[2] RELOCATING THE LIGHT

THE HEARER is primed by the explicit directions given in each proem, but the Mahāvaṃsa further elaborates on the transformative power of the text through its masterful use of metaphor to conjure the desired emotional states named in the proem. The Mahāvaṃsa does not just repeat the Dīpavaṃsa’s charge to the readers but extends it through the narrative of the text itself in its treatment of the metaphor of light in the story of the transformation of the nāgas. The nāgas are no longer read as simply the catalysts for the loving compassion and attention of the Buddha (as in the Dīpavaṃsa); the fact that they have been transformed into Buddhists seems more clearly established in the Mahāvaṃsa. In the Dīpavaṃsa, although there are several references to light, the metaphor is not fully developed the way it has been in the Mahāvaṃsa. It is in the rich, poetic use of the metaphor of light in the Mahāvaṃsa that we see the Mahāvihāran community reinterpreting for the reader its unique claim to the authentic lineage of the Buddha himself.

The proem of each text, then, seeks to train its audience’s eyes to notice the more narratively rich aspects of the text. The blindness of ignorance is dispelled by the heightened sensitivity brought on through washing facts with the light of the dhamma. When one’s vision has been thoroughly primed, one is able to encounter the nāga within the narrative and not dismiss it as “mythical accretion” but instead as an agent of the text’s work. In this way, I draw inspiration from the intellectual project of Hayden White, who treats

the annals and chronicle forms of historical representation, not as the imperfect histories they are conventionally conceived to be, but rather as particular products of possible conceptions of historical reality, conceptions that are alternatives to, rather than failed anticipations of, the fully realized historical discourse that the modern history form is supposed to embody…. What will be revealed, I think, is that the very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which “the true” is identified with “the real” only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.¹

The narrative of the Buddha’s three visits to the island of Laṅkā opens each of the two vaṃsas, revealing to the audience the overwhelming presence of the Buddha right at the outset. The overall narrative structure of the Buddha employing a terrifying darkness and then an enlightening light in the stories of the Buddha’s three visits is somewhat mirrored in the presentation of the Buddha’s story before the iteration of the various kings’ works. The manifesting of darkness and the giving of light function both to bolster claims of authority for the textual community responsible for the vision the text presents and to provoke saṃvega (anxious thrill) and pasāda (serene satisfaction) both in humans and nāgas within the stories as well as in the audience outside the stories. The narrative structure itself supports the goal of transformation of the reader-hearer first articulated in each proem.

In the Mahāvaṃsa, dual goals are operative: first, to effect a transformation of the individual through the narrative and, second, to achieve better poetry through the conscientious manipulation of the tools of rhetoric, including metaphor, choice epithets of the Buddha, characters as fields of empathy, and a structure that culminates in a desired effect. In other words, the structure itself is a rhetorical strategy employed to prime the reader for the full impact of the narrative itself. As we will see, reading and remembering the instructions given in the proems are integral to comprehending the full effect of the narrative.

For the Dīpavaṃsa, the text’s intended effect is both a personal, ethical transformation on the part of the hearer and perhaps a “plea for survival,” a broader assertion of the potency and legacy of the Mahāvihāra among rival institutions vying for the king’s attention and patronage.² The Mahāvaṃsa assumes these same goals and adds to them the full recentering of the Buddhist world to the island of Laṅkā. By keeping these goals and reading instructions in mind, we will be able to notice how the opening chapters’ structure and content potentially catalyze ethical transformation within the well-primed interpreter and have an impact on the imagined world order. The metaphor of the revealing light of the dhamma working on the reader-hearer to effect the full transfer of dhamma to the new territory (whether the individual actor or the island of Laṅkā) manifests the text’s worklike persuasion.

LITERARY DEVICES FOR ACHIEVING RELIGIOUS EFFECTS

In the Mahāvaṃsa, metaphors (along with similes) function as what Anne Blackburn, reflecting on the much later eighteenth-century text Sārārthadīpanī, has called “ruminative triggers,” which are “stylistic characteristics of the text that draw the text and the reader more closely together and thus intensify the quality of the reader’s reflective experience. The presence of these ruminative triggers…made it easier for monastic readers to read selectively and to interpolate elements of their personal experience (including their relationship to other texts and to people) into the work as they read.”³ The metaphor of light is a ruminative trigger particularly capable of effecting transformation, not just in these texts or even in Buddhism alone. Light “works” in all religious traditions; one need only consider the ubiquity of candles in worship. By first recognizing the range of meaning revealed by the focus on light, a reader is primed to appreciate, even be moved by, other ruminative triggers operating in the text.

To explore the literary devices and their effects, we should first take stock of the tools we are assumed to have garnered through our reading of the proems. From the Dīpavaṃsa’s proem, we understand that the first section of narrative about the Buddha himself coming to the island sets up a pattern of transference that is then replicated by the coming of the bodhi tree, the relics, the sāsana, and King Vijaya. According to that proem, by listening to and honoring this multivalent, delightful vaṃsa, joy and gladness will result. From the Mahāvaṃsa’s proem, we recognize that this text understands itself to be a replacement for the Dīpavaṃsa, relaying the same general narrative, but more efficiently and poetically. Easy to grasp and bear in mind, this text aims to produce emotional states in the reader-hearer, first saṃvega, which then transforms into pasāda, which in turn engender opportunities for these states’ continued production. These emotions must be developed in this order (saṃvega first, then pasāda), as we will see in the narrative when the Buddha manipulates fear before resultant calm sets in. The more agitated or fearful the character (within the narrative) and reader (outside the text) become, the greater the sense of joy and satisfaction they feel upon resolution of the hardship.

According to Steven Collins, saṃvega is the more intense of the two emotions. He defines the two terms in his translation of the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa as follows: “‘Serene confidence’ is pasāda, ‘animation’ saṃvega. One cannot convey all the nuances of these terms. The first is often said to occur at Buddhist Stūpas; it is a clarity of mind, calmness, and a conviction in the religious value of what, or who evokes that feeling. The second is a stronger emotion (from a root meaning to tremble or quiver), and is used when some shock inspires an increase in the intensity of religious feelings and intentions.”⁴ In other words, the text’s desired effects are not simply emotional responses in the aesthetic realm. Instead, the expectation is that the hearer will be religiously moved.⁵ These two emotional qualities are employed sequentially in the Mahāvaṃsa to heighten their religious effect. Saṃvega is not a banal shock and awe; it is explicitly the feeling of being awestruck. More importantly, it compels one to act on heightened “religious feelings and intentions.” As Maria Heim notes, “Saṃvega, translated variously as agitation, urgency, thrill, fear, and anxiety, is often used in Pāli sources to indicate fear that is capable of instigating a sense of moral and religious urgency.”⁶ The resulting calm after the storm, pasāda, is integrally connected to the shock that precedes it. Concomitant with the satisfaction of pasāda is “a conviction in the religious value” of the catalyst of that emotion, typically the Buddha.

The semantic field of the term pasāda, which means “satisfaction” and “joy,” also includes “clarity” and “light.” This term is employed in both the Dīpavaṃsa and the Mahāvaṃsa, but in the Mahāvaṃsa it assumes the character of a countermeasure to the saṃvega, which is the initial response from the yakkhas (a class of nonhuman beings) and the nāgas. The darkness of ignorance, viscerally felt during the experience of saṃvega, is replaced with the clarity and light of the dhamma—namely, pasāda. This process occurs for the text’s external readers-hearers also as their initial reaction in encountering the story, empathetic fear, is replaced by the serene confidence of clear understanding once the tension of the saṃvega is resolved.

