Roots That Hold
Commemorating the founders who gave us a school — and a soul
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a schoolyard before the morning bell, when the dew still clings to the grass and the first light catches the old stone buildings just so. Every Old Rajan who has stood on that hilltop overlooking the Kandy Lake knows that silence — and knows, somewhere beneath conscious thought, that it carries weight. It carries the weight of more than a century. It carries the weight of what a handful of extraordinary men dared to believe in 1887, when the odds were firmly against them.
This year, as we gather once more to commemorate our founders, we do not simply observe a tradition. We answer a debt. And to understand what we owe, we must first understand what they risked, what they built, and the remarkable, improbable story of how Dharmaraja College came to exist at all.
The World They Were Fighting Against
The 1880s in Ceylon were not an easy time to be a Buddhist. For decades, British colonial rule and the powerful network of Christian missionary schools had placed the island's educated class firmly within a Western cultural orbit. To receive a proper English education — the only kind that opened doors — a Sinhalese boy typically had no choice but to attend a mission school. Buddhist culture, Buddhist learning, the Dhamma itself — these were being quietly, systematically pushed to the margins.
It was in this context that an American arrived in Kandy with a vision that must have seemed, to cautious minds, rather audacious: a Buddhist school, English-medium, that could compete with the finest missionary institutions in the country. His name was Colonel Henry Steel Olcott.
"A major factor in the decline of the Sinhalese Buddhists was the lack of proper education — and the best solution was to make educational institutes available with a solid Buddhist religious background." — The founding philosophy of the Buddhist Theosophical Society
The Man From America
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott was not, by any conventional measure, who you would expect to found a Buddhist school in the heart of Sri Lanka. An American philanthropist, lawyer, and journalist, he had been electrified by reading a transcript of the famous Panadura Vadaya of 1873 — a remarkable public debate in which Buddhist monks had more than held their own against Christian missionaries. Olcott saw in Theravada Buddhism a philosophy that aligned with his deepest convictions, and he made a decision that would change the island forever: he came to Ceylon to help.
As founder of the Buddhist Theosophical Society, Olcott worked with venerable Buddhist clergy and local patriots to diagnose a simple truth: Buddhist children needed schools of their own. Schools that would give them the world's knowledge without asking them to surrender their heritage. In 1887, he visited Kandy and expressed his wish to start just such an English-medium Buddhist institution. The idea found immediate, passionate support among the city's Kandyan nobles.
Today, his statue stands at the college — garlanded each year at the Founders' Day ceremony — a permanent tribute to the outsider who chose to stand on the inside of Ceylon's most important cultural struggle.
The Founders
The Night of the Bo Tree
History rarely turns on grand gestures. More often, it turns on a single, audacious act carried out by a single, resolute person in the dark.
The land chosen for the school lay in front of the Old Palace, in the shadow of the Sacred Tooth Relic Temple, adjoining the Natha Devalaya — a site whose spiritual significance made it perfect for a Buddhist institution. But standing on that plot was a large Bo tree, the Ficus religiosa, sacred to every Buddhist in the kingdom.
The British Colonial Administration saw their opportunity. They declared the tree could not be felled — such an act, they said with studied solemnity, would be an insult to Buddhism itself. It was a trap dressed as sensitivity. If the tree remained, there could be no school. If the Buddhists cut it down themselves, they could be publicly accused of desecrating their own religion. The founders were caught.
The Legend
One Night, One Man, One Decision That Changed Everything
Wadugodapitiya Punchirala Korale did not wait for permission. The Kapu Mahattaya of the Devalaya understood, with the clarity of a man who had spent his life in the shadow of the Tooth Temple, that the tree in question was not itself an object of veneration — it was a pretext. And pretexts, unlike sacred trees, could be removed.
That night, he organised the felling and complete removal of the Bo tree. By morning, when the British administrators arrived to inspect their clever obstacle, the ground was clear. The "insult to Buddhism" had vanished in the darkness. And on the 30th of June, 1887, Dharmaraja College opened its doors.
Twelve Students and a Cadjan Shed
It is worth pausing to picture what Dharmaraja looked like on its very first day. Not the sweeping hilltop campus with its cricket grounds and hostels and the gleaming Kandy Lake view. Not the institution of 4,000 students and three hundred teachers. The Dharmaraja of 1887 was a modest cadjan shed — a thatched-roof structure — with a single teacher and twelve students.
