THE PĀLI Mahāvaṃsa has survived through fifteen hundred years of history to become a seminal text of Sri Lankan Buddhism. It has survived thanks in part to the scribes who were charged along the way with copying it (palm-leaf manuscripts do not hold up indefinitely in the Sri Lankan climate). It survived the early translation performed by George Turnour and the consequent attention it garnered from Western Orientalists. And it survived through numerous other intervening interpretations, finally making its way into the hands of modern interpretive communities and scholars alike. Modern scholars must be grateful to all these scribes and interpreters, without whom the text may not have survived at all. Yet we must not forget the work that these interpretations have exerted on our modern understanding of the text. As I hope to have shown by now, key operative facets of this text—its literary form, function, and aims as well as the emotionally provocative, religious work it can perform on the primed reader—warrant a reorientation of modern scholarship on this monumental text.
The abundance of relatively recent work on the Mahāvaṃsa, scholarly and polemical, Western and Sinhalese, initially piqued my interest in this text. As a student, I found myself reading the secondary material more thoroughly than the Mahāvaṃsa itself and being swayed by various opinions about the foundational role it has played in forming the consciousness of the modern Sinhalese people. The more I read, the more the Mahāvaṃsa receded into the background. I realized that I had lost the text itself in the extensive and persuasive layers of interpretation that enshroud it for the contemporary reader, no matter his or her situation.
Reading translations only compounded this effect of feeling removed from the world of the text. Colorful rhetoric such as Wilhelm Geiger’s rendering of the phrase
sāsanujjotanaṭṭhānaṃ as “a place where [the Buddha’s] doctrine should (thereafter) shine in glory,” when “glory” is nowhere implied in the Pāli, initially clouded what I understood to be the text’s purpose. Reading the
Mahāvaṃsa in Pāli, I came away with a different impression altogether about the relationship of this text with the rise of Sinhalese nationalist discourse. I began to see the anachronism of attributing to this text the status of foundational charter, let alone the designation “history.” The narrative’s colorful
nāga stories drew me deeper into the text, and I wondered why snakes had anything to do with Buddhist history writing. But just as they slipped out of my reach when I privileged historical or political concerns over literary, they engaged my imagination when I read the
Mahāvaṃsa in the Pāli. I had to ask, What are such evocative literary characters doing in the midst of such a historically minded, culturally defining expression, a relic of the original Mahāvihāran claims to authority and even supremacy?
I began to imagine the utility of reading this text as a work of literature, with all the emotional, aesthetic, and didactic dimensions that such a reading may carry. My hope is that I have been able to illustrate here why a rethinking of the Pāli Mahāvaṃsa is not only warranted but also provides an essential corrective in the study of Theravāda Buddhism and Sri Lankan texts.
The Mahāvaṃsa itself justifies my approach. As we see in its proem, its agenda is not historical or political but ethical: the text is intended to lead to a particular transformation in the reader-hearer. The Mahāvaṃsa’s proem uses language that clearly suggests the text’s purpose is to generate first saṃvega, anxious thrill, and then the resulting pasāda, serene satisfaction. Once primed by the proem, the reader immediately encounters the narrative of the Buddha himself. The Mahāvaṃsa thus begins with an impact, calling up an image that was clearly intended to inspire saddhā (confidence or faith) and a type of faith-filled reading. The text not only encourages its readers to take on this specific, religious vantage point vis-à-vis the text but also continues to employ various rhetorical techniques throughout, such as the metaphor of the dhamma as a light or lamp, that buttress such a reading and ensure that the reader is transformed through the act of reading.
And whom do readers encounter besides the Buddha in this very first chapter of the
Mahāvaṃsa, in this charged and light-filled atmosphere?
Just as the Buddha encounters the reader and in fact intercedes on his behalf, so the reader is swept into being interested in the
nāgas. Though scholars are wont to suggest as much, the character of the
nāga cannot be reduced to any compact, symbolic shorthand for chaos.
1 Nor is it to be understood exclusively as a representation of an indigenous people in the land of Laṅkā, as certain historicist readings, bent on reconstructing the ethnic histories underlying the text, have implied.
2 I suggest, rather, that the
nāga is an ideal literary character employed in these poetic narratives to provoke desirable emotions and to heighten the reader-hearer’s aesthetic response.
The
nāga’s ontological status sets it apart from the human who confronts it in the text. It is this gap that makes the
nāga such an effective character to assist in heightening the reader-hearer’s emotions as she or he reads the
Mahāvaṃsa. The
nāgas act much like humans; they are scared, assuaged, converted, devoted, and anguished when confronted by the Buddha and separated from him or his relics. The audience may empathize with them insofar as their emotional state is concerned. But the
nāgas’ dubious soteriological aptitude leads the audience finally to feel more sympathy than empathy, and this contrast generates in them feelings of gratitude for their human birth and a sense of urgency regarding proper practice. This result makes no literal sense, but it makes great literary sense.
3According to the Mahāvaṃsa, nāgas are soteriologically capable of great faith and transformation. The use of such characters performs a particular kind of work on the reader. Imagining the nāgas as distinctly “other” than human rather than as surrogate characters for a human agent or vehicles solely to inspire empathy helps to catalyze for the audience the requisite imaginative processes. In a community where the Buddha himself was never historically present, the reader-hearer must make a significant imaginative leap to cultivate faith and proper practice. This is the purpose of the “other” character, the nāga, in the Mahāvaṃsa—to catalyze that imaginative leap for the reader and affirm the Buddha’s continuing presence.
