Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History

AS LIMINAL characters, the betwixt and in-betweeners, nāgas mediate the dark and the light. They are characters precisely poised to be interpreters for the outside reader-hearer through the text. As we have seen, nāgas often act as attention getters within the text, functioning as red flags to denote important passages, but that is not all they do. In the previous chapter, we saw nāgas in close proximity with the living Buddha. In the case of Bhūridatta, this proximity is in fact a shared ontology of sorts and a window into the eventual soteriological aptitude of even the lowest born—the nāga Bhūridatta is in fact the bodhisatta developing himself on the way to buddhahood. The nāgas of the Mahāvaṃsa’s first chapter are also exceptionally close to the Buddha—it is their impending war that drives the Buddha to visit the island of Laṅkā, and the nāgas are depicted as the first and the model converts on the island he determines to be ideal for his sāsana. In both cases, we see the Buddha imagined as living and active in a distant past and the nāgas imagined as naturally included in the same world the Buddha inhabits.

In Buddhist literature, nāgas are considered to have a very special bond with the relics of the Buddha. Relic veneration distinguishes Buddhist practices from those of the other religious traditions in the Indic landscape, and so the common pan-Indic trope of the nāga shifts in meaning as it is used and interpreted by Buddhist texts.¹ In pan-Indic representations, the nāga is always depicted as a hoarder and protector of treasures, but in the Buddhist world the nāgas also protect, care for, and demonstrate proper veneration of the greatest treasure of all, the Buddha, both during his life and after his death and parinibbāṇa (final extinguishing) in the form of his relics. Nāgas reveal what is important, whether it is a treasure or the Buddha himself, to help orient devotees to the proper objects and mode of veneration.² Nāgas determine the value of relics; they locate and guard relics; they are simultaneously model worshippers and unworthy hoarders of relics; and they mark time and recall the Buddha. As a literary trope, then, nāgas demand that we pay attention to them if we are interested in the Buddha, dead or alive, whom they worship.

The textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa envisions the world without the living Buddha as being still saturated with his enduring presence. Within the text, relics are a viable technology developed by a community seeking continuous proximity to the Buddha, and the nāgas are utilized as particularly salient characters to facilitate an ongoing connection with the Buddha via those relics. There is a clear relationship developed in the Mahāvaṃsa between the nāgas and the relics of the departed (post-parinibbāṇa) Buddha, especially in the transportation of relics to the island and the procurement of relics to enliven stūpas as sites for human ritual interaction. Relics notably seem to need to pass through the possession of the nāgas, especially through their hands and stomachs, to arrive at their respective proper resting sites and to validate the cetiyas (sanctified places that provoke memory of the Buddha).

What is the place of relics in the tradition that created and sustained the Mahāvaṃsa? Relics bring legitimacy and a story that further supports the legitimacy, and they constitute a productive trigger for the remembrance of the Buddha. How does the position of the literary character of the nāga vis-à-vis the relics initiate a worklike dimension for the reader? And does the tripartite classification of relics operative in the early medieval textual community responsible for the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa as articulated in the Kalingabodhi Jātaka have an impact?³ Beginning with the typology of relics articulated by none other than the authenticating voice of the Buddha himself found in this Jātaka text, we might envision how the Mahāvaṃsa’s textual community understood these relics.

Particularly curious is the nāgas’ relationships to pāribhogika relics (relics of use) in the Mahāvaṃsa. The arrival of the bodhi tree to the island of Laṅkā was a significant moment in enacting the transplantation of the dhamma circumscribed by the light imagery in Mahāvaṃsa I. The bodhi tree is designated the best type of relic to use while the Buddha is alive. It is also the first relic to be transported to the island for the newly converted king Devānaṃpiyatissa because the first three visits left incidental relics such as the jeweled throne and parasol that are functional only for ritual use by the nāgas.

But nāgas also maintain a relationship with the corporeal relics of the Buddha (sarīrika), as we will see in the Soṇuttara story (about a novice monk’s procurement of the requisite bodily relics from the nāgas for enshrinement by King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī). This story is especially interesting if we consider the literary maneuvers of the Mahāvaṃsa in light of the simplicity of the Dīpavaṃsa. The Soṇuttara story is entirely absent in the Dīpavaṃsa, but in the Mahāvaṃsa it is prominent, the culmination of the entire “Duṭṭhagāmaṇī epic.” It is significant that the supernaturally gifted novice Soṇuttara is himself classed a nāga (novice monk), so that the story presents a nāga who is sent to outwit a nāga who has been hoarding the relics. Here, all transactions (of value, of power) occur in liminal regions, regions of easy access for the two kinds of nāgas, both of whom are liminal characters. How does reading or encountering this narrative of the gift of relics predestined for Laṅkā (according to the deathbed prognostications of the Buddha himself, at least as formulated in the saṅgha’s version of the story) inspire a charged sense of confidence or faith and a layer of obligation in the reader-hearer that might effect a moral or ethical transformation?⁴

Finally, the sole example of uddesika relics (representation or image relics), appearing in a salient story embedded in the Asoka cycle (Mahāvaṃsa V), demands our attention. A nāga represents the image of the Buddha! King Asoka honors the image as if it were the Buddha himself, which provides an interpretive community the opportunity to explore issues of the Buddha’s absence and presence as well as the role of the nāga in negotiating or mediating the chasm between the temporally distant Buddha and future generations of Buddhists.⁵ This story also allows for an exploration of the Buddhist concept of time and space, as the nāga (here named Mahākāla, or “Great Time”) has lived to see all four buddhas of this aeon. As conceived in Theravāda Buddhism, one is spatially and temporally removed from the intercession of a historical Buddha; nāgas function as intermediaries to bring images and relics forth for the ethically motivated connection to the Buddha. For the primed interpreter, encountering the nāgas in the narrative and being susceptible to the imaginative work provoked by that encounter result in a satisfying experience (pasāda) conducive to intensified religious practices such as relic veneration.