The relationship between light, clarity, and understanding dominates Pāli texts of all eras. In her discussion of the Buddhist use of literary tropes, Blackburn quotes in its full, convoluted length a serial simile from the introduction of the Saraṇāgamana section of the overtly didactic eighteenth-century work Sārārthadīpanī.⁷ The simile runs through some of the most common depictions of the Buddha, dhamma, and saṅgha, from the Buddha as a doctor dispensing the medicine of the dhamma to the Buddha as a prince decorated with the ornaments of virtue distributing the precious gift of the dhamma to other princes. The opening images in this extended simile caught my attention. Almost mirroring the structure of the Mahāvaṃsa, after a preliminary statement that declares the text to be about the Buddha, dhamma, and saṅgha, the Sārārthadīpanī launches into depictions of the Three Gems in paired terms of light and dark, heat and cooling rays:

The three refuges are taught in this way: The Buddha is first [as] chief of all beings including men and māras and the dhamma following that because it appears as a teaching from that Buddha, and [then] the saṃgha, which is a receptacle for bearing that dhamma, like a golden bowl for lion’s oil. Further, in this regard, the Buddha is like a full moon, the dhamma taught by the Buddha is like the moon’s rays, and the saṃgha is like people made happy by the fact that that heat is calmed by the rays of the moon. Further, the Buddha is like the arc of daybreak on top of a high mountain, the dhamma is like the sun’s rays which destroy darkness, and the saṃgha is like a population for whom darkness is destroyed [having] destroyed the darkness of the defilements by looking at good teaching. The Buddha is like a person who burns the forest, because [he] burns the forest which is the defilements. The dhamma taught by the Buddha is like the fire. The Buddha’s listeners [in this case, monks] are like an area of land that has become a pure field after burning the forest of defilements.⁸

Rhetorical triggers for similes, such as the term just as and like, are markers that indicate that a reader-hearer is about to engage in the imaginative comparative leap. It is this encouraged imaginative leap that makes the Mahāvaṃsa such an effective literary text, provoking its readers-hearers through similes, metaphors, and encounters with imaginative characters. We can see the work of the imagination provoked by the text clearly in the case of similes. Blackburn writes: “These overt markers of a simile simultaneously indicate likeness and difference, emphasizing that the image presented is a verbal creation that gestures toward experience rather than directly describing it. This in turn provides what might be called an interpretive opening, or a point of entry for the reader to reflect upon the types of experience that the text describes. The reader is inspired to think about what he or she has read precisely because the simile’s avowed failure to elaborate identity puts the attentive reader to work.”⁹ There is thus a palpable tension inherent in simile usage, where the term similar or like carries the simultaneous and competing weight of “also different.” Although a simile inspires the reader primarily to picture what something (an emotion, event, or idea) is like, the reader’s overall impression must be an awareness of the inherent difference between that imaginative depiction and “reality.”

In the case of the “light of the dhamma” narrative in the Mahāvaṃsa, the tension between similar and different takes on a temporal hue. There is no overt reliance on serial similes to exaggerate the “interpretive opening” between text and reader. Instead, there is a sense that the events depicted occurred far in the past and were enacted on the reader’s behalf. The metaphor is employed to corroborate the overall lesson of the Mahāvaṃsa, that to be a “good person” one engages in the transformative capacity enabled by the work of the text via the narrative’s “interpretive opening.” And this engagement is not solely the purview of virtuosi; as Charles Hallisey remarks, “analogies, similes, and metaphors are a common feature of Theravādin homiletics,” and “analogy and simile were apparently considered very effective teaching tools, appropriate for even the dullest student.”¹⁰

The connection between the text’s explicitly stated ethical thrust and the image of light developed throughout this first narrative, I suggest, prepares the interpreter for his or her own encounter of the Buddha and his sāsana through the powerful medium of story. Once primed for what response to hope for or expect (joy, satisfaction), the reader encounters the narrative saturated in a particular light. Without the proem, and taken apart from the proem’s location at the outset of the entire vaṃsa, the opening narrative of the Buddha’s three visits to the island of Laṅkā in the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa is still whimsical and interesting and a classic example of a story of the transference of dhamma to a new place. However, once the reader is aware of the expected result of his reading, he will be more susceptible to the emotional highs and lows, the agitation and relief, constructed in the narrative. The text may even inspire action in the form of supporting the textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa’s production.

An effective rhetorical strategy is employed in the very first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa. Whereas the story of the Buddha’s three visits to Laṅkā is told in the Dīpavaṃsa’s first and second chapters, the same narrative in the Mahāvaṃsa is reorganized into one single, self-contained unit that culminates in the successful transformation of the landscape of Laṅkā. There is no such climax in the Dīpavaṃsa account, even though the story seems the same. Could the use of the metaphor of light be the key to understanding this literary move made by the compiler of the Mahāvaṃsa? Susan Suleiman succinctly summarizes a series of questions that drive my own analysis of the vaṃsas:¹¹

Among the pertinent questions that the structural and semiotic variety of audience-oriented criticism allows one to formulate are the following: How (by what codes) is the audience inscribed within the system of a work? How does the inscribed audience contribute to the work’s readability? What other aspects of the work, whether formal or thematic, determine readability or intelligibility? Finally, and in a slightly different perspective, what are the codes and conventions—whether aesthetic or cultural—to which actual readers refer in trying to make sense of texts and to which actual authors refer in facilitating or complicating, or perhaps even frustrating, the reader’s sense-making activity?¹²

I believe these questions are best explored by reading the corresponding sections of the stories in the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa against one another. In the proems, both texts reach out to an “inscribed audience,” and the Mahāvaṃsa carries that prescriptive force into the verse that concludes each chapter.¹³ It is in this juxtaposition that it becomes possible to ascertain what type of “semantic charter” is set forth in the two texts, what kind of textual community or audience they anticipate (and even desire), and what characteristics (such as the prevalence and prominence of the nāgas and of the metaphor of light) facilitate this audience’s “sense-making” ability.

The use of narrative amplifies the dreamlike, otherworldly quality in both structure and content, inspiring the use of the imagination called for in the Mahāvaṃsa. As Hayden White notes,

The relation becomes a problem for historical theory with the realization that narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real events in their aspect as developmental processes but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications. Many modern historians hold that narrative discourse, far from being a neutral medium for the representation of historical events and processes, is the very stuff of a mythical view of reality, a conceptual or pseudoconceptual “content” which, when used to represent real events, endows them with an illusory coherence and charges them with the kinds of meanings more characteristic of oneiric than of waking thought.¹⁴

In other words, any recounting of things past, especially those things far past, that are beyond the empirical knowledge of the agent responsible for their retelling, is a story. Even history recedes into something less than “real” by the nature of the passage of time; by reliving and representing a moment or an event, an agent is creating something anew, even if it is rooted in a “real” experience. By its very definition, history is story. White contends that a strain of modern historiography unnecessarily bifurcates history from narrative and extends a bias against storytelling as antiscientific. I agree with the view that these “histories” have much in common with oneiric thought, but I would not go so far as to cast aspersions on the result of such thought simply because it smacks of something less than refined, waking discourse. Rather, I would suggest that it is precisely this quality of the oneiric that helps the vaṃsas deliver their intended effect, the production of agitation and satisfaction. The oneiric atmosphere developed in the narrative and through the use of poetry reinforces my conclusion that what the Buddha does, where and how he conveys the dhamma as light to the nāgas of the island of Laṅkā within the world of the story, and how the reader interprets the Buddha’s acts (ideally by experiencing abundant saṃvega and pasāda) are more important than the empirical historicity of his actions.

The development of saṃvega and pasāda and their direct correlation with the image of fear-inducing darkness and calming light, first prefigured for the reader within the proem’s explicit reading instructions, become “verbal echoes”¹⁵ throughout the rest of the text. Each reference recalls for the reader the first event in the narrative that evokes such emotions—namely, the Buddha’s use of darkness and light in his conversion of Laṅkā. Even the particular formulation of the repeated end phrase at the conclusion of each chapter in the Mahāvaṃsa serves as a “verbal echo” to return the (primed) reader’s attention to the text’s ethically transformative potential.

