The past doesn’t have The Answer, but it may have suggestions
Some thoughts about lessons from the past and the excitement of water management
I’m currently in the final stages of completing the manuscript for my book, Hegemony to Enmeshment: the Western Indian Ocean in the First Century CE.
I’ll talk more about that (probably a lot more!) in future posts, but for now, my mind is all over the place. I’m following up on final references, checking articles I’ve had on lists for months and years, making sure I’ve read the recent releases in Indian Ocean history. It means jumping from one region and century to the next and, honestly, isn’t my favourite part of the research process.
A Great Find
There are moments, though, that make every stage of researching and writing history immensely rewarding. One of those moments, for me, was reading about Sri Lankan irrigation:
Jayawardana, Chandana and Wijithadhamma, Medagmpitiye, ‘Irrigation Practices and Norms in Sri Lanka by the 5th Century CE: A Survey Based on the “Samantapāsādikā”’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, New Series, 60.1 (2015), 1–61.
Layers of narration
The Samantapāsādikā, which is the focus of this article, is a fascinating source. It hints at the layers of transmission by which so much information about the past is gifted to us. In this case, the story begins in around the third century BCE, when commentaries on spiritual texts began to be made by Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka in the Sinhala language. These commentaries were meant to explain the meaning and everyday application of religious advice. As a result, they were regularly updated to reflect changes in society, as well as in religious attitudes. Then, in the fifth century CE, a monk and scholar, Ācariya Buddhaghose, decided to translate these commentaries into Pali, an alternative scholarly language that had developed in the previous centuries in Sri Lanka.
The commentaries cover almost every subject imaginable, and have not, as Jayawardana and Wijithadhamma point out, been used enough by historians as sources for myriad aspects of life. To demonstrate this, they turn their focus on material about irrigation and water management. To do this successfully, some important points need to be borne in mind:
It can be hard to know when a specific piece of commentary dates from. Is it an early piece of advice, from the 3rd century BCE, the 2nd, the 1st, etc., which Ācariya Buddhaghose only translated in the 5th century CE? Or is it a fresh piece of commentary that he added in the 5th century, or perhaps an older one that he updated with new information?
The commentaries preserve a perspective that is mainly focussed on monastic activities: the business of monasteries, the priorities of monks.
It is not always easy to know what specific terminology means, especially where it refers to ancient techniques, technologies or patterns of behaviour that are no longer with us, or for which the ancient names have been forgotten.
Every kind of source, ancient or recent, has complexities of its own. Balancing these against what can be learned is a lot of the work of historical research. In the case of the Samantapāsādikā, its rich possibilities include:
Giving a unique insight into life in Sri Lanka in the 5th century CE: even if not all of the commentaries were made then, it is clear that Ācariya Buddhaghose updated his material significantly. Sometimes internal details allow specific pieces of advice to be dated more accurately.
Offering an intimate picture of monastic life and concerns: Buddhist monasteries played a crucial role in 5th-century CE Sri Lanka. They owned huge areas of land, invested in infrastructure, participated in political life and offered religious services to hundreds of thousands of peoples. Monastic life was definitely not withdrawn or set apart from other elements of Sri Lankan civilisation.
Providing an insight into ancient Sri Lanka, from inside Sri Lanka: as the authors discuss, much of the history of Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific was dominated between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries by European perspectives. This was part of a colonial knowledge system, that helped to reinforce the stereotype of ‘inferior’ parts of the world, whose past could only be known by ‘superior’ Europeans. Texts like the Samantapāsādikā provide an alternative point of view.
Snapshots
The glimpses that the Samantapāsādikā give us into Sri Lankan irrigation in the 5th century CE are fascinating and intimate (and much more exciting than you might think, if you haven’t thought much about water management before!). It reveals, for example, that in Sri Lanka (as in many parts of the world, past and present) the weather and the moral state of society, were seen as closely connected: ‘During the reign of righteous rulers, it would rain once a half month or ten days or five days…’ (p. 14).
Utterly delightful was a reflection in the commentaries on how to prevent damage to canals for channeling water to fields. Damage could lead to unfair water distribution or people’s fields drying out. The Samantapāsādikā specifies that people should not cause waves, which might erode canal banks or lead to breaches. This, Ācariya Buddhaghose adds, means not encouraging children to play in the canals. The text goes further, though, adding that, if children are already playing in the canal, a person should not startle or scare them, presumably because then they would jump about and cause even more waves (p. 31)!
Snapshots like this of the everyday in the distant past draw me back again and again to my subject: gorgeous reminders of the variety but also the similarity of human experience and the timelessness of simple pleasures, such as splashing around in cool water on a hot summer’s day.
Systems
Jayawardana and Wijithadhamma also explore some of the practicalities of water management and I came away from this article with a lot of the simple joy of knowing things I didn’t before. For example, did you know…?
Modern sluices, which release water from reservoirs in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, usually let the water out from the bottom of the pool, to flow downhill into fields below. The problem with this is that natural salts in the surrounding ground and in rainwater sink. The water at the bottom of the reservoir therefore becomes saltier than the water at the top. Releasing water from the bottom of the reservoir, over time, causes the fields that are being irrigated to become less productive, and even barren, because of increased salinity. From the descriptions in the Samantapāsādikā it seems that ancient sluices released water from the surface of the reservoir, not the bottom. This may explain why our historical sources for ancient Sri Lanka do not show signs of fields going out of use because of salinity, even after hundreds of years of artificial irrigation (p. 18). This remains a problem in irrigated landscapes today.
Over time, the bottom of a reservoir or pond becomes more and more watertight, because as water seeps out of the bottom, it draws smaller and smaller pieces of mud and debris into the smaller and smaller holes that the water escapes through. Reservoirs also fill up with silt and mud over time, meaning that they are able to hold less water. When a reservoir needs to be dredged, therefore, it is important to scrape out the excess mud, but not too much of it. Dredging too deeply will damage the waterproofing that has developed over time. This seems to be something that ancient engineers in Sri Lanka understood (pp. 28-29).
Some thoughts about the application of the past
The purpose of Jayawardana and Wijithadhamma’s article is not to suggest new ways to manage water in modern Sri Lanka. However, the authors do point out that colonial scholars and administrators, from the 16th century to 1948, judged Sri Lankan technology by European standards and disregarded local methods in favour of standardised approaches (p. 6). This applied to everything, not just water management, and everywhere in the colonised world, not just Sri Lanka.
The modern world, and the colonial organisations that gave birth to it, both prefer to operate with standard systems of knowledge. Theories are developed, refined from the specificities of reality into abstractions that assume unlimited resource and complete information. This is then reapplied in turn to specific situations.
As we face massive intersectional challenges, from climate change to environmental degradation, there can be an urge to look backwards, to hunt for An Answer (perhaps The Answer) in the past. Whether it is an ancient and mysterious civilisation that built the pyramids and Atlantis, then disappeared, or hidden knowledge passed down by shadowy figures in secret societies, it isn’t hard to find conspiracy theories whispering that if we just look into ancient history, we might find a miraculous way out of the problems of the future.
No surprises that I, and every other credible historian, finds these theories unconvincing. There are no missing years or lost technologies, no shortcuts or miracle escape pods. The past is not The Answer. But…
Our ancestors, all over the world, invested huge amounts of time and effort, over generations, into understanding their locality. Though some people did move around, for the most part societies were less mobile than now. As a result people developed great insight into sustainability and risk mitigation in their particular environment: their lives depended on it. As the world changes around us, and general theories prove inadequate or impractical, we are starting to realise that our lives, too, may depend on the local, the specific and the longterm. These are perspectives that the past can offer in spades: not answers, but suggestions.