The term vaṃsa covers a rich and multivalent semantic field; it can mean everything from “history,” “chronicle,” and “lineage” to “node of bamboo” or even “hollow bone” or “spine.”⁶ This matrix of meanings expands yet further when we consider the historical situation of many interpreters (both of the term vaṃsa and of the vaṃsa genre of literature) and how the vaṃsa genre itself has accreted meaning for interpretive communities—the Mahāvaṃsa can be and has been read as a charter for the political aspirations of relatively contemporary Sinhalese Buddhists. It can also be read as a charter or, better, a manual that outlines proper royal duties and authority, and in this way it leads to confirm or provoke value judgments regarding good Buddhist kingship. It can be read as a chronicle of the establishment and subsequent paramparā, or teacher–student succession, of the monks who sustain and perpetuate the Buddhist tradition. Finally, it can be read, as I do in this chapter, as a text that provides the appropriate pedigree for the relics that are so central to ritual practices of the Mahāvaṃsa textual community and of the saṅgha to this day. The Mahāvaṃsa can be viewed as each of these things: a history of the island, a chronicle of kings or of the lineage of the saṅgha, and a substantiation of the development of the cult of relics. It chronicles the vicissitudes of power both inside the narrative—that of the saṅgha and the royalty, both “historical” and imagined—and outside the narrative—the latent, transformative power unleashed through the reading or hearing of the text itself.⁷ What it does with the most conscientious agency and rhetorical force, however, is chronicle the full transplantation of the dhamma to the island through narratives of the enshrinement of relics.

The Mahāvaṃsa begins and ends with stories about nāgas and relics. It opens with the coming of the Buddha himself to the island, where he sets up a pāribhogika relic and designates the future sites for his relics. And it concludes with a full epic narrative of the great hero-king Duṭṭhagāmaṇī, his ceremonial building of the Mahāthūpa, and the enshrinement of the sarīrika relics within. By opening with a story of the Buddha himself, the Mahāvaṃsa locates its beginning in a particular time. But the maneuver from the Buddha’s living presence to his relics allows the text to put forth an open-ended telos. The Buddha’s presence in the future is both implied and perpetual because it is contained in his relics. A new aeon is ushered in and a new buddha is possible only when his relics are no longer worshipped. Relics are, in short, concrete purveyors of Buddhist eschatology. The main narrative arc of the Mahāvaṃsa is thus based on the establishment of the relics and the concomitant expectation that the proper sentiments conducive to proper behavior are stimulated by hearing their story.

Based on this orientation, a new reading of the Mahāvaṃsa is warranted. Other studies have relegated the relics to an ancillary role, suggesting that they validate, legitimate, or corroborate the authority of a ruler (secular king or head of the saṅgha). For example, in a provocative article Alice Greenwald treats the relic mounted on Duṭṭhagāmaṇī’s spear as a legitimating device for his actions.⁸ As the Mahāvaṃsa tells it, after killing many people on the battlefield, Duṭṭhagāmaṇī feels guilty and struggles with his worthiness; he is then educated by eight arahants (“worthy ones,” enlightened beings) that he is indeed a good person.⁹ But what if the focus of the Duṭṭhagāmaṇī epic in the Mahāvaṃsa is not, in fact, Duṭṭhagāmaṇī? What if it is not essentially a story about a great king but instead a story about the great relics that require a good and righteous king—and an encounter with the nāgas—to finally enshrine them? If we consider the Mahāvaṃsa primarily as a history of the coming of the relics and sāsana to the island (as claimed explicitly in the the Dīpavaṃsa’s proem) and as a vehicle for the cultivation of heightened emotional states for the reader-hearer (as claimed in the Mahāvaṃsa’s proem), how does our understanding of the compiler-author’s rhetorical strategy change?

This trajectory complements my focus on the poetic aspects of the Mahāvaṃsa over and against but not supplanting the political, literal, or historical aspects. When King Devānaṃpiyatissa asks Mahinda how he can see the Buddha who has already passed into parinibbāṇa, Mahinda explains, “When you see the relics, you see the Conqueror.”¹⁰ In other words, to experience emotional satisfaction and the quelling of agitation, one must have imagination. It is a mental condition that an adept and experienced senior thera (monk) such as Mahinda comprehends; he has cultivated the imaginative process necessary for the worship of relics. Likewise, for the hearer-reader of the Mahāvaṃsa to become the good, virtuous person called forth by the text, he must cultivate the imaginative ability to equate the relics with the Buddha.

Having been primed first by the reading instructions contained in the proem, and having bolstered our reading technique through the examination of metaphor in the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa, we are ready to consider the relics in a new light. I would extend Mahinda’s maxim in the following way: when we see the relics, we see the nāgas, and vice versa. The nāgas loom large in the lightened landscape of the Mahāvaṃsa. Why? Keeping in mind the type of reading called for in the proem, having honed our lenses to adjust for the glare of the light of the dhamma, we should perceive that the nāgas reveal something about the work of imagination in reading religious literature.

The fact that the nāgas are markers of important events and locations and even of value in the “life” of the relics has for the most part been overlooked in previous studies of Buddhist relics.¹¹ The nāgas are such familiar characters in Indic contexts that for many scholars they seem at best to recede into the background or are otherwise cast aside or treated as part of a generalized mythic topos rather than as significant agents in religious and historical texts. My project has been to pay attention to the poetic elements of the Mahāvaṃsa to see what aspects of the text provoke the desired ethical and emotional responses in the reader—in other words, to highlight the nāgas in the vaṃsas. As I have suggested in earlier chapters, we should consider the production of the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa to be the constructive “world wishes” of their ambitious fourth- and fifth-century textual communities. The stories of the pedigreed relics are essential to these texts’ respective arguments for and visions of Laṅkā’s premier placement in the Buddhist world; the prominent position given to the stories of nāgas procuring and protecting said relics suggests that these fourth- and fifth-century monks were employing an established, powerful literary strategy.