The recentering imperative, the wish to have an impact on its own world and its audience, pervades the vaṃsa at many levels. These parallels reach the inscribed audience in such a way as to reinforce the archetypal story of the Buddha’s visit, buttressing the effect of the recentered world because the familiar pattern reveals the eternal and effective nature of the process—it is “natural” that the Buddha and his relics would end up residing in Laṅkā. Just as the Buddha comes from India to subdue the indigenous, unworthy ones, so Vijaya later comes and reforms the yakkhas, and even later the monk Mahinda is sent by the Indian monarch Asoka to convert the indigenous population. The narrative in the first story of the coming of the Buddha organically sets up the structure that will sustain the rest of the text—it is a story about arrival, power, and transformation (through relocation and conversion). The Buddha must be the first, the model, and the catalyst for the pattern that will be followed. The Buddha initially brings the light of the dhamma, but it is only fully entrenched when the later Mahinda brings the Buddha’s relics there.¹⁶

Returning to Suleiman’s questions, we must ask, What are the codes, formal or thematic, to which the audience appeals in order to make sense of the vaṃsas? I explore here how the pervasive and saturating metaphor of dhamma as light appeals to the reader and helps to effect transformation, both geographic (of Laṅkā into the center of the Buddhist world) and individual (of a good person into an emotionally charged and satisfied person). Within the light-infused universe of the text, nāgas act as signifiers of a secondary code for meaning making, a code that deals with the individual’s readiness to be transformed through contact with the dhamma. Nāgas are ontologically incapable of reaping the soteriological benefits of proximity to the Buddha, yet they are nevertheless effectively converted by the Buddha in Laṅkā. Laṅkā is thus a supercharged place where even one’s destitute situation can be overcome so long as one is inclined to have faith in the Buddha. This inclination is provoked through heightened emotional states; just as the Buddha manipulates the nāgas’ emotions in the text, so the text manipulates the reader’s emotions. Even though the Buddha is far removed from the audience at the time of reading, the audience is brought into proximity to him, allowing transformation to occur through the power of narrative. From their situation internal to the narrative, the nāgas help to bring the Buddha to the island, and just as they have a crucial function in ferrying relics to Laṅkā (as shown in chapter 4), so they here serve as beings to empathize with, to share the status of liminality vis-à-vis the Buddha.

Our two texts, through their rhetorical force and vision at the outset of their narratives, effectively imagine and redraw the contours of the Buddhist landscape by positing, positioning, and articulating the island of Laṅkā as the new center of this landscape.¹⁷ What exactly within the opening narrative of each text contributes to or effects this cosmically important transformation? Although the narrative building blocks in the Dīpavaṃsa’s account of the Buddha’s three visits to Laṅkā are evident and compelling as well as effective in the construction of the Buddhist world, it is through the particularly illuminating metaphor of deeply penetrating light that the Mahāvaṃsa most forcefully effects the recentering of the Buddhist world. This metaphor does two things: it effects a transformation of the world (the recentering on Laṅkā), and it effects an emotional and ethical transformation in the primed audience. The rich, recentering, and atemporal metaphor of light even extends beyond the physical landscape of Laṅkā at the time of the Buddha into the very presence of the hearers of the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa in the Mahāvihāra and beyond. The metaphor of light engages the text’s worklike aspect; its efficacy depends on the salience of the image for the community at stake.

So who is on the receiving end of the metaphor of light, and how does the metaphor resonate for them? And what types of individual ethical transformations are engendered through the reading and interpreting of these texts? Although the proem of the Dīpavaṃsa gives clear instructions for how to achieve the desired, transformative, confidence-building effect, at first read the narrative seems more illustratively edifying than poetically, aesthetically powerful. How does the structure of the first story about the transformation of unethical agents (nāgas) into Buddhists serve as a model for the reader and interpretive community? I assert that the story is told to train readers-interpreters about useful methods to fulfill the expectations of the text itself. These expectations are contingent upon the heuristic suspension of disbelief, which allows the reader to enter a world that is other (temporally distant from the present) and yet shared, almost the same. The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa aim to train the reader’s vision; the reading process itself creates corrective lenses that enable the interpreter to come into direct contact with the powerful presence of the Buddha.¹⁸

With this view in mind, we can move away from the typical reading of the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, especially this first story comprising the Buddha’s three visits, as a “charter of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism”¹⁹ and instead understand it as a different kind of charter. The structures and characters that make up this first story operate in a semantic realm rife with meaning. Pierre Maranda has explained what he calls “semantic charters” in several contexts, and it is through his work that I believe we can begin to make sense of the functions of the image of light:

Semantic charters condition our thoughts and emotions. They are culture-specific networks that we internalize as we undergo the process of socialization. These mechanisms are at work both in category formation and in the establishment, consolidation, or rejection of relationships between categories: “Within a semantic universe, some combinations of, i.e., relations between, elements are common, others are permissible but rare, others are poetic or archaic, and others are excluded…. We could say, inspired by Rousseau, that human communication is a social contract which rests on a body of subliminal laws, and that a culture’s myths contain its semantic jurisprudence.”²⁰

Reading the metaphor of light as a “semantic charter” clarifies its dual worklike function within the vaṃsas. Through the transformation of individual characters such as the nāgas (even if this occurs collectively) within the text, the light of the dhamma penetrates and saturates a new landscape, effecting the recentering of the Buddhist map. This occurs both within the text and outside of it by eliciting a transformative response from primed readers-hearers.

ANTICIPATING THE BUDDHA’S VISIT: DĪPAVAṂSA

After its proem, the Dīpavaṃsa proceeds to narrate the Buddha’s enlightenment event, or the process by which he mastered states of meditation and insight, thoroughly penetrated the dhamma, and became emancipated from the rounds of rebirth in saṃsāra (“wandering on,” the cycle of birth, life, and death). This connection back to the legitimating presence of the Buddha and specifically to his own moment of transformation lays a crucial foundation for the text.²¹ At the point where he has become the perfectly enlightened one (abhisaṃbuddha) and has claimed the title of “Buddha” (buddho buddho’ti, I.13), the new Buddha speaks out in his first postenlightenment act described in the Dīpavaṃsa. He is described here in terms of his light-giving capacity: “Having become Enlightened and having made an utterance about all things, / the Light Maker spent seven days just so on the excellent throne.”²²

Strictly speaking, when this epithet is first used in the Dīpavaṃsa, the Buddha has not brought any light anywhere yet. Thus, the text here either prefigures the narrative twist, preparing the interpreter to see the Buddha as the Light Maker, or it makes an assumption regarding the reader’s familiarity with the story about the bringing of the light of the dhamma to Laṅkā. The name “Light Maker” in the latter case would serve as a mnemonic device, a loaded epithet that would recall for the right hearer (“good person”) a familiar story.

Also embedded within the image of a Light Maker is the popular understanding of the physiological and ontological ramifications of becoming a Buddha: one actually glows, emanating the virtuous light of the dhamma.²³ An epithet such as “Light Maker” is thus as constructive as it is descriptive—it both anticipates and helps to create the image of the Buddha as the light-giving one and by extension creates the model reader, who is understood to be the light-receiving one. The use of this epithet engages the text’s worklike aspect: it triggers an association with the vision, worldview, or, to employ Ronald Inden’s concept, “world wish”²⁴ of the community who calls the Buddha by this name. The epithet thus functions as one of Blackburn’s “ruminative triggers” by tapping into a metaphor that carries with it an aesthetic whose encoding is familiar to the primed interpreter.

