The village of Panvira has long been associated with artisans who make the humble “paathra,” a special bowl that is one of the eight essentials donated to monks for prayers for food.
Thenuwara Badalge Sarath, 65, says he is the only blacksmith left in a village that once supplied much of the country with iron ore.
“When I learned the craft from my father, more than a dozen families in the neighborhood made these bowls,” Sarath says, hammering a piece of scrap metal into a holy vessel.
“Today, I am the only one who continues the tradition. My son died in a road accident recently and there will be no one to continue the craft after I die,” says the fourth-generation artisan.
It takes him about a week to make a batch of five or six bowls from discarded steel drums. Each bowl sells for 600 rupees ($2), but competition from cheap imports is fierce.
“There are aluminium bowls imported from abroad. They are cheaper and lighter – we can’t compete,” Sarath said at his village blacksmith shop near the southern tourist resort of Hikkaduwa.
Karma drives demand
Demand for alms bowls is unusually high in the Buddhist-majority country of about 22 million people, where there are more than 42,000 monks, as offering them to temples brings good karma.
Kirinde Assagi, a senior Buddhist monk, said alms bowls are one of eight items a monk needs to lead an ascetic life and spread the dharma, along with two robes, a razor, a filter cloth, a bunch of needles and a belt.
“The bowl is his livelihood. When a monk goes out begging with the bowl, he gets food,” Assagi said.
“Because giving ‘ata pirikara’ to monks brings great good karma, devotees are rushing to donate this,” the monk said of the eight-item gift pack.
At the Gangaramaya temple in the capital Colombo, nine such donation packages were received in an hour on one weekend.
A mountain of discarded pots
Most of the bowls are of poor quality, made of aluminium and unfit for food, Asajji said.
In a storage room behind the temple sits a pile of bowls that monks say are not even fit for feeding house pets.
“I’ll show you a pile of begging bowls that we discard. We make holes in the bottom of the bowls and use them to plant potted plants.”
Monks in Thailand, Myanmar and Laos traditionally beg for alms every morning to emphasise their simple lives and show their reliance on others for their livelihoods.
But the influx of cheap bowls is affecting dawn rituals.
“As the quality of alms bowls declines, we see the custom of begging among monks slowly disappearing,” he said.
The Gangaramaya temple in Colombo has been working to improve the quality of the vessels offered to monks and revive the alms-giving ritual.
In recent years, the Thai royal family has gifted more than 27,000 high-quality stainless steel bowls to Sri Lankan monks, most of whom are followers of the country’s Siamese school of Buddhism, Asaj said.
Unlike the financially wealthy Gangaramaya temple, smaller temples sell excess bowls back to the market, a move that hurts traditional artisans like Sarath.
“When the bowls go back from the temple to the shops, we find it difficult to sell our products,” Sarath said.
He tries to convince devotees that offering bowls that have been re-gifted is less meritorious.