Relics and relic worship are critical in the living tradition instigated by these fourth- and fifth-century Mahāvihāra monks, and in the vaṃsas they produced, the nāgas can be seen as model agents regarding relics.¹² First, nāgas determine or attribute value to the relics. As Patrick Geary suggests of the Christian context in his book Furta Sacra,¹³ the value of relics can be determined by their theft, and the relics in the vaṃsas are habitually being stolen by the nāgas (especially when they are en route to an enshrinement in Laṅkā), even if only temporarily. This motif is so important in the vaṃsas that I am inclined to think that a trip through the hands of the nāgas is requisite before a relic is of full use or value.¹⁴ The bodhi tree, having been established by Ānanda (the Buddha’s principal disciple) to be the most suitable substitute as a relic of use for the Buddha in his absence,¹⁵ endures a baptism or consecration by nāgas as it is whisked away to the nāgaloka. For the textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa, by this function of value attribution the nāgas help to determine where the practical, ritual focus should be—on the relics.

Second, often simply (though uncritically) designated by scholars as “chthonic deities,” nāgas also serve to ground, locate, and guard various kinds of relics.¹⁶ In the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, nāgas guard relics of all types. Bodily relics, both bones (internal body parts, available only after the Buddha’s bodily death) and hair and teeth (“dead” parts of the Buddha that might be given by the Buddha during his lifetime, such as the hair and nail relics given to Tapassu and Bhallika¹⁷), are important because they viscerally connect the present worshipper with the Buddha. Relics of use appear frequently in the vaṃsas; for example, according to the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa, the Buddha gave to the nāgas the tree that was used as a parasol to shade him and the throne upon which he sat during his second visit to Laṅkā. Nāgas also oversee the places designated by the Buddha as cetiya in his second and third visits to the island¹⁸ until they receive their intended bodily relics in the future. Relics are equipped with some sort of homing device, so that nāgas are led to those that have been abandoned or that are not receiving adequate human attention. Nāgas are thus naturally inclined to find and guard the relics of the Buddha, and it is a convenient trope in the Pāli narrative tradition that they consider any relics that have been buried in the ground or washed out to sea as their rightful property. This crucial behavior captured in narrative form provides the tradition with a perpetual source of relics for future installations. For instance, in the Mahāvaṃsa, a doṇa (measure) of Buddha sarīrika (bodily relics) is kept guarded in the nāgaloka until King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī needs them to be established in the land of Sri Lanka.¹⁹ We see that a portion of relics kept in the hands of the nāgas allows for potential future enshrinements. That the nāgas always retain a reliable source of relics leads the audience of the Mahāvaṃsa to feel gratitude upon reading or hearing about them.

Third, nāgas model ideal veneration of the relics. As we saw in chapter 3, nāgas are of dubious soteriological aptitude; there is tension in the tradition regarding the relationship of relics to nāgas. Nāgas are simultaneously cast as ideal worshippers of the Buddha and as karmically incapable of receiving the full benefit of their veneration.²⁰ In the Mahāvaṃsa account of the novice monk Soṇuttara, who is sent to the nāgaloka to retrieve the relics kept there in order to install them for King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī in Sri Lanka, when the nāgas are outwitted by the novice and divested of their precious relics, they argue that they are actually better equipped than humans to lavishly worship the relics.²¹ The nāgas (as nonhuman) are located outside the social framework, and yet they challenge that framework in an eminently Buddhist way (it was the Buddha, after all, who said that behavior, not one’s birth station, determines virtue and potential).²² The nāgas are depicted as ideal worshippers of the Buddha’s relics, and yet they are thieves, in direct violation of one of the five fundamental moral precepts in Buddhism (namely, adinnādāna, or “taking what is not given”). Yet as we saw in the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa, the Buddha himself converts the nāgas, who undertake the precepts and who are thereby bound to honor them. They seem to provoke pity from the reader-hearer, perhaps even jealousy, insofar as they have immediate access to relics. Nāgas as portrayed in narrative literature are especially susceptible to the power of relics, and they are in the enviable position of having access to them in spite of their soteriological ineptitude. How much more urgent, then, is the focused attention and veneration from the reader outside the text, who is in a much better position to benefit from right behavior?

In the broader Theravāda Buddhist conception, relics function at the junction of ethics and time. Relics point back to the good deeds performed by the Buddha on behalf of his future community and engage the imagination of their audience in “re-presenting” the Buddha through remembrance of those good deeds. Relic veneration is a central act or, as Kevin Trainor succinctly calls it, a “technology of remembrance and representation.”²³ In other words, relics simultaneously carry the presence of the Buddha into future times and to future receivers and remind practitioners of the Buddha’s eventual complete absence. I would expand Trainor’s definition of the function of relic veneration to include inspiring the worshipper and increasing his or her capacity to receive the dhamma, so the process of relic veneration fully activates the relic itself. The compilation, recitation, and reading of these vaṃsas and attention to the texts’ focus on relics and their pedigrees become strategies first for reception and then for “remembrance and representation” of the Buddha. Relics literally cement the tradition: when enshrined (whether physically contained or textually located), a relic provides a focus for practice and a tangible site for connection with the Buddha.²⁴ In this secondary level of the “technology of remembrance and representation,” narratives, with nāgas at their center, teach why the relics are important.