The use of light, especially in epithets for the Buddha, may represent a very old rhetorical strategy. Richard Gombrich muses that the use of shining imagery for the Buddha may represent a co-optation of Vedic images of power and divinity, intentionally applied by an early Buddhist community seeking legitimacy: “In the Ṛg Veda, however, Aṅgīras is a class of supermen, standing between men and gods, and Agni, the personification of fire, is the first and foremost Aṅgīras (RV I, 31, 1). In other texts too the Buddha is called Aṅgīrasa when he is said to shine very brilliantly: at SN I, 196 he outshines the world; at AN III, 239 (=J I, 116) he shines and glows like the sun. So in this passage he is virtually impersonating Agni, the brahmins’ fire god. This looks less like a debate than a takeover bid.”²⁵ In other words, at a moment in a narrative where the Buddha is exerting his authority over another—namely, when he impresses the Brahmin Kassapa in the fire hut—the Buddha essentially takes on the characteristics of the utmost Brahmin, Agni, to sway Kassapa to the new dhamma. The Buddha uses salient tactics to convince and convert—light conversion (or takeover) works. Likewise, in the narrative told in the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, when the Buddha hovers over the island, the yakkhas interpret his superpowers as being within their own repertoire of yakkha powers—“Is he a yakkha?” they ask. Perhaps this most salient form of power exertion marks a special transformation tactic, a formula somewhat akin to “like begets like,” where the yakkhas are most attentive to power in a familiar form. Immediately after his discussion of the fire hut event, Gombrich addresses a negotiation outside the world of the text that involves the situation of the earliest Buddhists (as Jonathan Walters calls it, the “text of its day mode,” or reading the text for information about the textual community of its production²⁶). Early Buddhists effectively co-opted salient and useful metaphors and images from Vedic sources as they developed their own world wishes. Outside the world of the text, the context might affect the production and interpretation of the world inside the text.

In the narrative, having been completely transformed by the process of enlightenment, the Buddha then makes use of his potent visionary acumen and surveys the whole world (Dīpavaṃsa I.16–22). His attention is drawn to the “most excellent Laṅkādīpa” (I.17, I.19, I.22),²⁷ a place where he knows the dhamma will take hold, replicating the pattern established by the visits of the former buddhas. This process is the voicing of adhiṭṭhāna, or determined resolution. Rhetorically and structurally, the authoritative, eternal, and repetitive nature of buddhas and their dhammas is initiated here. There is nothing inherently original about this buddha; in fact, the island’s claims to legitimacy are underscored by attesting to the presence of a long lineage (vaṃsa) of buddhas there. But the positing of the island as a fitting place for the dhamma, a place that had fulfilled that same function in previous eras, also makes one problem obvious: the island is (in this story’s present) currently inhabited by the nonvirtuous sorts of beings not inclined or even karmically able to inherit the dhamma.

Verses I.20–21 of the Dīpavaṃsa examine the Buddha’s thought process: “At this time, yakkhas, bhūtas, and rakkhasas are in Laṅkādīpa, all are scorned by the Buddha; their strength I can take away. Having driven out the crowd of yakkhas, pisācas, and avaruddhakas, I will make this island a shelter and cause it to be inhabited by men.”²⁸ What semantic charter is being appealed to here? We see a world with a hierarchy of beings where some beings are less than Buddha-worthy.²⁹ This world, which is also replete with various virtuous beings, is, to recall Maranda’s definition of a semantic charter, a “culture-specific network.” In this world, virtue is measured on a sliding scale. The counterexample of the unworthy beings tells us that one must be sufficiently primed for proper reception of the dhamma. The Buddha’s thinking, as told through the narrative, makes a claim about the prerequisites required of the interpreter as well as of the various other beings referred to in the text. In a way, the text suggests that one ought not read on if one is insufficiently virtuous. What this says about those who continue to read, thus coming in contact (albeit of the literary sort) with the Buddha, is that they are not scorned by the Buddha but instead are sought out by him. And it is not simple exclusion from the list of unworthy ones that would lead one initiated into this semantic charter to have confidence in the Buddha’s intentions. The Buddha here reveals his plan for the island, to “make this island a shelter.”

Beyond the potential ethical agents’ individual or collective readiness or worthiness, there is also a crucial temporal and even cosmic dimension to the equation. The Dīpavaṃsa informs its readers that there is a right and a wrong time (kālaṃ akālaṃ) to introduce the dhamma (I.19). This idea reinforces the argument introduced in the previous chapter about the necessity of priming the receptor, but this added temporal dimension shifts some of the agency away from the individual and onto a cosmic clock. The natural rhythm of the universe affects a “good person’s” ability to be transformed. What good will it do to introduce the dhamma if it is the wrong time to do so? What does this qualification then say about the time at which this passage is being read, and what does it say about the present time? The text’s diachronic presence and presumed efficacy indicates the endurance of the Buddha’s dhamma; it is (still) the right time to initiate the transformative effect of the dhamma. The dhamma, like the Buddha, can still be accessed through the text—especially through the inclusive and worklike function of a passage like this—by an able, primed interpreter.

Within the narrative, the Buddha continues his prognostication of his connection with the island of Sri Lanka with his anticipation of his parinibbāṇa (final extinguishing upon corporeal death), which is again expressed with a metaphor of light (“like the setting sun”).³⁰ He anticipates the rise of the virtuous ruler of Jambudīpa, Asoka, and, most important, the role of Asoka’s son, Mahinda, in the establishment of the sāsana on the island of Laṅkā.³¹ He puts a divine guard over the island because he needs to get on with the work of being a nascent buddha in the meantime. For the Buddha, his work in Laṅkā is still in the future; the text makes him stay true to his conventional biography and returns him to set up shop in Baranasi.

As we have seen, the Buddha is described by the text as being empowered by his sense of purpose to change the very nature of the island of Laṅkā. The play between the forward-thinking moral agency expressed by the Buddha’s adhiṭṭhāna and the text’s insertion of that act into the Buddha’s conventional biography establishes a particular sense of time and nuances what is otherwise a rather black-and-white presentation of kālaṃ akālaṃ, a right and a wrong time, articulated in verse 19. In other words, the Buddha knows his own time (in the future he will set like the sun, the very measure of time itself), and he knows there is to be another time to finish the preparatory work. Here, we see light, time, and Buddha’s omniscience coming together to weave the narrative and construct a particular vision of the world and of Laṅkā.

If we read the Dīpavaṃsa as an index or reflection of the time and textual community in which it was compiled, we may perhaps conclude that its main concern was to regain attention and support from the various rival sects around Anurādhapura in the fourth century. Walters identifies “four major moves” that ensured the Dīpavaṃsa’s goals would be met. First, the text was composed in Pāli, in śloka meter that related it directly to the Khuddaka Nikāya, “thus reviving that language as the medium for Buddhist textual production among the beleaguered Theravādins of the Lesser Vehicle.” Second, it articulated a history that “claims that the disciplinary order of the Mahāvihāra in Sri Lanka is that of the original Theras.” Third, it identifies the Sri Lankan kings with the Okkāka/Ikṣvāku lineage and as Sākyas, or “kinsmen of the Buddha himself.” Finally, it connects Mahinda directly with the Mahāvihāra and “thus accorded that monastery the privilege of being the first to receive Buddhist teachings in Sri Lanka, a privilege that had no doubt also been claimed by their rivals at the Abhayagiri.”³² I would add that the composition of the Dīpavaṃsa in a specifically poetic form, in translocal Pāli, and replete with particularly resonant characters (nāgas) to represent in whimsical form the monks themselves was also a choice that ensured the Dīpavaṃsa’s long-reaching salience. In spite of its coarse poetry, it was a text that defied obsolescence even after the Mahāvaṃsa was composed, and it remained in circulation so that we still have it today. Perhaps its continued salience is a result of the compiler’s translating the worldly concerns of his or her immediate community into narrative and then thrusting that narrative into the legitimating (and timeless) biography of the Buddha. As Umberto Eco has said, “To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world…. This is the consoling function of narrative—the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.”³³