That teacher was its first Principal, Andiris De Silva, who served from 1887 to 1890. Under his quiet, committed leadership the school grew steadily — first to fifty students, then toward a hundred — and the families of Kandyan nobles began enrolling their sons, lending the institution both numbers and social standing.
By 1890 a more academically credentialed principal was needed, and the school found one in a young scholar who would reshape its destiny. Sir D.B. Jayatilaka — a man who would go on to become one of Ceylon's most important nationalist leaders — became the second principal. It was Jayatilaka who gave the school the name it carries to this day: Dharmaraja, named after the Buddha himself, the King of the Dhamma.
The Makers of Dharmaraja
What They Left Us
From that cadjan shed has grown one of the finest schools in Sri Lanka — a 54-acre campus overlooking the Kandy Lake, home to over 4,000 students, one of the oldest scout troops in the world, a cricket rivalry stretching back to 1893, and a lineage of alumni who have shaped the politics, culture, sciences, and arts of this nation across more than thirteen decades.
The school whose first home was a thatched shed now has laboratories, a library, a swimming pool, an indoor stadium, and buildings named for the very men who built it. It has sent its scouts to the Himalayas, its ruggerites to the national team, its scholars to every corner of the world.
But what our founders truly left us cannot be measured in acres or in trophies. They left us a proof of concept — the audacious, stubborn, ultimately triumphant idea that a people need not surrender their identity to receive an education. That a Buddhist child in colonial Ceylon could sit in a classroom, study hard, speak English, and still go home to the Dhamma. That heritage and ambition are not enemies.
Every Old Rajan who has ever walked through those gates carries that proof within them.
A Brief Journey Through Time
Dharmaraja opens as the Kandy Buddhist High School — a cadjan shed, 12 students, one teacher. The night before, a Bo tree that stood in its way had been quietly, brilliantly removed.
Sir D.B. Jayatilaka becomes principal and renames the school Dharmaraja College — "the King of the Dhamma." The academic foundation of a great institution is laid.
The first Battle of the Maroons cricket encounter against Kingswood College is held — a rivalry now in its second century.
K.F. Billimoria — a Parsee who came to Ceylon on a short commercial visit and stayed for 30 years — becomes principal, beginning a transformative era of construction and expansion.
The 1st Kandy Dharmaraja Scout Group is established — one of the oldest scout troops in the world. It goes on to win the King's Flag for three consecutive years: 1917, 1918, and 1919 — an unmatched record.
Billimoria acquires the Lake View Estate — 37 acres overlooking the Kandy Lake — securing the magnificent campus that generations of Rajans would call home.
Over 4,000 students. 300 teachers. 54 acres. And a spirit that traces its lineage, unbroken, to a thatched shed, twelve boys, and a handful of men who refused to accept the world as it was.
You Are Part of This Story
Fellow Old Rajans — every one of us is a chapter in the book those founders began writing in 1887. We did not choose to be born into this lineage, but we are shaped by it nonetheless. The maroon and blue is not just a colour scheme; it is a covenant. A covenant with Olcott's vision, with Punchirala Korale's courage, with Jayatilaka's scholarship, and with the twelve unnamed boys who sat down in a cadjan shed and began to learn.
This year's commemoration is our moment to honour that covenant together — in person, in community, as Rajans. To garland the statue, to hear the stories again, to look at one another and recognise that we are the proof that our founders were right.
You are warmly invited
Invitation: Honoring Our Founders Join Us at the Founders' Commemoration
We invite every Old Rajan, wherever in the world you may be, to join your fellow alumni as we honor the men who gave us our school, our values, and our community. Let us stand together where those twelve students once sat—and remember what it all began with.
In this same spirit of gratitude, we invite all Rajans in Melbourne to join us in commemorating the founders of Dharmaraja College. Please join us for an Alms Giving Ceremony to be held at a temple in South East Melbourne during the last week of June 2026.
Specific details regarding the venue and timing will be shared shortly. We encourage you to come together, share in the merits of this meritorious act, and honor the legacy of our great founders. Let us unite in remembrance and gratitude.
Oneself is the refuge for oneself — College Motto, from the Dhammapada
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