Protecting human heritage: Sri Lanka's Buddhist culture

We live in a time of accelerated militarism, environmental devastation, and deepening social collapse.

- DR. ASOKA BANDARAGE

Amid these crises, the destruction of our shared global heritage — humanity's historical, spiritual, and artistic legacy — receives an astounding lack of attention.

As we enter the age of transhumanism and techno-market reality, creativity is no longer an organic expression of human consciousness; it is shaped, filtered, and directed by artificial intelligence and algorithmic control. In geopolitically and ethno-religiously contested regions, this erasure becomes deliberate. Cultural destruction is not merely a byproduct of technological and market acceleration, but a calculated strategy of domination and control.

Sri Lanka’s Buddhist heritage is one such example. In the context of global rivalry, the island’s rich spiritual traditions and historical memory are being undermined — not only by external forces but also through internal conflict and distortion.

Our existence is increasingly narrowed to the logic of survival — economic productivity, algorithmic optimisation, and digital visibility. Deeper dimensions of life, including spiritual wisdom, ecological belonging, and cultural memory, are eroded or dismissed as irrelevant. Bioregionalism, historical legacy, and alternative cultural identities — traditionally rooted in place, ancestry, and ecological knowledge — find little space in this homogenized dystopian future-present.

The Sri Lankan Context