Even before the story of the Buddha’s visit to expel the yakkhas is told, the Dīpavaṃsa contains a pregnant reference to a nāga. According to the timeline presented in the vaṃsa account of the biography of the Buddha, after his first rains-retreat in Isipatana (Sārnāth), he begins his peripatetic practice, initiating his model of ministry. Uruvelā, later known as Bodh Gayā, is geographically located at the very heart of this enlightenment narrative. The narrative sets up a pattern—namely, the movement of an auspicious, transformative character (the Buddha) from the very center region (Uruvelā) to an absolute peripheral region (Laṅkā). In Uruvelā, the Buddha happens upon Kassapa, an ascetic of the Jaṭila sect, which presents him with an opportunity to experiment with his powers of conversion. In this story, we encounter a nāga, but it is one with very little agency (he is not even given a name). The nāga serves as a means by which the Buddha can effect the transformation or conversion of his intended target, Kassapa. The story of the Buddha’s conquering of the unnamed nāga is reduced to a single line of reference:

[36] The Best-of-Men tamed a nāga-snake in the fire hut. Seeing this miracle, they all invited the Tathāgata:

[37]“Gotama, we will look after you always with a continuous supply of food here in this vihāra through the four months of winter.”³⁴

The action provides the new Buddha with the opportunity to provoke several conversions within the central territory of Uruvela. This nāga-snake (ahināga) is not itself converted, but the image of it being overpowered is the tool the Buddha then uses to convert others. Although the episode with the nāga is reduced to a single line, its appearance alone is significant in that it foreshadows what will soon take place elsewhere—namely, the subduing of a multitude of nāgas in Laṅkā. It prefigures a structural equation, where to conquer nāgas equals to conquer people. The nāga in the private fire hut is conquered, and the result is that people outside the fire hut are converted. Later in the narrative, when the nāgas of Laṅkā are converted, it is the people outside the narrative, the interpreters, who are to be converted.

Why would the Dīpavaṃsa author-compiler dwell on the episode of the Jaṭila ascetic in Uruvelā but reduce the first sermon—the very establishment (the turning of the wheel, the setting in motion) of his dhamma—and the Buddha’s first conversions to only two lines of text (I.31–32)? The nāga may have a reduced personality in the Dīpavaṃsa account of Kassapa’s conversion, but it is here set up as a key figure in a paradigmatic, didactic encounter that will later be echoed in the establishment of the dhamma in another borderland, Laṅkādīpa itself.

I read this inclusion of the story of the conversion of Kassapa by subjugating the nāga as a dry run, a practice performance for the Buddha’s prowess of conversion over other nāgas that prepares him for other encounters on the borderlands. Immediately following this conversion episode, the Buddha uses his iddhi (superpowers derived from meditation) to meditate by the Anotatta Lake in another borderland territory. Once primed through meditative practices, the Buddha has the ability to move from this border region to another: the island of Laṅkā in the middle of the ocean. Notice the obvious liminality issues: that the Buddha passes from one border region to another and that it is the light (in the form of fire) and the nāgas (our “codes”) that are able to permeate these boundaries. It is in the midst of his meditation at Anotatta that the Buddha decides the time has come to rid Laṅkā of its demonic inhabitants, the yakkhas, and to turn over the island to human residents (I.48). In other words, the brief inclusion of the nāga story at this time highlights the Buddha’s overwhelming power and shows that he can win converts such as Kassapa even in the borderlands through contact with and subjugation of the nāgas. Although the power exhibited by the Buddha to subdue the nāga may seem tame and understated here, in terms of the pattern established this episode is quite significant. The Buddha tames a serpent right in the heart of his sāsana as it emanates out from the bodhi tree, the site of enlightenment. This is a conversion event, but not of the serpent—the Buddha overcomes and tames the serpent (ahināgaṃ damesi); these acts enable him to convert the Jaṭila ascetic Kassapa.

As we will see, although the yakkhas are terrified and expelled after the Buddha’s arrival in Laṅkā, it is the nāgas who provide the venue for the dhamma to take hold in the new land. Nāgas are locatively and ontologically liminal agents, betwixt and between water and land, always just outside the realm of worthiness. As such, they represent the willing but difficult potential converts (the audience) that the Buddha can infiltrate by means of his penetrating light (dhamma). Transformation occurs at the boundaries, effected by the rays that, like the sun, are constantly emanating outward from the dynamic center that is the Buddha himself. In this way, the nāga represents the edge, the frontier, the future, possibility, as well as the Buddha’s amazing reach.

After meditating at Anotatta Lake, the Buddha senses that the time has come to give his attention to the island, so he transports himself to Laṅkā using his miraculous superpowers (iddhi). He stands in the sky above the yakkhas, where they mistake him for a yakkha, one of their own kind. After several awkward descriptive passages about his entry into meditative states, he performs magical miracles: “The man, standing like a yakkha of a measure of magical power and great psychic powers, instantly made dense clouds full of thousands of rain drops, rain, cold wind, and darkness.”³⁵ The darkness terrifies the yakkhas; the empathetic reader, carried away by the narrative, should similarly feel a sense of awe, even terror, toward the Buddha at hearing of his exploits. The natural world is thus manipulated in the service of the Buddha’s ethical mission as he restores the light. But this is not the gentle, penetrating light of the dhamma: “Just as the midday sun shining in the summer season, so terrifying heat was set in the body³⁶ of yakkhas. Just like the heat of the four suns at the conclusion of a kappa [aeon], even more so was the flame cast by the seat of the Teacher.”³⁷ Here it is great heat, not explicitly light, that terrifies the yakkhas. The Buddha uses heat to help him purge the land of unwanted yakkhas and saves the light for his conversion of the nāgas.

The yakkhas are depicted as unable to embrace the dhamma as heat. The Buddha nonetheless is motivated through his compassion to provide the yakkhas with a new place: “The Buddha, the chief among sages, conducive to ease, having seen the suffering and terrified yakkhas, the merciful and compassionate great sage, thought about how to bring ease to the minds of the nonhumans.”³⁸ He finds a mirror island to Laṅkā named Giridīpa that is endowed with all of the same attractive qualities as the yakkhas’ current home. Transferring them to this other place, the Buddha explains that his reason for doing this is that Laṅkā is destined to continue to be ruled by men (not bodhi- or enlightenment-challenged yakkhas), just as it has been inhabited by men “since remote kappas”: “Endowed with these and other good qualities, a residence for men, auspicious in various ways, the sāsana will shine [dīpissati] [there] among the islands [dīpesu], like the full moon in the sky at Uposatha.”³⁹ The last line is especially interesting in terms of the developing metaphor of light. The double meaning of the word dīpa as both “lamp” and “island” works well as the phrase conjures a light-filled image: “[Laṅkā] will shine among the islands.” Invoking the Uposatha, the bimonthly gatherings of the saṅgha, as a way of dating or timing the full moon is also interesting.⁴⁰

After the Buddha rids Laṅkā of its yakkha inhabitants, at the end of chapter I of the Dīpavaṃsa the Tathāgata (Buddha) returns to the border region of Uruvelā, and his life story resumes in media res. At the outset of the second chapter, the setting shifts; now the Buddha is established in his most central and stable rains retreat, in Anāthapiṇḍika’s Jetavana grove near Kosala: “In this Jetavana the Buddha, dhamma king, Light Maker, looking throughout the world, saw beautiful Tambapaṇṇi [Sri Lanka].”⁴¹ The nāgas there are depicted as creatures that would challenge even the most naturally compassionate: they are ethically the lowest of the low and are very much depicted as snakes:

All of the nāgas possessed great psychic powers, all were horrible and poisonous, all were steeped in malevolence, violence, and conceit.