As discussed in chapter 2, dhamma is conceived metaphorically as light. This same light pervades the relics. As described in the Pāli vaṃsas, relics frequently exude the six-colored rays that the Buddha himself cast as a visible reflection of power. The relics typically generate and emanate these rays at the moment of enshrinement to inspire saṃvega and the feeling of awe and to instill pasāda in the hearts of humans, confirming the relics’ potency and efficacy. Nāgas are likewise tempted and empowered by these rays. In short, it is through the relics that the dhamma extends its penetration into the world of human, ethical agents; the light of the dhamma attracts and energizes its viewers’ imagination.

Relics are the means by which Buddhist time is measured. Relics transcend the usage of a single generation and serve to link a community of practice over time and hold the community together through focused practice. The Mahāvaṃsa marks the passage of time in its narrative; by reaching into and depicting the past, it creates a future for relic veneration. There could not have been relics until there was a Buddha, and there cannot be a new Buddha until all the relics of the recent Buddha have disappeared.²⁵ The textual tradition narrating the importance and effects of relic veneration further serves to link the community through time; the narrative itself links successive textual communities. The literary character of the nāga similarly spans generations, both in its relevance and utility within the narrative and in its function vis-à-vis the interpreter outside the text.

Just as the sarīrika (corporeal) and pāribhogika (usage) relics span vast swaths of time, nāgas have exceptionally long lives, which makes them particularly useful characters in narratives because they have been firsthand witnesses of the Buddha. They can even be called upon to become relics themselves; by taking on the image of the Buddha, nāgas in essence become the third classification of relics, uddesika (image), so that worshippers who are unable to view the countenance of the Buddha himself during his lifetime might still view a glimpse of his magnificent being. Later in this chapter, the image of the Buddha as assumed by a nāga is considered to be a manifestation of his very real presence and as a potent indication of the special nature of the nāga. This manifestation functions to bring the reader-hearer into proximity with the Buddha himself in spite of the passage of time. Of course, the process is dependent on the text character’s imaginative ability to utilize the image manifested by the nāga and on the reader-hearer’s imagination upon envisioning the image.

Generally speaking, both the Jātaka tales and the vaṃsas are about the presence and absence of the Buddha through time. They are also, to some degree, about the succession of presences of the Buddha in this world and how the aporia is negotiated through narrative as a technology of representing the absent Buddha.²⁷ The Mahāvaṃsa begins with the legitimating force of the Buddha’s presence and then illustrates how strategies of access and proximity are developed through the technology of relic veneration, effecting the transfer of the light of the dhamma to the land of Laṅkā. In the same way, the Jātakas deal with the legitimating presence of the Buddha in each frame tale, where the Buddha explicates a former life for the edification of the audience inside and outside the text, collapsing the distance between the teacher Buddha and his pupils, who span generations. The Kalingabodhi Jātaka establishes a paradigm that helps the Buddhist community negotiate the Buddha’s absence from that community after his parinibbāṇa.

In the Kalingabodhi Jātaka’s frame story, Ānanda wishes to have a substitute for the Buddha so that when the Buddha is temporarily away from the Jetavana monastic complex, his disciples might have recourse to an appropriate receptacle for flower offerings and the like. The Buddha asks Ānanda how many kinds of cetiya there are, and Ānanda answers that there are three—namely (1) sarīrika, those of body; (2) pāribhogika, those of association; and (3) uddesika, those “prescribed.”²⁸ The Buddha concludes that while he is still alive, only a bodhi tree is a fitting recipient of veneration in his temporary absence.²⁹

The scenario reads like a trial run for the Buddha’s imminent parinibbāṇa. In the relatively safe confines of this narrative, “absence” ostensibly refers to the times when the Buddha is away from the monastery, but we know that soon after his death, he will be completely and permanently away (parinibbāṇa). These strictures will hold and help guide the community in lieu of his live, physical, charismatic presence. Early on, then, we see the tradition seeking to establish through narrative an explanation of the different types of relics, with recourse to a tripartite divisional scheme. Practically speaking, once the Buddha is really gone, all three categories become viable objects of relic veneration. The threefold schema is significant in Sri Lanka, and it has penetrated into contemporary practice, as Richard Gombrich reveals in the following Pāli verse, which he says is “known by heart by most villagers and recited by the most pious laymen who take the Eight Precepts at the temple on poya days”: “I worship always every shrine, standing in every place, the bodily relics, the great Bodhi tree, and every image of the Buddha.”³⁰

Relic veneration is still a key practice in the present day, just as it was for the textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa, where the establishment of the relics is at the core of the text. The focus on the relics in the Mahāvaṃsa could have been an argument for a nascent practice, but it could also have been a deliberate adoption of an orthodox veneer, a proclaimed assumption of practices without which attention and patronage could have shifted away from the Theravāda monastic practices. We cannot know exactly what practices were au courant for the textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa, but we can pay attention to the text’s dominant focus on the relics of the Buddha as the concrete purveyors of Theravādin eschatology and the presence of the Buddha and as the catalyst for the emotional reception by the audience. Significantly, the nāgas closely relate to each of the three types of relics and thus warrant our attention.

