Sasara Wasana Thuru Lyrics by Amaradeva

(For as long as I wander through saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth),
until the day I see nibbāna (liberation)…)

In this field of merit, this golden Sinhala soil,
to be born here again,
may the causes and the good fortune fall in place,
the causes and the good fortune.

(The rays of the Ruwanmali stupa, the shade of the great Bodhi tree,
the Tissa reservoir and Sigiriya, these are my inheritance…)

(For as long as I wander through saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth),
until the day I see nibbāna (liberation)…)

In this field of merit, this golden Sinhala soil,
to be born here again,
may the causes and the good fortune fall in place,
the causes and the good fortune.

This is a love song to a homeland, sung as a quiet prayer. The voice belongs to a Sri Lankan who looks at his own land, the temples and tanks and rock fortresses he grew up among, and makes one wish: that for as long as he is bound to be reborn at all, every one of those births might happen here, on this same Sinhala soil, until the day he finally reaches nibbāna and the wandering stops.

To understand why that wish carries so much weight, you have to hear the Buddhist idea underneath it. Saṃsāra is the long, repeating cycle of birth and death that, in Buddhist thought, every being is caught in. Nobody chooses where they are born next; that is shaped by kamma and by hetu and vāsanā, the causes and the accumulated good fortune you carry from life to life. So when the song asks “may the causes and the good fortune fall in place,” it is not a casual hope. It is asking that all of that unseen machinery line up so that rebirth keeps landing in this one place he loves. He calls the land a pin keth, literally a “field of merit,” the image of soil where good deeds grow like a crop, and ran derana, golden earth, the way you’d speak of something precious and blessed.

The middle verse is the heart of it, and it is where a listener from outside Sri Lanka needs a little decoding. He names four things as his urumaya, his inheritance, the things he feels he belongs to. Ruwanmali (the Ruwanwelisaya in Anuradhapura) is one of the most sacred Buddhist stupas on the island, its white dome a symbol of devotion for centuries. The maha bo, the great Bodhi tree, is the sacred fig at Anuradhapura grown from a cutting of the very tree the Buddha sat under, the oldest historically recorded tree in the world. Tissa Wewa is an ancient reservoir from the same old kingdom, standing for the wisdom of a civilization that mastered water and farming long ago. And Sigiriya is the fifth-century rock fortress and its frescoes, the height of the island’s art and engineering. Set side by side, these four are shorthand for the whole sweep of Sinhala Buddhist heritage: faith, history, ingenuity, and beauty.

What the song leaves you holding is a deep, calm belonging. There is no romance and no grief in it, only the contentment of someone who has found the place his soul is at home and would not trade it across a hundred lifetimes. Coming from Amaradeva’s voice, it lands as something close to a national hymn, a gentle vow that this land and its inheritance are worth being born for, again and again, until there is no more being born at all.