Moreover, those snakes were quick, powerful, corrupt, cruel, rough, harsh, irritable, angry, and bent on destruction.⁴²

The Buddha is moved once again to relocate to the island, which is threatened by an impending family feud between two nāga families intent on each other’s utter destruction. Can we read into this scenario an indication of the feud between the rival factions of monks at the time of the Dīpavaṃsa’s composition? In the case of the nāgas, there is no clear victor; the battle is avoided, and both parties defer entirely to the Buddha. Might the telling of this story be an attempt within the text to point toward the common, unifying authority of the Buddha himself? The Buddha is motivated by compassion and the desire to see happiness (welfare) in a future time (Dīpavaṃsa II.12–13). To stop the nāgas’ fighting, the Buddha applies the same terrifying techniques he used with the yakkhas years earlier: he plunges the natural world into darkness so that “the terrified, trembling nāgas did not see one another, nor did they see the Subdued One, nor from where they should battle.”⁴³ After thoroughly horrifying the nāgas into submission, the Buddha sends forth thoughts of loving kindness and emanates a warm light, adjusting his outward disposition to match his moral attitude. The Buddha is again described with the rich imagery of light: “It was a great sight, stupefying and hair-raising; they all saw the Buddha like the shining moon in the sky. Standing there, endowed with the six colors, shining in the middle of the sky, illuminating the ten directions, he addressed the nāgas.”⁴⁴ Explaining the futility of anger and destruction, the Buddha delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon about the sufferings in hell: “Then the Clear-sighted One agitated the nāgas with sufferings in hells, relating the nature of birth in the worlds of men and devas [gods], and [the nature of] nibbāṇa [‘extinguishing,’ the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice].”⁴⁵ The result of his compassionate sermon is that all the nāgas present (eighty koṭis [unthinkably high number]⁴⁶ of nāgas [Dīpavaṃsa II.40–41]) take refuge in the Buddha, the first step in becoming Buddhist.

The next event in the story initiates the establishment of relics in the new terrain, beginning with a gift from the nāgas: the Veḷuriya throne, contested possession of which had brought the nāgas to the brink of war, is offered to the Buddha.⁴⁷ The nāgas together “placed the throne in the middle of the two islands. There, on that throne, the Light Maker, King of Truth, sat down.”⁴⁸ By using the throne, the Buddha establishes it as a relic of use (pāribhogika). This suffusion of sacrality occurs at the request of the nāgas and in a liminal territory between their two warring camps. The nāgas offer food and drink to the Buddha on his throne, initiating and modeling the paradigm of support that qualifies one as Buddhist. The text’s message is that giving to the Buddha in this way and to his relics in the future is the proper way to display gratitude for his ongoing compassion.

The story then tells of the nāga uncle Maṇiakkhika’s pious invitation to the Buddha to return to the island one more time so that he can serve him (Dīpavaṃsa II.42–47). But the Buddha, Light Maker, withdraws to the center of the island to meditate. After this period of meditation, the Buddha again addresses the nāgas, telling them to worship the throne and the tree (from the Jetavana grove that the Buddha had used as a parasol during his visit) in his absence, and then he departs.

The Buddha’s third and final visit to the island is said to occur in the eighth year after his enlightenment, which again locates it in a specific moment in his biography and its associated timeline. The Buddha returns in response to Maṇiakkhika’s earlier invitation, and this time he brings with him a retinue of five hundred monks. The nāgas are seen to be dutiful Buddhist patrons as they prepare for the Buddha’s arrival by constructing a jewel-encrusted pavilion. The Buddha and his bhikkhus are offered seats, and then the Buddha enters a meditative state, where his compassion once again is made manifest in terms of the way light travels beyond its emanator: “[The Buddha] entered into the attainment of benevolence [metta] and suffused all directions.”⁴⁹ The Buddha accepts offerings from the nāgas, preaches to them, and then, accompanied by his bhikkhus, rises into the air for a tour of particular sites on the island. His next stop is briefly mentioned—the Dīghavāpi Cetiya—where he again descends, meditates, and enters a trance state. Then he alights at the future site of the bodhi tree in the Mahāmeghavana garden, which shows him as a node of connectivity with the buddhas of the past (the three previous buddhas are said to have stayed there as well) and with the textual (reading) community of the present (the time of the Dīpavaṃsa’s composition) because this site has a history: it is the first place given by King Devānaṃpiyatissa to Mahinda and his community of monks upon their arrival in Laṅkā.⁵⁰ The multilayered connection to the past is important within the text: the Buddha expresses that the very same site had hosted the bodhi trees of the three former buddhas of the era. His final visit occurs within the same garden, where he honors each of the three former buddhas by installing a throne and listing their meditative accomplishments. This declaration of buddha lineage anticipates the next narrative turn—the fourth chapter of the Dīpavaṃsa begins with an enumeration of kings and dynastic lineage that is at the supposed heart of the chronicle.

ANTICIPATING THE BUDDHA’S VISIT: MAHĀVAṂSA

In the Mahāvaṃsa, the story introducing the Buddha to the island of Laṅkā takes on a more potent force than it does in the Dīpavaṃsa. This may explain in part why so many commentators have overlooked the Dīpavaṃsa as a text with its own interpretive richness. In line with the critique waged in its proem that the Dīpavaṃsa is too long in some places and too abrupt in others, the Mahāvaṃsa follows the structure of the story but tells it at a much different pace. Umberto Eco asks a good question: “If, as we have noted, a text is a lazy machine that appeals to the reader to do some of its work, why might a text linger, slow down, take its time?”⁵¹ Where the Dīpavaṃsa dives right into the account of the enlightenment event in order to ground the coming of the dhamma in the period of the Buddha’s enlightenment, the Mahāvaṃsa begins even further back in the Buddha’s biography.⁵² In Mahāvaṃsa I.5, the then-bodhisatta desires to become a buddha so “he might free the world from dukkhā [disease]”⁵³ after seeing (coming in contact with) Dīpaṅkara, the current Buddha. The Mahāvaṃsa thus carries the impetus to create a refuge of Laṅkā further back in time to the bodhisatta’s life as Sumedha, through whose life the basic format (or “Buddha Blueprint”⁵⁴) is set up. Sumedha was a wealthy prince who became an ascetic but who was inspired to aspire to buddhahood through coming in contact with the Buddha of his day, Dīpaṅkara.⁵⁵ Projecting back through the Buddha’s biography, his own vaṃsa, the Mahāvaṃsa reveals an underlying concern for its textual community—namely, that one must come in direct contact with the Buddha.

Could this narrative structure (the text) reflect the concerns of the textual community for sole authority at a time when rival vihāras made competing claims of legitimacy (the context)? In this account, the presence of the buddha of the current era is not enough to secure legitimacy—the vaṃsa projects the pattern yet further back into the past through many buddhas, where direct contact on the island of Laṅkā (or Oja, as the island was called in the time of the previous buddha) is possible. Furthermore, when contact happens, a primed and ready agent is rendered incapable of ignoring the Buddha’s draw,⁵⁶ that attractive, penetrating light. That light is authoritative and reaches back through time. Indeed, the name “Dīpaṅkara” means “making light” or “illuminating.” This reference to Dīpaṅkara in verse 5 not only adds legitimacy and legacy to the story but also foreshadows the metaphor of light that will come to dominate the chapter. The idea of dhamma as light, which was merely sketched in the Dīpavaṃsa, is here in the Mahāvaṃsa fully revealed and utilized in the retelling of the Buddha’s three visits.

In the opening chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa, the narrative of the Buddha’s three visits to the island of Laṅkā thrusts the island deeply into his conventional biography. All three visits are narrated structurally so that the stories of transformation of certain characters, the nāgas and yakkhas, parallel the transformation of the place, Laṅkā. The story is thus a didactic repository or, better, a vehicle for conveying the truths usually articulated by the physical presence of the Buddha (the often cited canonical formulation is “who sees the dhamma sees me”).⁵⁷ The dhamma thus becomes transferable and the means through which Buddhism spreads and establishes itself in a new terrain; dhamma itself, conceived as light, functions as a mytheme. As a diffuser of dhamma-light, the Mahāvaṃsa pronounces an explicitly rendered “wish” of the Mahāvihāra textual community not simply to be incorporated into the Buddhist world but also to become the very center of it, transformed and sanctified by the Buddha’s authoritative visits. The Mahāvihāra textual community asserts its claims to legitimacy and even supremacy at a time when spiritual and temporal authority conveyed through patronage by kings is being contested in Sri Lanka. The relocation of the Buddha’s light from the homeland of India to the island of Laṅkā could have been a paradigmatic move that buttressed the Mahāvihāra’s claims of centrality and authority.