As we saw in chapter 2, when the Buddha returns to India, he leaves the bejeweled Veḷuriya throne behind in Laṅkā, the object that had in fact been the catalyst for the unrest that was the very reason for the Buddha’s intervention and presence on the island. Previously an object of contestation between groups of nāgas, the throne is transformed by his use into a relic and established by the Buddha as an object of veneration, even though he used it for only a short time. The Buddha also leaves behind the parasol (tree) that his companion, the god Sumana,³¹ had brought from India and that had been used to shade him during his stay in Laṅkā. The Mahāvaṃsa begins with both of these relics of use, illustrating the importance that relics exert on the religious practices established in the narrative for the textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa. This text is not a simple “history” of the Buddha’s visits to the island but instead a provocative vision of the Buddha leaving behind concrete items to inspire and incite the emotional responses that would drive future communities’ religious practices.³²

The Veḷuriya throne, simultaneously representing both the Buddha’s presence and absence, and the parasol–tree, presaging the centrality of the bodhi tree, are meant explicitly for the nāgas to worship after the Buddha has left the island. It is understood that after the Buddha leaves, the nāgas will remain behind to cultivate themselves by fostering good practices such as relic veneration. In a similar way, the narrative inspires an intellectual and moral connection, even obligation, to the practice of relic veneration and inspires the outside reader-hearer to behave like a good Buddhist. From the beginning, the Mahāvaṃsa establishes the centrality of relic veneration as a means to achieve saṃvega and pasāda, which in turn inspires veneration’s continued practice.

The narrative then presses forward to a time where the people (humans) of Laṅkā have yet to be made aware of the Buddhist way of life. The good king Devānaṃpiyatissa of Laṅkā encounters the monk Mahinda, who has been sent forth at the behest of the thera Moggaliputta of India at the end of the Third Council to convert people in “the adjacent countries,” the borderlands.³³ Just as nāgas occupy an inauspicious birth situation, so the borderlands are considered unlikely locations for the dhamma to thrive. Yet the king of Laṅkā is easily converted by the thera, and soon his entire retinue wants to be included in the movement. A narrative that dwells on the efficacy of the dhamma to take hold in such liminal beings and places surely underscores the power and persuasiveness of that dhamma.

The structure and pace of the narrative as well as its plot illustrate the expected transformation of the audience. If chapter I of the Mahāvaṃsa is an introductory lesson on how to be Buddhist—namely, to set up the paradigm of saṃvega and pasāda and the focus of worshippers on the relics left behind—chapter XIV illustrates the basic questions a community generates as it accepts the doctrine: practical questions such as what kinds of seats the bhikkhus might like, when food can be served to them, and so forth. One of the most vocal of the nascent Buddhists, Queen Anulā, Devānaṃpiyatissa’s queen, would like to seek ordination. When the king asks Mahinda to ordain her, Mahinda explains that a bhikkhunī, or female monk (nun), must perform the ordination and that his own sister, Saṅghamittā, would be the one to come from India to oversee the ordination of the women of Laṅkā, thus establishing another layer of the transference of the dhamma to Laṅkā.

As recounted in Mahāvaṃsa XIX, nāgas were among the various classes of beings appointed by Asoka to watch over the bodhi tree prior to its voyage to Laṅkā.³⁴ A scion of the bodhi tree has a supernatural voyage to Laṅkā; the sea stands still for a surrounding circle with a radius of a yojana (about seven miles), while flowers and music envelop the tree. Even though some nāgas are among the beings charged with the protection of the tree during its travels, other nāgas in the ocean are overwhelmed with the desire to possess and worship it and seek to take it by magic.³⁵ As they are just about to steal it, the bhikkhunī Saṅghamittā (the daughter of Asoka and sister of Mahinda), by her own great supernatural powers, takes the form of a garuḍa to try to scare off the nāgas. Terrified, the nāgas first take the graft of the bodhi tree down to the nāgaloka to pay reverence to the relic for seven days and seven nights before returning it to Saṅghamittā.³⁶ This is a case of a relic of the Buddha actually being taken (by force) to the nāgaloka for worship before it becomes an active site for veneration in Laṅkā: “Trembling, the great snakes begged the great Theri [to stop scaring them]; thereupon they carried away the great Bodhi to the snake realm. Having worshipped it with manifold venerations and with the kingship of the nāgas for seven days, they brought it back to the ship and had it set up there. Thus, on the same day, the great Bodhi came here to Jambukola.”³⁷ Significantly, one week is the proper amount of time for relic veneration and for establishing a new Buddha image by investing it with power and the story of the Buddha.³⁸ The week-long sojourn in the nāgaloka could similarly invest the bodhi tree graft. The layover at least confers upon it a good story, a pedigree of value. What happens to relics when in the nāgas’ possession? Why is there a need for a cosmic layover or virtual baptism in the narrative? Even before this pāribhogika relic is established in Sri Lanka, it must first receive this special attention from the nāgas.

According to the Kalingabodhi Jātaka, the bodhi tree was the most fitting relic to venerate during the life of the Buddha. We can see that it has special importance after his death as well. Saṅghamittā is a liminal character of sorts (a woman, a bhikkhunī, a shapeshifter-garuḍa), presaging the other liminal figures we will meet in other relic-procurement stories (the novice Soṇuttara, who claims sarīrika relics from the nāgas, and nāgas with the uddesika relic of the Buddha). To get the relic to Laṅkā requires a trip over the ocean, a liminal territory (just as Soṇuttara travels through the earth and the nāgas “travel” through time). The pattern of retrieval is an important feature of the narrative, and it is repeated both internally (it happens more than once in a story) and externally (it happens in multiple stories in Pāli texts).

Even the stalling of the relic serves to heighten the suspense; in some ways, perhaps this interlude is included precisely to change the pace of the chronicle and add to the emotional effect on the reader-hearer. By being a member of the textual community that is sustained by the relic veneration narrated by the text, the reader-hearer knows the outcome of the Mahāvaṃsa’s suspenseful relic procurement stories even before they are told.³⁹ The story of the nāgas taking the bodhi tree to their abode attests to the value and temptation of the relics, and for the reader-hearer outside the text it instantiates a certain gratitude that the relics described therein are so readily accessible.

