same day at a rally of his National People’s Power coalition in Badulla, Mr. Dissanayake said he would not override the courts. “We will abide by the decisions delivered by the courts,” he said. “Beyond that, no one should expect decisions from us.” He did not mention Gnanasara by name. His coalition, which grew out of the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, won the presidency and a parliamentary majority in 2024 on promises to fight corruption and uphold the rule of law. Samanthabhadra runs Umandawa Global Buddhist Village, a monastery in Kurunegala, through Siri Sadaham Ashramaya, the company that issued Wednesday’s statement. In a video posted by the monastery’s Umandawa page on Wednesday, Samanthabhadra presenting the ceremony explained it. Samanthabhadra said he claimed no power of his own and acted as an intermediary, calling on unseen forces, among them gods and yakshas, or demons, to act on the country’s troubles. He called the practice gurukam, or folk magic, and said he had learned it in his village while also receiving a formal education. He said the effigy was made of clay and that needles were used, and compared the rite to practices elsewhere in the world. He said the country’s problems were being handed over to nature and to unseen powers as an offering, without personal ambition. A post accompanying the video said the forces that had guarded the island for more than 3,000 years, which ancestors knew as gods and yakshas, were being entrusted with protecting “country, nation and faith,” a formula long used by Sinhala Buddhist nationalists. ## Mahasona ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/10/sri-lankan-buddhist-monks-turn-6388a4-1-1.jpg) A performer dressed as Mahasona, the feared demon of Sinhala folklore, takes part in a traditional exorcism ritual at Viharamahadevi Park in Colombo on Tuesday night, amid protests demanding the release of jailed Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara. The name Mahasona comes from maha sohona, “the great cemetery.” In southern folk tradition, the demon began as Ritigala Jayasena, a giant in the service of King Dutugemunu, who ruled from Anuradhapura in the second century B.C. In a duel with another giant, Gotaimbara, Jayasena lost his head, and a bear’s head was fitted in its place. He became a spirit of the burial ground, believed to kill by crushing a victim’s shoulders or to strike with fever and wasting illness. The island’s Pali chronicle, the Mahavamsa, lists [Dutugemunu’s 10 champions](https://books.lakdiva.org.lk/mahavamsa/chap023.html?ref=jaffnamonitor.com). Gotaimbara is among them, and so is a warrior named Mahasona, but the chronicle says nothing of a demon. The story of Jayasena’s transformation belongs to later folklore. The park where Tuesday’s offering was made is named after Dutugemunu’s mother, Viharamahadevi. The Mahason Samayama, the full ceremony to which the offering belongs, is one of the *tovil*, the healing rites of the southern lowlands. It is usually held for a patient believed to be afflicted by the demon. A dancer masked as Mahasona performs through the night while the exorcist bargains with the spirit, mocks it and feeds it until it agrees to release the sick person. The anthropologist Bruce Kapferer, who said he watched the ceremony about 80 times in the Galle region, made it the subject of his 1983 study, “A Celebration of Demons.” He argued that Western psychological terms could not account for the healing these rites provide. The performers have traditionally come from the Berava community of drummers and hereditary ritual specialists, and the craft is taught through regional schools, Matara’s among them. Village practice distinguishes among kinds of ritual. A tovil drives affliction out of a patient. A shanti karma, the term Tuesday’s statement used, asks for blessing and protection. Hooniyam, or kodivina, is sorcery meant to harm a named person, and piercing an image with needles is usually associated with it. The organizers of Tuesday’s ceremony described it as both protective and aimed at “the wicked.” Spirit cults on the island predate Buddhism, and the chronicles preserve traces of them. The Mahavamsa, compiled in the fifth or sixth century A.D., places the arrival of Buddhism in the third century B.C., when Mahinda, a monk it describes as the son of the Indian emperor Ashoka, converted [King Devanampiya Tissa](https://mahavamsa.org/mahavamsa/original-version/01-visit-thatagatha/?ref=jaffnamonitor.com). The island’s earliest inscriptions, cut beneath the drip ledges of rock shelters from about that period, record caves donated to Buddhist monks. Much of the chronicle is religious narrative, and historians treat it with caution. It opens with the Buddha visiting the island and driving its yakkhas, or demons, into the hills so that his teaching could later take root. Its founding legend pairs Vijaya, an exiled prince from northern India, with Kuveni, a yakkhini. Many historians read the yakkhas and nagas of the chronicles as memories of the island’s earlier peoples and their cults. The Mahavamsa records that Pandukabhaya, a king it places before Buddhism’s arrival, built shrines for two yakkhas, Kalavela and Cittaraja, and sat beside Cittaraja at festivals. Several centuries later, it says, King Mahasena built a stupa on the site of Kalavela’s shrine. The chronicle also says that, at the Buddha’s request, the god Sakka entrusted the protection of Vijaya and of the Buddha’s teaching in Lanka to Uppalavanna, a deity later identified with Vishnu. Over the following centuries, contact with South India brought more gods into Buddhist worship. Vishnu; Skanda, known to Sinhala Buddhists as Kataragama Deviyo and worshipped by Tamils as Murugan; and the goddess Pattini came to be regarded as guardians of the faith. Natha, often identified with the Mahayana bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, also joined the pantheon. Shrines dedicated to these deities, known as devales, stand inside or beside many Buddhist temples today. Some of this was arranged from above. In the 18th century, after monks from Siam came to restore higher ordination, King Kirti Sri Rajasinha placed the procession of the tooth relic at the head of Kandy’s Esala Perahera. Until then the festival had centered on the processions of four guardian shrines, those of Natha, Vishnu, Kataragama Deviyo and Pattini. Most of the change came more slowly, through village practice, local shrines and the verses exorcists recite. Buddhism followed a similar pattern elsewhere in Asia. In Myanmar, King Anawrahta organized the worship of nats, local spirits, into an official pantheon of 37 in the 11th century and placed it beneath the Buddha. Households in Thailand keep small spirit houses for the guardians of the land. In Tibet, tradition holds that the teacher Padmasambhava bound local deities by oath to protect the Buddhist teaching. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere and the Indologist Richard Gombrich wrote in “Buddhism Transformed” (1988) that Sinhala Buddhists have traditionally kept the Buddha’s path to liberation separate from a religion of gods and spirits concerned with welfare in this life. In their account, the gods grant favors in this world but play no part in salvation, and their worship is treated as distinct from Buddhism but compatible with it. The arrangement is a hierarchy with the Buddha at the top. Guardian gods are understood to act under a warrant, or varam, derived from him. Demons rank lower and can be commanded in his name. Exorcists usually begin by paying homage to the Buddha, his teaching, and the monastic order. Pirith itself draws on a commentarial story in which the Buddha came to the plague-struck city of Vesali and the recitation of the Ratana Sutta drove out evil spirits and disease. That sutta has been a staple of the chanting in the park this week. In Sinhala villages, particularly in the south, these practices are part of ordinary life. A family that takes a sick child to a hospital may also call an edura, or exorcist, if the illness lingers. People consult astrologers before weddings and house-warmings, tie pirith nool, threads blessed by chanting, around their wrists, and make vows at devales over jobs, court cases and examinations. There is little reliable survey data on how widely these beliefs are held. Obeyesekere and Gombrich reported in the 1980s that harsher deities such as the goddess Kali, and sorcery in general, were gaining followers as migration and urban life loosened village ties and people under new pressures looked for help. The earliest Buddhist texts do not deny the existence of such beings. The canon is full of devas and yakkhas. In the Sutta Nipata, the Buddha answers the questions of a hostile yakkha named Alavaka and wins him over. In the Atanatiya Sutta, the king of the yakkhas offers verses to protect monks from hostile spirits, and Sri Lankan pirith still recites those verses. The Ratana Sutta addresses the beings gathered to hear it, asks them to show kindness to the people who make offerings to them and to protect those people. On monks, the texts are stricter. The Brahmajala Sutta, the first discourse of the Digha Nikaya, lists the “debased arts” by which some ascetics living on alms earned a living, and which the Buddha is said to avoid. They include offering oblations to the gods, promising gifts to deities in return for favors and, in Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation, “the knowledge of charms to lay demons in a cemetery.” A rule in the Cullavagga, part of the monastic code, forbids monks to learn or teach such arts and classes a breach as a minor offense. These rules apply to the clergy. The texts set no comparable rule for lay followers. The question of harm reaches further. The first Buddhist precept is to refrain from killing, and the Dhammapada says one should neither kill nor cause another to kill. Buddhist ethics places the moral weight of an act in the intention behind it. “Intention, I tell you, is kamma,” the Buddha says in a discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya, in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation. In the Kalama Sutta, often cited as a charter for free inquiry, the Buddha tells his listeners to judge practices by their results and to abandon those that, when carried out, “lead to harm & to suffering,” as Thanissaro Bhikkhu renders it. He names aversion as one root of such harm. The fifth verse of the Dhammapada puts it in a single line: “Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world,” in Acharya Buddharakkhita’s translation. Pitiduwe Siridhamma, better known as Siri Samanthabhadra Thera, the founder of Umandawa, described Tuesday’s ceremony in other terms. Speaking in a video published by Umandawa, he said the ritual was performed without ego or personal gain, as an appeal to nature to restore balance to a troubled country. His monastery called it a rite of blessing. The same statement said the ritual was intended to sweep away “the wicked” and that needles had been driven into “the unrighteous.” Sri Lankan politicians have turned to the supernatural before. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decision to call an early presidential election in January 2015, which he lost, was widely attributed to the advice of his astrologer. While the 2015-19 coalition government was in power, Dinesh Gunawardena, then an opposition lawmaker and later prime minister, led a group to a shrine of the god Devol on an islet off Seenigama, on the south coast, saying they would curse that government. Petitioners there grind chilies on a millstone and ask the god to punish those who have wronged them. The demon’s name has also been borrowed by soldiers and militants. During the civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the army’s Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, a covert unit that operated deep inside rebel-held territory, was popularly known as the Mahasohon Brigade. Its operations were credited with killing several senior L.T.T.E. figures, among them Charles, the group’s military intelligence chief, who died in a Claymore mine ambush in Mannar in January 2008\. The L.T.T.E. also blamed the unit for the September 2001 killing of Shankar, the founder of its air wing. The unit’s reach unsettled the rebel leadership. A senior former L.T.T.E. source told Jaffna Monitor that fear of an ambush had become so widespread that nearly every senior commander felt exposed when traveling inside territory the rebels controlled. In March 2018, Amith Weerasinghe, the leader of a Sinhala nationalist group called Mahason Balakaya, was arrested by counterterrorism police after anti-Muslim riots in Digana, near Kandy. On Wednesday, the sixth day of the sit-in, the monks remained in the park. The Court of Appeal is scheduled to hear the petitions over Gnanasara’s robes on Thursday. On Friday, he is due back at the Colombo High Court in the case over his remarks about Islam.