Laṅkā, as envisioned by the Mahāvaṃsa, is susceptible, even prone, to the powerfully penetrating, border-destroying light of the dhamma. As in the earlier Dīpavaṃsa, the narrative opens with Laṅkā as the home to yakkhas (who must be expelled) and nāgas (who must be converted). As an island on the periphery of South Asia, an island connecting the nāga underworlds and the realm of the humans, Laṅkā is a liminal landscape. In spite of this position, or perhaps because of it, it becomes in the Buddha’s estimation the ideal repository for the dhamma. Turning to the world envisioned by the text, and looking at how the narrative primes the reader for the full, enlightening impact of the transference of the dhamma, we see how the metaphor of dhamma as light aids in the transferral of the dhamma to a new landscape.

Even before the Buddha physically visits the new terrain of Laṅkā, he anticipates in luminous terms that it will be a fitting repository for the light of dhamma. As in the Dīpavaṃsa, the Mahāvaṃsa inserts this episode into the ninth month after the Buddha’s enlightenment, which may be an intentional move to show just how soon after his enlightenment the Buddha’s thoughts turned to the island of Laṅkā. Attributing a precise “date” to the event establishes authority beyond that of a disembodied (unplotted) event—dating the visit to Laṅkā firmly lodges it within the Buddha’s biography. In verse 20, the Buddha (Gotama) is motivated to prepare the island of Laṅkā for the future reception of his dhamma: “For Laṅkā was known by the Conqueror as a place where the sāsana would shine, from Laṅkā, filled with the yakkhas, the yakkhas must (first) be driven out.”⁵⁸ The reach (and very image) of the Buddha’s influence (sāsana⁵⁹) is conceived using a metaphor of radiant light.

In his first visit to the island to drive out the yakkhas, the Buddha employs his iddhi to fly through the sky, and then, hovering over the island, he takes away the light. This tactic is an especially effective attention getter: the yakkhas are terrified by the darkness. The Buddha then restores the light, thus restoring order, and takes a seat, thus grounding himself on this new terrain. The mat upon which he sits begins to smolder at the edges, frightening and pushing the yakkhas back toward the edges of the island, clearing the island for the Buddha at the center. Through his superpowers, the Buddha draws a neighboring island over to Laṅkā. By placing the yakkhas on it and removing them from Laṅkā, he “made this island worthy of men.”⁶⁰ After this episode, the Buddha returns to his prior location in Uruvelā, an act that literally returns the Buddha to the established Buddha biography in process to pick up where he left off when he makes the aberrant visit to Laṅkā. Although for now Laṅkā is cleared of the yakkhas, the light does not quite remain situated in its new place.

As in the Dīpavaṃsa, in the Mahāvaṃsa the Buddha returns to Laṅkā in the fifth year of his buddhahood to intervene in the impending war between nāga families, which is more elaborately recounted here. The nāga Mahodara’s hoards of supporters live in his extensive sea palace, described as five hundred yojanas in length; he is from under the sea, a different loka (world) than the battlefield. His nephew Cūlodara is a mountain nāga. These nāgas, coming from two different places, meet. The nāgas’ emotional state, which is given prominence in the Dīpavaṃsa, seems less important in this text. In the sky over the battlefield, the Buddha once again applies the same technique that he used with the yakkhas—namely, the creation of darkness and then of redemptive light:

The Leader was seated there in the sky over the middle of the battle; the dispeller of darkness produced awe-inspiring darkness for the nāgas.

Consoling those tormented by fear, he revealed the light. Satisfied, and having seen the Well-gone One [sugata], they venerated the feet of the Teacher.⁶¹

After this powerful display, the Buddha teaches, alights on the contested throne, and accepts food and drink from the nāgas. From his station on the nāgas’ own shared terrain, the Buddha then establishes in the refuges and precepts eighty million land and sea nāgas. He uses light to convert, rather than to expel, the nāgas.⁶² The Buddha then takes his leave to return to the Jetavana grove (and hence rejoins his standard biography in media res).⁶³

The third visit to the island does not continue the use of light imagery because the function of light has already been fulfilled—by this visit, the nāga inhabitants have already been converted. They are now fitting patrons of the Buddha and his retinue of five hundred monks. This time the Buddha does not manipulate light. He instead highlights the landscape of Laṅkā, indicating the various sites that will in the future become repositories of the Buddha’s charisma (through placement of his bodily relics or through his association with the sites) and places of pilgrimage and devotion. In this visit, the transformative power of the light is unnecessary.

Thus, in all three postenlightenment, pre-parinibbāṇa visits depicted in the Mahāvaṃsa, the Buddha is an agent on the move over borders—he moves first from Uruvelā and then from his rains-retreat home in the Jetavana grove of northern India to the island of Laṅkā. The object at stake, the tool of transformation, is the dhamma—made manifest through the image of light, the bringing of the light to the island of Laṅkā. In other words, the Mahāvihāran authors are depicting the Buddha setting up the island of Laṅkā as a different kind of land—one far away from his own abode, a Buddhist place that has been transformed by the light of the dhamma.

The point of the Dīpavaṃsa is to argue for the compilers’ rightful legacy and place in the Sri Lankan Buddhist landscape. By the time the Mahāvaṃsa was written, a more ambitious recentering of Laṅkā itself in the broader Buddhist landscape was at issue. Although there are several allusions to and descriptions of the Buddha’s light-making capacity in the Dīpavaṃsa, the metaphor is more intentionally employed in the Mahāvaṃsa. Like any good story that grows and develops in the retelling, connections are made and symbolism, semantic charters, codes, and conventions are developed and augmented by the time of the compilation of the Mahāvaṃsa.

There is a big difference between the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa accounts of the climax of the story. At the end of the Buddha’s final tour of the island, and after a full recounting of his three visits, we get to the recapitulation of the fully transformed nature of this island. This recapitulation, too, capitalizes on the language of light that has been driving the chapter; hearers-readers would be primed for such a salient explanation of the previous stories.

Steven Collins translates the climax of the Mahāvaṃsa as follows: “So the Leader of boundless sagacity looked to the benefit of Lankā in the future, and saw the advantage to the crowds of Gods, snakes (i.e. nāgas) and the like in Lankā at that time. The Light of the World (lokadīpo), abounding in compassion, came to the good island (sudīpaṃ) three times, and therefore [or: through him] this island (dīpo…ayaṃ), radiant with the light [or: lamp] of the Dhamma (dhammadipāvabhāsī) became highly respected by (all) good people.”⁶⁴ The recapitulation begins with the source of light, the Buddha, in the past. He sees benefit for other beings and is motivated to bring the light to the island; once his presence is established through his three visits over time, the dhamma becomes respected by the community of the good (the primed, the virtuous). In a provocative and lengthy footnote to this section, Collins explores the poetic work in the structure of this passage. He shows the modified chiasmus (A-B-B-A) in the Pāli verse: “Lokadīpo / sudīpaṃ / dīpo…ayaṃ / dhammadīpa” (Light of the World / good island / this island / light of the dhamma), and the pun involving the Pāli term dīpa, which means both “island” (Sanskrit dvipa) and “lamp” (Sanskrit dīpa). The verb avabhasi (ava + bhasati) means “radiant” or “shining,” referring to dīpa as lamp, not island. The subject, the lamp of dhamma, does the shining, not the island itself.⁶⁵ This reading is corroborated by following the flow of the modified chiasmus, where the use of structured language—poetics—transfers meaning along with the dhammic light. The popular translation of the term dhammadīpa as “island of dhamma” thus does not in fact reflect the light (dīpa) of the dhamma that is grammatically suggested in the Mahāvaṃsa but instead imbues the term with anachronistic, nationalistic overtones.⁶⁶

