Henri van Zeyst was one of the
last of that generation of Westerners who came to Asia to join the Buddhist monkhood
before the Second World War. Of the many who came, few lasted long. Henri went
to Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, and was still there 50 years later, although not as
a monk. Those who came then and in later decades and did stay, usually flourished and became known to
Western Buddhists through their writings on Buddhism and translations of
Buddhist texts; Nyanatiloka and Nyanaponika, Nyanamoli, Nyanavira and Bhikkhu
Bodhi being amongst the more famous. Henri van Zeyst remained little known
outside his country of adoption, despite his numerous writings.
Henri was born in Utrecht, the
Netherlands into a pious Catholic family in 1905. He was a brilliant student
and in his early teens decided to study for the priesthood, to the delight of
his parents. A younger sister eventually became a nun. Educated throughout in Catholic schools and colleges, he spent his final years of studies in
philosophy and theology and the first year of his priestly ordination in an
Italian monastery near Florence. In his early ’30s he was sent to London to be
in charge of a new foundation of his Order, where he was also teaching
Dogmatic Theology to the scholastics of Christus Rex Priory in North London.
As part of his continuing
intellectual development Henri did a course in comparative religion and came
into contact with Buddhism for the first time. Gradually some of the uncertainties he had
about aspects of Catholic doctrine but
which up until then he had resolved to accept on faith, began to be aggravated by what he learned about the
Dhamma. He was startled to discover that this sophisticated philosophy with its
lofty ethical ideals dispensed with the notion of a soul and even with a divine
arbiter. When he learned that there was actually a Buddhist temple in London,
on Gloucester Road in Kensington, he started surreptitiously visiting it in his
spare time. The monks there gave him books to read and did their best to answer
his questions. The more Henri read the
more he found himself agreeing with aspects of Buddhism which directly
contradicted what he had always believed and had dedicated his whole life to.
Neither fervent prayers for strength and guidance, nor fears about alienating his
family, friends and teachers, nor concerns about what he would do with his life
if he left the Church, could stop the fading of his faith.
Once Henri told me of the discomfort he felt when he succeeded in
dispelling the doubts of a man who had been losing his faith, when he himself no
longer believed. The pressure of living a lie was becoming unbearable. Something
had to break and eventually it did. Convinced that the Dhamma, and not the
Church, had the most credible explanation of reality, Henri decided to leave.
Late one night he put all the monastery keys on his desk together with a letter
saying that he was never coming back and stole into the night. He took a room
in a small hotel and slept almost continuously for three days, the tension of living a lie for so long having utterly
exhausted him. A few days later he booked passage on a steamship and left for
Ceylon. The first port of call was Marseille in southern France and he looked
forward to exploring the city and walking around without his clerical garb. But
as he walked down the gang-plank he saw, to his utter amazement, his parents,
the family priest and another cleric waiting for him on the pier. It seems his
fellow priests in London had sensed his cooling religious fervor and despite
his efforts to keep it secret, had also come to know of his visits to the
London Buddhist Mission. When he disappeared they reasoned that one of the
things he might have been considering was becoming a Buddhist monk. A check of
passenger lists of steamers heading to Asia uncovered his name. The Church in
Holland was notified and they arranged for his parents, his family’s priest and
a senior cleric from his Order to be driven at breakneck speed through Holland,
Belgium and France to meet the ship when it arrived. When Henri saw his parents
he retreated back on board and they and the two priests came up to meet him
there. Several hours of pleading and arguing followed. The senior cleric assured
Henri that he was just tired and after a good rest and some counseling
everything would be back to normal. Henri replied that it wasn’t a matter of
tiredness; he simply no longer believed. Finally his mother announced tearfully
but firmly: “If you go you will never see me or your father again.” He never
did either, although in early 1965 he made a trip back to the Netherlands where
he had a happy reunion with his siblings. As a gesture of reconciliation they
bought him a green Volkswagen and even in the 1970s and early 80s he could still
be seen driving it around Kandy.
Henri arrived in Ceylon on the 26th of August 1938 with no
money, no knowledge of the country he was determined to become a monk in, and
only the address of the Maha Bodhi Society, given to him by one of the monks in
London. Nonetheless, the natural hospitality of the Sinhalese soon helped him
find his way and on the 10th Oct 1938 he took his novice ordination
at Maligakanda in Colombo and was given the name
Dhammapāla. Immediately he began a period of intensive study of Dhamma, Pāli
and Vinaya at the Wikramashila Pirivena in Pallewela, on the outskirts of Gampaha.
