Living Heritage

Living Heritage was spawned as the love child of dreamers, sages, shamans, magicians and world citizens who have seen enough, done enough and traveled far enough to know that the world is quickly killing off all that is unique. With the mass standardization of the global village, we are no longer surprised when we travel. We know what to expect, with eco-tourism as the latest gimmick – air conditioning, comfortable beds, a swimming pool, a research station with a laboratory for professional botanists, a forest trail and yoga.

The great scholar Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy writing in The Dance of Shiva, Fourteen Indian Essays in 1924 stated:

“ Each race contributes something essential to the world's civilization in the course of its own self-expression and self-realization. The character built up in solving its own problems, in the experience of its own misfortunes, is itself a gift which each offers to the world. The essential contribution of India, then, is simply her Indianess; her great humiliation would be to substitute for this own character (sva-bhava) a cosmopolitan veneer, for then indeed she must come before the world empty-handed”.

What applies to India applies equally to Sri Lanka, to Peru, Tibet, Europe – to every nation that is in its own way unique. The essential contribution of Sri Lanka is then, simply, her serendipity or Sri Lanka-ness. We have so little left of the unique culture that sets us apart, that we, at Living Heritage, have devoted our time and resources to creating oases that cast a “magic bubble” over sacred regions and sacred ways of life to both preserve them and to make them accessible to those who have the heart to understand them and the spirit to seek them out.