A senior Buddhist prelate has written to the Commissioner General of Prisons arguing that only an ordained monk and his own Maha Sangha Sabha may decide whether his robes are removed, after prison authorities issued Ven. Galagodaaththe Gnanasara Thera with standard prison dress and a prisoner registration number.
The letter is from Ven. Kotapitiye Rahula Thera, Anunayake of the Maha Vihara lineage Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte Sri Kalyani Samagri Dharma Maha Sangha Sabha and a retired senior professor, the Daily Mirror reported. Gnanasara Thera belongs to the same Sangha Sabha.
What the letter says
The Anunayake Thera opens by accepting the court’s authority outright. The Sangha Sabha raises no objection to the judgment and “fully accepts the supremacy of the judiciary,” he writes — the dispute is not with the sentence but with what happens to the robes inside prison, which he says he learned of from media reports.
His argument is a jurisdictional one. The right to robe a monk, and to disrobe one, rests with the monk himself and the Maha Sangha Sabha he belongs to, and under the practice established in Sri Lanka it is an ecclesiastical act requiring the approval of the relevant Mahanayake Thera. Allowing a monk to appear in his robes whenever he is brought outside his place of detention is, he writes, long-established traditional practice, and disregarding it sets a wrong precedent for the Sasana.
He then makes the specific claim on which the request turns: Gnanasara Thera has not been reported to the Sangha Sabha as having committed a Parajika offence under the Vinaya Pitaka — the category of transgression that ends monkhood — nor any offence serious enough to warrant removal of his robes. Determining that, after a disciplinary inquiry, is the Sangha Sabha’s own responsibility.
He therefore asks that the robes not be removed and that Gnanasara Thera be allowed to appear in them when taken outside detention. Hiru News, which published the letter in full, reports that copies were sent to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and to the Commissioner General of Buddhist Affairs.
What the prison has already done
The step the letter objects to had been taken the previous afternoon. Prison media spokesman and Commissioner of Prisons (Operations) Senaka Pallegetenna said on Monday that Gnanasara Thera had been given a prisoner registration number and the jumper issued to inmates, that his robes had been removed, and that he is being held in a ward for ordinary prisoners, Hiru News reported.
That followed the Court of Appeal order directing the Commissioner General of Prisons to enforce the balance of the six-year contempt sentence, after the Supreme Court annulled the 2019 presidential pardon granted by then-President Maithripala Sirisena. He was returned to Welikada Prison on Monday, having been arrested on an open warrant on Sunday.
The effect of the prison’s registration is visible in court. When he was produced before the Colombo High Court on Tuesday in a separate case, he appeared in civilian white clothing rather than robes.
Two sets of rules meeting
The disagreement is narrow but unresolved: prison authorities say he has been registered and treated as an ordinary inmate in accordance with prison procedure, while the Sangha Sabha says the status being altered is an ecclesiastical one that prison procedure has no standing to change.
Not reported
Neither filing carries a response from the Commissioner General of Prisons, the Department of Prisons or the Ministry of Justice to the letter. No outlet reports whether the Department has a standing rule on ordained prisoners’ dress, or what was done when Gnanasara Thera served the first nine months of this same sentence in 2018–2019. There is no indication of whether the Mahanayake Theras of the Siyam, Amarapura or Ramanna Nikayas have taken a position, whether the Sangha Sabha intends to hold the disciplinary inquiry its letter describes, or whether Gnanasara Thera himself has made any request. The President’s office has not commented on the copy sent to it.