On the 5th of December two years later he received his higher
ordination. In those days many of the educated class in Ceylon were looking
forward to the very real possibility of full independence after the war and
there was a surge of interest in the nation’s history, culture, language and
particularly its religion. The presence of an impressive-looking European monk
(Henri was 6 ft. 4") who had not only adopted Buddhism but had actually
become a monk as well, attracted an enormous amount of attention. The fact that he was not
British gave him extra appeal. Soon he was surrounded by a crowd of helpers and admirers, the foremost of these being the famous lawyer and educator Ananda Mivanapalana.
In 1942 Dhammapāla became seriously ill and had to be hospitalized. During this time he
was devotedly cared for by Richard Abhayasekera, later to
become one of the founders of the Buddhist Publication Society together with
the famous German monk Nyanaponika. After recovering his health Dhammapāla and
Mivanapalana founded the All-Ceylon Buddhist Students Union, an organization
that was to have a profound influence on a whole generation of high school and
university students, many of whom went on to become senior figures in politics,
the civil service, education and law.
One of his students from that time has written: “Dhammapāla
spoke to [the students] in simple English, brilliant with human cameos and an
impish humour that made Buddhism real and meaningful to the young. It shook
them out of the lazy complacency, dull sermons and half-understood ritual that
Buddhist practice in most schools had slipped into.” Another organization inspired
by Dhammapāla was the Kandy Buddhist Association which continued to conduct its
activities up to the 1980s. One of the highlights of his teaching during this
period was a three-day debate he had with the Rev. Clifford Wilson, Vicar of
Christ Church, Galle Face, organized by students of the University of Ceylon.
Although the audience was a mixed one, both Buddhists and Christians, the
general consensus was that the Rev. Wilson had been bettered. At the end of the
event he good-naturedly bowed to Dhammapāla and said: “Venerable sir, I take my
hat off to you.” The crowd, which had increased exponentially each day of the
debate, roared its approval – at Wilson’s magnanimity and at Dhammapāla’s
victory.
While Dhammapāla’s regard for the Buddha’s
teachings never faltered, he was increasingly dismayed by how it was practiced
and understood in Ceylon. The general state of the Sangha disheartened him even
more. Talking about his feelings at this time Henri once commented to me: “I
finally came to the conclusion that you can practice the Dhamma without the
Buddhism. In fact, I thought and I still think that you can only fully practice the Dhamma without
the Buddhism.” In 1947 he disrobed, to the great sadness of his many admirers.
Shortly
after he disrobed Henri decided to go to India to visit Buddhist sacred sites and
to explore the country’s rich and diverse spiritual heritage. He met some of
the great saints of the time; Ramana Maharishi, Anandamayi Ma, Sivananda
Sarasvati and even Sai Baba, then just a young man little known outside the
district where he lived. The Hindu saint who impressed him most was the gentle,
smiling Ram Dass with whom he stayed with for some time. He also he met J. Krishnamurti
in Varanasi, an encounter that would have an influence on his understanding of
Buddhism. The two remained friends for many years and met for the last time
during Krishnamurti’s tour of Sri Lanka in 1980.
Henri had no patience for the ritualistic
practices and supernatural claims of religions; he would occasionally jokingly describe
himself as “a Kalama Sutta Buddhist.” However, he did acknowledge that he had
once been witness to what would normally be considered a miracle. During his
time in India he had heard about the then 21-year old still little-known Satya
Sai Baba and had gone to meet him. As he walked along the dusty road to the
ashram he saw the swami coming towards him, took out his camera and took a
picture of him. When the two met Sai Baba told him that the picture would not
come out and that he should take another one. When Henri cocked the camera to
do so he found that his film was finished. Sai Baba crouched down, made a small
pile of dust and suddenly pulled a roll of film out of it. Henri was utterly
astonished. Even until recently, finding a roll of film in a remote Indian
village was difficult; in the 1940s it was virtually impossible. When Henri
related this story, and I heard him do so on several occasions, he would always
end by saying: “You can believe it or not. I don’t care. But that happened to me!” although he never
attempted to give a rational explanation for the incident.
When
Henri returned to Ceylon he was uncertain what he could do to make a living.