The first stories of the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa establish the connection between the Buddha himself and the nāgas, a connection that hinges on relics. The nāgas use relics in their pursuit of a better Buddhist life (ideally for rebirth as a human). What is salient for us here is the idea that objects of the Buddha’s use (throne, parasol, tree) become objects fit for use as relics to be venerated in order to stimulate and sustain the newly converted nāgas’ religious practice. The pāribhogika relics are not only accessible to humans but are also used by the nāgas. In the story, then, having the nāgas so focused on the relics draws the reader-hearer’s attention likewise to the centrality of the relics.

According to the Mahāparinibbāṇa-sutta, after the Buddha’s corporeal relics were divided into eight portions after his cremation, the portion that was enshrined on the banks of the Ganges at Rāmagāma washed out to sea in a flood.⁴⁰ Anything that haphazardly finds its way into the sea becomes fair game for the poaching, hoarding ways of the nāgas who inhabit the water, and the relics come into their possession. This story serves the later relic-centered Sri Lankan tradition—ever concerned to preserve the impression of its status as preordained by the Buddha himself—in that it allows for a significant portion (one-eighth) of sarīrika relics to be brought to the island in the time of Duṭṭhagāmaṇī, two centuries before the Common Era.⁴¹ This cache of corporeal relics is entrusted to the nāgas’ guardianship.

The supernaturally gifted novice Soṇuttara is himself classed a nāga, as all novices are until they have undertaken full ordination. The story thus presents a nāga (novice) who is sent to outwit a nāga (supersnake), and all transactions (of value, of power) occur in liminal regions, regions easily accessed by both kinds of nāgas. How might reading or encountering this narrative of the gift of relics predestined for Laṅkā, according to the deathbed prognostications of the Buddha himself, effect a moral or ethical turn for the hearer? A focus on the impact on the audience, however, is not to argue explicitly against the more conventional reading of the Soṇuttara story as a model for the nascent state–saṅgha relationship in that the Mahāvihāra expresses its unique and ideal situation to procure the relics that fulfill the requirements of stūpa building.⁴² That this story does not exist in the Dīpavaṃsa provides us with an opportunity to think about how it may function in the later Mahāvaṃsa as a critical means to engender a desired response, the text’s poetic aim.

Relic theft is a tantalizing topic. Unlike in other religious traditions, such as the Roman Catholic, where relic theft is confined to the human realm and human agents, the Pāli vaṃsas maintain that thievery happens between worlds and is perpetrated primarily by nonhuman agents. What all of these traditions have in common, though, is that the perpetrators (here, the nāgas) may not be motivated by greed but rather by extreme piety and the desire to serve and worship the relics appropriately. Following Patrick Geary’s ideas about relic theft in the Christian context,⁴³ I suggest that thievery points to the extreme value of the relics and even generates additional value. I argue that thievery also heightens the imaginative involvement the reader-hearer of the Mahāvaṃsa has with the story. For the textual community, much is at stake regarding the theft of relics. It is really no surprise to hear of the theft because the story is narrated expressly to attribute a pedigree, a vaṃsa, an authoritative link to the Buddha himself. In the case of Soṇuttara, stealing relics is an essential part of the establishment ritual, of the bringing of the relics to the new land of Sri Lanka. Passing through the hands, bellies, or coils of the nāgas seems a requisite layover before a relic can be activated in the landscape proper and enshrined for human veneration. Thievery occurs in liminal spaces, in the betwixt and between worlds; it happens as relics are in transmission from their original location to the island of Laṅkā; one might even say that relic theft happens during the in-between times as well.⁴⁴

As the story goes, King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī prepares the preordained site for the Buddha’s corporeal relics, the Mahāthūpa at Ruvanveli, with great pomp and circumstance. The stūpa is built, the ceremony is under way, and the crowds have gathered before anyone seeks to retrieve the one-eighth portion of the Buddha’s corporeal relics that had been in “storage” in the nāgaloka for this very (legitimizing) occasion. The king depends on the specialized skills of the saṅgha to procure the essential ingredient to enliven his stūpa. The nāgas had grown quite attached to the relics in the intervening centuries, however, and are reluctant to part with their charge. The novice monk Soṇuttara, on account of his highly developed iddhi (meditative superpowers), is dispatched to recover the relics from the nāgas. He enters into meditative states conducive to the sort of intraworld travel he needs to do, and when he hears the music in the city indicating that the ceremony has begun, by means of his iddhi he enters the earth to reach the nāgaloka (Mahāvaṃsa XXXI.45).

After being greeted respectfully, Soṇuttara explains to the nāgarāja the purpose for his visit. The nāgarāja motions to his nephew Vāsuladatta, who takes the hint, swallows the relic casket, and hurries off to the base of Mount Meru, where he coils up in an immense circle.⁴⁵ In a desperate attempt to outwit the visitor, the nāgas behave in a most nāga-like way: one of them steals away with the treasure, here the relics of the Buddha, and lies at a mound, here none other than Mount Meru itself, the very center of the Buddhist universe, as if it were a safety zone. But Vāsuladatta is no ordinary snake; he creates various other regular snakes through his own superpowers (mahiddhi), the same type of special powers that Soṇuttara has. The image conjured is that of a snake pit, a seemingly safe place to hide a treasure, encircled as it is by treacherous snakes. Vāsuladatta’s hiding act is far from discrete, however. It attracts the attention of many onlooker nāgas and devas, who approach the site, thinking, “We will witness the battle of both nāgas.”⁴⁶

