Faith
Sir Ernest de Silva was a strong Buddhist who contributed much to the advancement of Buddhism. One such instance was when he purchased an Island (Polgasduwa) in 1911 and offered it to Ven. Nanatiloke, the famous German monk, to start a hermitage for Buddhist monks. The founder-Preceptor, a reputed German Professor who had been ordained in Burma, attracted many scholars and thinkers from all parts of the world, to name a few, from Germany, France, Holland, Yugoslavia, England and the United States of America in the West to the Far East and went onto play a prominent role in the revitalization of Buddhism in the world. Sir Ernest was thus instrumental in putting Sri Lanka on the map of the world of philosophy and religion.
When a great disciple of the German monk, Ven. Gnanoponika, had wanted to disrobe and return to Germany to take his Jewish mother away from the Nazi hostilities, Sir Ernest had used his influence and vouched for his mother and relatives and brought them to Ceylon whereupon some resided in one of his estates.
He also built a temple along with this mother: the Veluvanaramaya. He was the President of the YMBA (Young Men's Buddhist Association) and the Kalutara Bodhi Trust and his wife was the Inaugural President of the Ceylon Women's Buddhist Congress. Ranasinghe Premadasa, who was Sri Lanka's president from 1989 to 1993, said of him that "if there was a Buddhist Temple or school that he did not help, it was not in Sri Lanka.
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Famous quotes containing the word faith:
“It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Alas! this is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the prevalence of a man. Nothing can be effected but by one man. He who wants help wants everything. True, this is the condition of our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery. We must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success together.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)