Browsing by Author "Sachithanantham, P."

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Environmental Conservation through Yoga Practice and its Relevance to Contemporary Society
(Research Centre for Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Sachithanantham, P.; Thavapraba, S.
Environmental conservation is being discussed in various platforms in the 21st century. Every religion in society has many environmental concerns and ecofriendly philosophies in their doctrine related to describing cosmology, creation theories, the interconnectedness of gods and the nature, creatures and human. Yoga has eight ethical principles to stimulate human activities and safeguard the environment. In this way, religions and yoga help produce ideas that can lead to the protection of the natural environment. Humankind is spiritual, and their negligence or failure to follow the religious faith properly due to their busyness in their day to day activities leads them to exploit and pollute the natural environment. Yoga is an ancient religious wisdom. Practicing yoga is becoming a viable means to consoling the human mind, physical fitness and happy life in contemporary society. Protecting the environment through the philosophy of yoga has not been communicated to the present world by the researchers even though much research is carried out on environmental protection from various angles. Therefore, this research aims to demonstrate the yogic perspective of environmental conservation and recommend basic principles emphasing the importance of observing yoga. Thus, yoga practices will lead the individual towards attitudinal and behavioral change and control the adverse effects of human activities on the environment. This research analyzed data related to the literature on yoga sutra, textbooks, journals, research articles on environmental issues, and reached the conclusion that practicing yoga would be a useful way to minimize the environmental hazards due to human activities and optimizing environmental conservation through changing the individual mindset.
Pursuing environmental protection through religious doctrine and its relevance to the Sri Lankan context
(Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Sachithanantham, P.; Thavapraba, S.
Environmental protection is one of the important global issues in the contemporary word. Considering the emergence of the environmental pollution and effect, environmental protection has got a status as a burning topic among the researchers and several types of research and forums have been conducted in this connection internationally as well as locally. Religion is one of the social institutions. All the major religions, which are followed in Sri Lanka are very much concerned about the environmental protection based on the theories of cosmology, creation, immanence of god in creatures, relationship of nature, human, admiration of nature, worship of nature. Hence, religions encourage the environmental protection. Religion, nature and humans, are interconnected as one family. In the modern era, science and technology exploit nature for human consumption and human activities. This is widening the gap between the interconnectedness of the god, nature, and human and even venerate the nature. Religious doctrine has not been adopted in the human characteristics and value formation. As a result man looks at nature as alien and he has failed to protect the environment. Religions give a sound eco-friendly background to human community through doctrine. But it does not reflect on their life. At this point, this research analysed data and extracted from the literature on religious Holy Scriptures, textbooks, encyclopaedia, journals, and research articles on environmental issues and try to communicate the findings. Sri Lanka is a religious country. The role of religions in influencing the decision making of every issue in Sri Lanka is inevitable since the independence. The objective of the research was to introduce the interaction of religions and environment, identify the environmental protection principles in the religious texts, and propose religious ideas for environmental protection. Therefore, the research explores and reiterates the environmental protection ideas from the religious doctrine and suggests to incorporate and implement those ideas in the environmental protection endeavour in Sri Lanka.
Social Harmony among Multi-Lingual Students Population in Sri Lankan Universities- A Research Special Reference to Eastern University Sri Lanka
(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Sachithanantham, P.
Universities consist of multi religious, multi-cultural and multi lingual student population, where it is expected to have social harmony among those undergraduates. However there have been recorded incidences and evidence to prove ethnic friction and linguistic Barriers in sustaining harmonious atmosphere in university education. Therefore, it is understood that the existing administrative mechanism has not improved social harmony among undergraduates of multicultural and multi linguistic background. Eastern university is teaching social harmony in English to have a common medium of instruction. Most of the Undergraduates who entered the Eastern University come from rural area and poor family background and they learnt in their mother language at the schools. Though majority of the university programmes are taught in English, schools have their curriculum in Sinhala and Tamil. Therefore students enrolled in to the university where their programme is in English will have trouble both in understanding the subjects as well as in communicating with other. These students face some problems such as transferring ideas, communication and interaction, mutual trust. Highlighting one community culture might be perceived as threat to others. Even after teaching social harmony at the university there are notable incidents challenges to normalcy between different students communities. The research intends; a) to learn how teaching social harmony contributes to make stability in the cohesive relationship among the students in the university; b) to learn what are the programmes practised in the universities; C) to learn what are the programme undertaken in other universities; and d) to identify the challenges to sustain the harmony between different students communities.Undergraduate population of EUSL are of Sinhala and Tamil in terms of language, where majority of the programme are conducted in English except, for faculty of Arts and Culture. Social harmony programme no exception. However informal communication is primarily done in their mother languages which might lead to misunderstanding and therefore will widen the gap between different undergraduate communities. Therefore more emphasis should be laid on social harmony programmes that will bring multi ethnic students together. Cultural activities should be encouraged in addition to teaching social harmony in class.