For the primed reader, the stories of the
nāgas introduce or underscore the urgency and necessity of these anticipated emotional responses and their concomitant ethical and ritual behaviors—the very actions that engender the community of “good people” purportedly constructed through the reading of this text. In other words, if the
nāgas can be so affected by the Buddha, riled and thrilled and then pacified and converted,
how much more so should this emotional and ethical experience occur for the primed monastic audience? For a member of the monastic community who has already explicitly stated at his
upasampadā (ordination) that he is not a
nāga, the
nāgas in the
Mahāvaṃsa, faithful and ubiquitous, always proximate and devoted to the Buddha and his relics, would be especially provocative characters to help generate the imaginative, transformative work called for by the text.
It is this monastic community that is responsible for the production and use of the
Mahāvaṃsa. Scholars typically consider the
Mahāvaṃsa to have been a conscientious attempt by Mahāvihāran monks to shore up support for their vision of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in an unstable political and religious climate. What is typically overlooked, however, is the way these monks accomplished this assertive project—namely, through a riveting text designed to carry the authority of preordination, or
Heilesgeschichte, of the Buddha and the coming of his relics to the island of Laṅkā. As Jonathan Walters has noted, the
Mahāvaṃsa may be considered unique among texts of its era insofar as it represents a deliberate play for historicization by the Mahāvihāra community of monks to secure their particular vision as the Theravāda orthodoxy. Walters reminds us that the
Mahāvaṃsa, as a Buddhist history, “was not intended to be ‘objective’ as nineteenth-century historians understood the term; it was intended as a guide in making sense of the present in order to shape the future.”
4But even this nuanced understanding of the agency and literary consciousness of the
Mahāvaṃsa’s textual community is colored by the much later medieval commentary on it, the
Vaṃsatthappakāsinī. Walters calls that commentary a “Mahāvihāran imperial project,” written to legitimize the Okkāka dynastic ascendancy and hegemony by recording “the proceedings of a ‘committee of inquiry’ charged with interpreting the Mahāvihāran
Vaṃsa (then five hundred years old).”
5 This “commentarial text” was given the title “Ṭīkā” (Commentary) and enabled Turnour and Geiger to read and interpret the
Mahāvaṃsa, and it may be entirely responsible for creating the Mahāvihāran imperial-project lens that all subsequent readings have utilized.
6 If at the outset we move away from reading the
Mahāvaṃsa as a political charter or argument by the Mahāvihāra—a reading exacerbated by the entrenched, politicized Mahāvihāran rhetoric of the
Vaṃsatthappakāsinī—we can begin to access the type of imaginative and aesthetically infused reading the
Mahāvaṃsa itself advocates.
With this new reading, we see that the
Mahāvaṃsa does not represent the singular political agenda of an orthodox, nascent, and ambitious Mahāvihāran community. The text’s proem has voiced its hopes for the reader-hearer in aesthetic and ethical terms. Poetic elements such as the repetitive metaphor of
dhamma as “light” or “lamp” work on the textual community not just to edify but to create a circumscribed supporting community of “good people” who are ethically and imaginatively inspired by the text. In the world of the text, these intended effects are brought about using various tactics, one of which is the presence of
nāgas. The
nāgas are not used simply as a “narrative hook” or as an accommodation for folk or low lay religious practice but are instead an integral part of the cosmos as understood by the textual community. Both the predominant presence of and the particular use of the
nāga in the
vaṃsa narrative renderings of history suggest that the
nāga is a significant agent in Pāli Buddhist texts, which are compiled “for the anxious thrill and serene satisfaction of good people.”
The literary dimension of the Mahāvaṃsa has been treated in a cursory way, if at all, in past scholarship. As scholars of religion, we find ourselves building our interpretations on the cumulative readings of the past, including the readings of earlier texts visible in commentarial traditions that have sustained our source texts to the present. But I have argued that the Mahāvaṃsa requires a rethinking in its own right and that recent readings and uses (and abuses) of its narrative have obfuscated the text’s work.
If, as Kevin Trainor puts it, relic veneration is a “technology of remembrance and representation” of the Buddha, a “cultural strategy for bridging temporal and spatial separation through a complex interaction of material objects, abstract notions, emotional orientations, and ritualized behaviors,”
7 perhaps the
Mahāvaṃsa is best understood as a relic itself that demands attention, even devotion, from the reader. Really paying attention to the
nāgas affirms the
Mahāvaṃsa’s values. The presence and prominence of the
nāgas in the text is thus to be anticipated and enjoyed; just as the
nāgas attend the relics described in the text, they are indices of importance for the text itself. The
Mahāvaṃsa is not exclusively a history but a relic in its own right, which, like a “real” relic, “passes through” the world of the
nāgas in order to become efficacious. Much like any traditional Buddhist relic, it requires physical proximity for efficacy and an attitude of openness about its intended emotional effect (faith and confidence, or some respectful analogue
thereof for the contemporary reader-scholar who is not personally expecting transformation to result from her reading). As a
vaṃsa that has persisted into our contemporary world, the
Mahāvaṃsa is certainly a “cultural strategy for bridging temporal and spatial separation” when read in this new light.