Having lived in monasteries since his teens he had little experience of the
real world. He took several teaching jobs, and worked for the General Insurance
Co. in Colombo. During a trip to Adyar to attend Krishnamurti’s talks the next
year Henri met a Tamil Christian woman Miss Leela Victor, a teacher at
Methodist Girls’ College in Colombo, and the two married in 1949. In 1956 an opportunity presented itself which
was almost tailor-made for Henri. As a part of the Buddha Jayanti celebrations
of that year the Government of Ceylon undertook to publish what was to be
called The Encyclopedia of Buddhism. It
was an ambitious project and some of the world’s best Buddhist scholars were
recruited to help. Henri was invited to join the staff. A plan for the
encyclopedia was drawn up, and after a specimen fascicule was circulated
amongst scholars and Buddhist leaders met with wide approval, it was decided to
proceed with the project. Henri’s entries appeared from the first fascicule
onwards and are some of the most readable in the encyclopedia. He wrote on a
variety of subjects but he became best known and appreciated for his articles
on Buddhist doctrine.
The editor of the Encyclopedia
was Dr. G. P. Malalasekera, but after he was appointed Ceylon’s ambassador to
the USSR and later his country’s Permanent Representative to the UN he was only
occasionally in Ceylon and rarely visited the Encyclopedia’s offices when there. As a result Henri became in
effect the editor as well is its administrative secretary. By the late 60s
there were troubles with the encyclopedia. The original vision of an in-depth
coverage of all schools proved to be overly ambitious and the need to cut back
the scope was recognized, the government’s interest in the project had waned,
and the budget for the project had been drastically reduced. Henri realized
that it was time to leave and in 1968 he did.
In the early 1970s Henri began a fruitful relationship with the man who
was to become his last ‘disciple’, Mr. Kuruppu. Kuruppu owned a printing
business and had a deep interest in all schools of Buddhism. Years before Henri
had planned to write an eight volume magus
opus on Buddhism but the project never got beyond the planning stage. While
still a monk he had written a substantial tome at the request of the publishers
M. D. Gunasena but for some reason it was never published. In 1980 Henri contacted
Gunasena asking if they still had the manuscript and if so they could return it
seeing as 40 years had gone by without it appearing. They replied that after a
great deal of searching they had found the manuscript and for R.15,000 he could
have it back. Kuruppu by contrast, told Henri that anything he wrote, he,
Kuruppu, would publish. And so he did. Over the next few years Henri wrote nearly
a dozen books, all which were published and distributed.
In 1984 Leela died and shortly after Henri, already frail although still
mentally as alert and sharp as ever, underwent an unexpected change. He began
wearing his hair in a feminine manner, dressing in a sari and said that from then
on he would like to be addressed as Pushpa, a common Sri Lankan woman’s name. Friends
and acquaintances were dismayed and some began keeping their distance from him.
By this time I had moved to Singapore but I had heard what had happened. In a
long letter Henri wrote to me explaining the decision he had made he said: “All
my life I have wanted to be a woman.” I was deeply saddened by this and other
things Henri wrote, not because of his unexpected change of identity but
because it was clear that he had been fighting and denying this inner longing
for much of his life. In 1985 at the invitation of the much loved meditation
teacher Godwin Samararatne Henri moved to the Nilambe Meditation Centre in the
hills some 20 kilometers out of Kandy where he built a small hut with room enough
for himself and his helper, Chandra. Two years later at
the height of the radical JVP insurrection there was an attack at Nilambe during which one of the founders of the meditation centre,
Parakrama Fernendo, was murdered and Henri’s hut was set on fire, although it
was never established who was responsible for this or why. It was thought best
for Henri to leave and arrangements were
made for him to stay with Pat Jayatilleke, a long-time friend and wife of the late
philosopher K. N. Jayatilleke. Henri died in her home on the 15th
September 1988.
I knew Henri van Zeyst well and counted him amongst my best friends.
Many a Sunday afternoon he, Leela and I,
sometimes joined by a guest of his or a friend of mine, would sit discussing
Dhamma or theology, Western philosophy or psychology, Henri contributing most
to these subjects. While he had a profound knowledge of and appreciation for
Buddhism he could be critical of it as it is traditionally understood and practiced.
He also believed that Krishnamurti’s teachings helped clarify some aspects of
the Dhamma, a not unreasonable position. His discourse was always precise,
clear and informed and often spiced with a cheeky humor. He could become just
slightly agitated when mentioning what he took to be the irrational in religion,
but other than such moments he was always cheerful and sanguine. Despite this,
I always had a vague feeling that there was some aspect of Henri’s personality
that needed to be resolved or at least articulated but which wasn’t being. Only
later what this was became apparent.
Although Henri van Zeyst
is almost unknown beyond Sri Lanka, and even there those whose lives he changed
are growing fewer by the year, he deserves a place in the history of modern
Buddhism, especially the Western experience of Buddhism. You can read more
about him and some of his writings here http://henri-van-zeyst.buddhasasana.net/