Meanwhile, the nāgarāja explains to Soṇuttara that he has no relics. Soṇuttara responds by recounting the story (pedigree, vaṃsa) of the relics and explaining how they are destined to be enshrined in Laṅkā on that very day. The nāgarāja tries another tack: he points out the superiority of the gem-encrusted cetiya in the nāgaloka, contending that human worship is far less lavish and sumptuous than the veneration paid by the nāgas and that it would not do to move the relics from such a high place to such a low place.⁴⁷ This logical argument, that “we can provide better service than you can,” following right upon Soṇuttara’s recapitulation of the story of the relics, suggests that hearing Soṇuttara’s account only further entrenches the nāgarāja in his proprietary position. Soṇuttara then argues with the nāgarāja over who is in a better position (soteriologically) to benefit from worshipping the relics and who can provide better veneration of them, veneration that is actually conducive to bearing out the Buddha’s intentions that relics can be used to help shed saṃsāra, the cycle of birth, life, death. I consider the nāgas’ debate with Soṇuttara a narrative device that engages the reader-hearer in the tension.⁴⁸ The reader-hearer, just like the multitude of nāgas and devas, is privy to a fundamental debate of worthiness, and reading this provocative passage prompts his or her imagination. For the fifth-century textual community, the winner of the debate is already known, and the feeling of gratitude toward Soṇuttara and the saṅgha of the past and even toward the wily nāgas who had to release the relics may set in.

True to his trickster nature, the nāga king tells Soṇuttara that he may have the relics if he can see them, thinking that they are well hidden and that the novice has no chance of finding them. But Soṇuttara uses his iddhi-empowered vision to detect the whereabouts of the hidden relics and then causes his arm to become very skinny so he is able to slip it down into the belly of Vāsuladatta to retrieve the relic casket. Soṇuttara shouts, “Stay, nāga!” (tiṭṭha nāga), and then returns successfully to the ceremony already taking place in Sri Lanka (Mahāvaṃsa XXI.66–68). While the nāga spectators lament the loss of the relics, the devas who had assembled there celebrate the victory of the “nāga among bhikkhus” (bhikkhunāgassa) (Mahāvaṃsa XXXI.72). Soṇuttara is a nāga, a novice, but he also behaves like a nāga, a snakelike being, by tricking the nāgarāja and his nephew, fashioning a snakelike arm to retrieve the relic casket, and moving between the nāgaloka and the world of humans above it.

In a sympathetic postscript to this story, the nāgas disregard Soṇuttara’s command to stay behind and instead, grieving, complain to the saṅgha about the loss of their relics.⁴⁹ Out of compassion and in an illustration of true goodness and generosity, the saṅgha gives a few relics back to the nāgas, and the nāgas then bring treasures to Sri Lanka as offerings and thus participate in the enshrinement ceremony (Mahāvaṃsa XXXI.73–74).

In this story, the sacred space is already primed; the enshrinement ceremony is already under way before the relics arrive as final confirmation. The relics are venerated in various locations in the cosmos and by various entities (which is allowed by Buddhism’s extensive cosmological formulation). The authenticity of the relic is proven by the fact that it was in the care of the nāgas and by the fact that the nāgas were extraordinarily reluctant to give it up. To accommodate the tradition’s penchant for keeping a reserve portion of relics in the hands of the nāgas for possible future use, the narrative acquiesces to the nāgas’ petition for some relics to be returned to the nāgaloka. Of course, in the story this gesture is seen to be an act of generosity and compassion on behalf of the saṅgha, not a selfish act to ensure the saṅgha’s future access to a store of relics.

The Soṇuttara story is nowhere included in the Dīpavaṃsa, so it illustrates the type of literary turn the Mahāvaṃsa compiler makes. The story of the procurement of the relics, with the exciting “battle” between the nāgas, is a particularly salient story that showcases the type of ethical lessons that arise from a good reading of the Mahāvaṃsa. According to the logic of this text, the procurement of the relics by Soṇuttara is absolutely not a theft, but a legitimate act, simply confirming the prognostications and actualizing the intentions of the Buddha himself.⁵⁰ Delivering the relics from the nāgaloka to Laṅkā is thus seen to be a legitimate act and draws the reader-hearer’s imagination into a realization that the Buddha has done so much that even after his passing he affects the world. For the audience outside the text—the Mahāvaṃsa’s textual communities who might be looking right at Great Stūpa Ruvanveli—this story is included precisely so that it will engender saṃvega and pasāda in them.

The story of the uddesika relic occurs in the midst of the account of the Third Buddhist Council in Mahāvaṃsa V, where we see Asoka’s faith developing. Just before the story of the nāga, Asoka is depicted as increasing his contributions to the saṅgha in response to his developing faith.⁵¹ Everything changes when he hears about the powerful nāgarāja Mahākāla, who has lived through the eras of the previous four Buddhas and therefore has seen each of them. Mahākāla is brought before King Asoka, who asks him to make manifest the image of the Buddha. The nāgarāja then “made by miracle the delightful form of the Buddha, endowed with the thirty-two major signs and blazing with the eighty minor attributes (of a Buddha), encircled by a fathom-long halo and shining with a garland of light beams.”⁵² The king’s response after seeing him is vimhaya (astonishment) and pasāda (religious satisfaction)—the same emotional qualities that the reader-hearer is expected to experience upon hearing this particular story. Then Asoka exclaims, “By him [Mahākāla], this image is such like the form [of the Buddha], how much more so then the form of the Tathāgata [himself]!”⁵³ After his viewing of the uddesika relic (courtesy of the nāgarāja), Asoka is “increasingly struck by the emotion of joy.”⁵⁴ The viewing lasts for seven days, where the great king of great power keeps the great festival named the Akkhipūja (Veneration by the Eyes).⁵⁵ Just as the nāgas commandeered the bodhi tree en route to Laṅkā and worshipped for seven days, here we see a nāga as the Buddha worshipped for seven days and nights. Providing an image that responds to the faithful Asoka’s religious needs within the text, the nāga also thus offers the reader-hearer outside the text an image to provoke the right emotions.