Dhammadīpa thus is the light of the dhamma that shines, not the island of the dhamma that shines forth. Also, the chosen epithet for the Buddha here is “Lokadīpo,” or “Light of the World.” As Collins remarks, it would make little sense to call the Buddha in this context “Island of the World.”⁶⁷ Recapturing the sense of light as the metaphorical, transformative tool employed by the Buddha somewhat subdues the nationalist overtones that have clothed the term dhammadīpa since its first translation as “island of dhamma” (presumably for political purposes) in 1942. The contextually challenged translation of it as “island of dhamma” in Mahāvaṃsa I:84, then, is a modern misreading perpetuated opportunistically (intentionally or not) to advance certain political agendas. Challenging the conception of Sri Lanka as the land of dhamma, again in the relatively safe location of a footnote, Jonathan Walters writes: “As Steven Collins has pointed out to me, this idea appears nowhere in the Vaṃsas themselves. As far as I have been able to discern, the earliest published use of the term in its timeless sense occurred only in 1942, and the author quotes statements made by Lord Passfield in the House of Commons: Ven. Bhikkhu Metteye, ‘Lord Buddha—The First Liberator of Slaves,’ Maha Bodhi Journal 50 (April–June 1942), 178–79. I can only conclude that the Dhammadīpa was invented in the middle of the twentieth century as an ideologization of the [Vaṃsatthappakāsinī]/Okkāka world vision.”⁶⁸ Although I am obviously in agreement with Collins’s translation and analysis, and I fully support the destabilization of dhammadīpa as a claim for the island’s inherent righteousness, I still have to wonder why the fifth-century Mahāvihāran community responsible for this text made this nuanced pun, especially considering that it occupies such a prominent place in the narrative that establishes the Buddha’s dhamma on the island of Laṅkā. This question is particularly pertinent given that the term is established within the course of a text that self-consciously recenters the Buddhist world, making possible the Mahāvihāran Theravāda Buddhists’ later hegemonic claims. It is important for modern polemics whether this authoritative source, the Mahāvaṃsa, makes an explicit claim that Laṅkā is an island of dhamma or not; looking back into a history of the island for an ideological foundation is a natural maneuver. But for the community of interpretation at the time of its composition, surely the dual meaning of dīpa was not only intentional but also skillfully employed, aiming for the ears, hearts, and minds of the primed “good people.”

The Sanskrit terms dvipa (island) and dīpa (lamp, light) are conveniently and poetically collapsed into one Pāli term, dīpa, and the author-compiler of the Mahāvaṃsa astutely exploits this conflation of meanings. The semantic field of the term is multifaceted, which allows the text to enter the literary worklike rather than documentary mode. The important point is that light imagery has been utilized throughout the chapter, sensitizing or preparing the listener in a particular way. This leads us to posit the following reading:

The island, which is metaphorically like a lamp, has been primed by the Buddha. In this scenario, the Light of the World is an agent of transformation who is brimming over with compassion (like oil in a lamp). That this argument is made by a fifth-century Mahāvihāra text is no mystery; the text quite clearly identifies the people for whom it has been composed by the appearance of the same refrain at the end of each chapter: “composed for the anxious thrill [saṃvega] and serene satisfaction [pasāda] of good people,” the people primed for his compassion to take hold. Reading or hearing the text, one becomes a participant in rendering its world wish. Who would want to be left out of the group of “good people” the text is claiming as its intended audience?

The text asserts a particular worldview—namely, Laṅkā’s centrality in the recentered Buddhist cosmos—and a particular wish—that good people are primed and transformed by hearing it. The concluding pun plays on the Pāli homonyms dīpa (lamp) and dīpa (island) and capitalizes on the fact that the reader himself, a good person, has been “primed” for the dual resonance. Encountering the dhammadīpa (light of the dhamma) in this context means that the reader, like the island and like the nāgas, is being subjected to the Buddha’s worklike, penetrating light.

The penetrating effect of the metaphor of light would not have been lost on an educated Buddhist audience of the fifth century; in fact, images of light abound throughout Pāli canonical texts.⁶⁹ But even in the canonical sources there is occasional ambiguity about which dīpa is meant: lamp or island? For example, Walpola Rahula considers an often-cited passage in the Dīgha Nikāya:

Attadīpa viharatha attasaraṇā (D., p. 62). Some European scholars are inclined to translate this passage as “be ye lamps unto yourselves” (Rhys Davids’ Dīgha Nikāya Translation, Vol. II, p. 108). But dīpa in this context means “island” and not “lamp.” The [Dhammapadātthakathā] commenting on this word says: mahāsamuddagataṃ dīpaṃ viya attānaṃ dīpaṃ patiṭṭhaṃ katvā viharatha. “Live making yourself an island, a support (resting place) even as an island in the great ocean.” Saṃsāra is compared to an ocean (saṃsāra-sāgara), and what is required in the ocean for safety is an island, and not a lamp. Cf. [Dhammapada] II, 5, dīpaṃ kayirātha medhāvī yaṃ ogho nābhikīrati; “the wise will create an island which the flood does not overwhelm.” The idea of a lamp is, apparently, borrowed from the Bible.⁷⁰

Although lamps (lit fires and candles) are used in many different religious traditions, both physically in rituals and metaphorically in literature, I do not agree with Rahula that the lamp is an imported, superimposed biblical image. It is abundantly clear that in the Mahāvaṃsa the śleṣa (double meaning) regarding dīpa as both island and lamp was intentionally employed for maximum poetic effect and delight for the reader-hearer.⁷¹

The dhamma is transferred to a good island (sudīpaṃ)—namely, an island that has been primed to receive the pervasive and penetrating light of the dhamma. Just as the Mahāvaṃsa itself has been “composed for the anxious thrill [saṃvega] and serene satisfaction [pasāda] of good people,” so this statement makes a claim about the ethical propensity of the island’s inhabitants. Just as a wick in a lamp must be primed and soaked in oil before it will accept the flame, so the lamp/island is primed to receive the dhamma, and so the fifth-century community is primed for transformation.⁷²

It is enlightening to read the opening chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa through the opening verses of the Vaṃsatthappakāsinī, a later commentary that reflects the concerns of its own textual community and interprets the concerns of the community responsible for the composition of the Mahāvaṃsa. Jonathan Walters calls the Vaṃsatthappakāsinī a “Mahāvihāran imperial project” that extends the claims of the Mahāvaṃsa by proclaiming Mahāvihāran supremacy (over the rival Abhayagiri and Jetavana sects and even over other countries).⁷³ The first verses of the Vaṃsatthappakāsinī claim to penetrate the true meaning of the Mahāvaṃsa, picking up on the leitmotif of the light of the dhamma:

Having honored the lord of the world who ought to receive honors (pūjā)

Who became the unsurpassed sun for tractable people-lotuses,

Who illuminated the sky of the excellent solar clan with radiant energy rayed by the glorious teachings (dhamma),

Who had vast majestic power in the dispersion of the darkness of delusion,

And [having honored] his teaching and his disciplinary order, the mine of virtues,

I shall give an explanation of the uncertain purpose (or meaning) of the verses of the Mahāvaṃsa:

Pay close attention to it, excellent men!⁷⁴

My reading of the opening chapters of the Pāli Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa has led me to believe that these forms of religious textual production represent negotiations for power and claims for security in both the universal, “political” sense (Laṅkā as the new center of dhamma) and the personal, religious sense (the transformation arising from hearing or reading or both). Both texts are desperate, urgent attempts to reorder and reorient both self and place as exemplars of Buddhism. Both texts claim authority for their textual communities and transfer a center of power and legitimacy from the Indian homeland of Buddhism to a newly established center of authority. Both texts amplify the sense of dhamma as light, leading to a conclusion that they are as much chronicles of the light as they are chronicles of the island itself.