As for Darby Griffith, she and her husband moved to Galle, most probably in September or October 1841. Here, internal evidence suggests, she had greater contact with the missionaries. One of the first encounters she mentions is with William Bridgenell, Methodist, on 21 October 1841. And from this point, she retracts from her previous, fairly positive construction of Buddhism. In her treatment of nibbana, for instance, she first links the state of what shecalls nirvana to abstact happiness and a termination ofsuffering. Within Buddhism even the wicked, she declares, who fall into loathsome animals or who drop from hell to hell can, if they reform their conduct, ascend again to the state of a man and gain the chance of nirvana (Darby Griffith 1842, III: 58). After her move to Galle, she explains that most people believe that devils can punish themeven in another state, and that offerings can prevent this so that annihilation their greatest conceivable happiness will then be attained
Noticeable also in1841 and 1842 are long passages concerning devil worship, fear of the spirits of the dead, poisons and revenge. These had not been mentioned in her early volumes, where she preferred to record appreciatively such things as the tastiness of Sinhalese curry and the scrupulous cleanliness of the people. She writes now with horror that terminally sick people are sometimes taken away from the house and left to die in the open because relations fear that the spirit of the the person will otherwise haunt the house after death. She gives an example of a paralyzed woman of soundmind who was eaten by animals in the jungle, after having been left there by her son. And this is what she writes about poison:
The Cingales are an exceedingly revengeful people and seldom, if ever, allow any real or supposed injury to remain unpunished, they are not satisfied, and are often afraid, for they are great cowards, of letting their anger be made known by words or blows, but cherish the most lasting and deadly hatred towards each other. I have often been told by personswho have lived a great deal in the interior of the country they Europeans in general have little or no idea how many murders are committed by the natives in the unfrequented parts of the jungle and from what I have heard, l have very little of this, but I also feel-? That farless is known of the number of deaths and diseases occasioned by poison. I have actually heard of most awful cases.
Concludind remarks
In these memoir writers, praise for the living tradition of Buddhism is scant, except for Bennett and Darby Griffith. Also significant is that Buddhism continues to be linked to the irrational.Campbell feels that much that the Dambulla priests tell him is mythological or a fabrication (Campbell 1843,III: 183). Sullivan claims that a man of genius or imagination is needed to find sense in the outline he givesof the religion (Sullivan 1854: 65). Baker in his stress on superstition implies irrationality. Only De Butts, Binning and Darby Griffith show genuine appreciation.