In historical narratives, nāgas are seen to be in relationship with the Buddha’s relics. In the Mahāvaṃsa, nāgas are beings that inhabit their own subterranean world, the nāgaloka, but they also have significant interactions in the human world. As we saw in chapter 2, nāgas first interact with the Buddha himself in his postenlightenment visits to Sri Lanka described in Mahāvaṃsa I. After the Buddha’s passing away, the nāgas maintain a relationship with him as they interact with his relics. Even though the texts portray nāgas as ideal, devoted servants and worshippers of the Buddha, due to their nonhuman ontological status they are soteriologically incapable of benefiting directly from their proximity to him and his relics. But this limitation does not seem to sway the nāgas’ devotion, as depicted within the text, or affect their utility to the reader-hearer outside the text. Nāgas function in the texts as connective characters between the relics of the Buddha and the Sri Lankan landscape, connecting the audience with the Buddha as proximately as possible.

In the Sri Lankan Theravāda tradition underlying the Mahāvaṃsa’s textual community, sacred space is preordained; it is established by the Buddha in his pre-parinibbāṇa visits to the island. Relics serve in a confirming capacity rather than a sacralizing one and are brought into the landscape through the nāgas. Relics are brought to the island of Sri Lanka to provide viable outlets to the light of the dhamma. The Mahāvaṃsa, then, is ultimately about rendering the absent Buddha accessible. When we consider the centrality of the relics in the vaṃsas, we might further be able to destabilize the reified notion of the dhammadīpa as the “island of dhamma” (or “righteous isle” in Ananda W. P. Guruge’s translation⁵⁶), replete with nationalistic overtones. Applying our reading of dīpa as “lamp” and understanding that a lamp requires priming before it can receive the transferred light, we can understand the landscape of Laṅkā as having been made ready by the Buddha for his relics so that future communities might have access to his presence.

Corporeal and use relics are distributed and enshrined throughout the land to actualize the Buddha’s predictions articulated in the Mahāvaṃsa’s initial chapter. The stories of their establishment via the nāgas’ nascent Buddhist practice suggest that relics must make a prerequisite trip through the “hands” (bodies) of the nāgas to become charged and viable objects of veneration. And not only must the relics themselves pass through the “hands” of the nāgas to become charged, but the Buddha must interact with the nāgas to establish the future location for those relics, as we saw when the Buddha quelled the battle of the nāgas. The textual tradition thus develops a narrative strategy whereby the nāgas are hoarders and protectors of relics, safeguarding repositories to be used in the future to continue the tradition of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Finally, nāgas can even assume the image of the Buddha to assuage the need of worshippers (that is, Asoka within the text as well as the fifth-century textual community outside it) to be in the presence of the Buddha, a presence that stimulates feelings of amazement and religious satisfaction.

The nāgas point to relics as sites capable of provoking intense emotion. This connection is viscerally captured by Vāsuladatta’s and the nāgarāja’s angst when the relics are taken away. Relics are appropriate and potent vehicles for one’s religiosity and one’s patronage, time, and energy. In the text, then, the nāgas are model worshippers—thankful, confident, devoted, loyal, and emotional. They serve to indicate the potency of relic veneration for the reader/hearer outside the text as well. The effective worship of the relics provides them the means to escape the nāga birth, in some sense proving that veneration of relics is a powerful spiritual tool. Nāgas are literary characters employed to evoke pity and an emotional response from the imaginative and compassionate audience. And yet because some relics are left behind in their possession, and there is the possibility that long-lived nāgas may conjure the form of the Buddha for future viewing, the textual community is simultaneously thrust into a position of gratitude toward these otherwise pesky characters. As humans, we have a relationship with the nāgas, whom we rely on to get relics in the future and to show us the Buddha.

Considering the nāgas’ dubious soteriological aptitude, discussed in chapter 3 and illustrated in the Soṇuttara story here, a reader-hearer must feel the text’s imperative. If the nāgas are so unworthy and yet strive to be close to the relics and be dutiful worshippers, how much more so should the human reader-hearer, who is in the right place (soteriologically and geographically), strive to become the “good person” envisioned by the Mahāvaṃsa? As the nāgas of the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa illustrate the cultivation of the prerequisite emotions of saṃvega and pasāda, so the nāgas at the culmination of Duṭṭhagāmaṇī’s enshrinement of the relics demonstrate the proper attitude of gratitude and the criticality of proximity to the Buddha’s relics. These stories generate a palpable sense of urgency, an awareness and recognition that because the relics are accessible to the Mahāvaṃsa’s textual community, the reader-hearer should feel grateful toward Soṇuttara and toward the nāgas for accomplishing a task in the past for the continued benefit of Buddhists in the future.

The exemplary devotion paid by the nāgas to the Buddha during his life is not just matched but surpassed after the dispersal of his relics. Something shifts within the narrative when the focus of the nāgas’ devotion transforms from being the live, walking, talking Buddha to being the transportable, compact (able to be held, swallowed, hoarded), highly desirable relics. This tension exists for humans as well, and we see that the initial division of the relics upon the Buddha’s cremation, as told in the Mahāparinibbāṇa-sutta, becomes a time for looming competition among tribes of people all wanting the same thing, just as the Mahāvaṃsa opens with the nāgas’ impending war. While the Buddha was alive, his ministry tended to emphasize unity, and his peripatetic wanderings served to spread his teachings far and wide, making them multilocated. Upon his death, a new paradox was engendered: although the Buddha can be dispersed through his relics, those relics must be enshrined and therefore fixed and located. So although it may seem that relics geographically amplify the Buddha’s dhamma, in fact they peg it down to particular locations.⁵⁷ The nāgas’ locative nature, chthonic or not, is significant to the relic tradition, especially as it is conceived and voiced by the fifth-century textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa in its claims of legitimacy and even primacy.