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

3. Sāsana is a key term and refers to the establishment of the Three Jewels—namely, the Buddha, the dhamma (doctrine), and the saṅgha (community). In the Theravādin Buddhist understanding of time, there can be only one Buddha at a time. Therefore, so long as the (current) Buddha (Gotama) is remembered, his relics are available for veneration, the dhamma is observed and taught, and the saṅgha exists as a field of merit, one lives in the sāsana. The term sāsana is therefore typically translated as “dispensation” and includes all aspects of the Buddhist tradition: the instructional and ritual materials, texts, relics, and so on of the saṅgha. Anne Blackburn translates sāsana as “Buddhist teachings and institutions” (Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 4).

4. Mahānāma, The Mahāvaṃsa; or, The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, trans. Wilhelm Geiger, assisted by Mabel Haynes Bode (London: Frowde for the Pāli Text Society, 1912), x. Note that this classic translation was completed under the patronage of the government of what was then called Ceylon.

5. In the introduction to his critical edition of this text, G. P. Malalasekera assigns the Vaṃsatthappakāsinī to the eighth or ninth century (introduction to Vaṃsatthappakāsinī: Commentary on the Mahāvaṃsa, 2 vols., ed. G. P. Malalasekera [1935–1936; reprint, London: Pāli Text Society, 1977], 1:cix), in contrast to Wilhelm Geiger’s suggestion of sometime between 1000 and 1250 C.E. (Cūlavaṃsa: Being the More Recent Part of the Mahāvaṃsa, trans. Wilhelm Geiger and C. Mabel Rickmers (from the German into English) [London: Pāli Text Society, 1929], 267). Walpola Rahula and K. R. Norman agree with Malalasekera (Walpola Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon: The Anurādhapura Period, 3rd Century BC–10th Century AC, 2nd ed. [Colombo, Sri Lanka: Gunasena, 1956], xxiv; K. R. Norman, Pāli-Literature, Including the Canonical Literature in Prakrit and Sanskrit of All the Hīnayāna Schools of Buddhism [Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983], 139).

6. Jonathan Walters, “Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pāli Vaṃsas and Their Commentary,” in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99–164.

7. For a similar argument applied to later, vernacular texts, see Steven Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular: The Power of the Past in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (Leiden: Brill, 2004), and “Emotions and Ethics in Buddhist History,” Religion 31, no. 2 (2001): 155–173. Also see Charles Hallisey, “Devotion in the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Sri Lanka,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988. This “aesthetically sensitive” approach does not preclude a reading of the texts as politically charged and assertive, as shown in chapter 5. The multiple ways the narratives in the vaṃsas are used through history points to the genre’s useful multivalence.

8. Mahāvaṃsa I.3: “Vajjitaṃ tehi dosehi sukkhaggahaṇadhāraṇaṃ /pasādasaṃvegakaraṃ sutito ca upāgataṃ.”

9. Mahāvaṃsa I.4: “Pasādajanake ṭhāne tathā saṃvegakārak e / janayantā pasādaṃ ca saṃvegaṃ ca suṇātha taṃ.” Geiger translates ṭhane not as “ground or condition,” as I am inclined, but as “places in the text,” with the following result: “[Attend ye to it] while that ye call up serene joy and emotion [in you] at passages that awaken serene joy and emotion” (Mahānāma, Mahāvaṃsa, Geiger trans. [1912], 1).

10. See, for instance, Mahāvaṃsa I.4 and II.7, among other appearances of this phrase: “Sujanappasādasaṃvegatthāya kate.”

11. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988); Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1993 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

12. Patterns (of transference of the dhamma and of fear followed by satisfaction) and rhetorical structures (metaphors such as the dhamma as light; phalaśruti, or the fruits of reciting or hearing the text; slesa [Sanskrit, śleṣa], or double meaning; and puns) introduced in the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa determine how the rest of the historical narrative is conveyed and received.

13. Kevin Trainor defines “relic veneration” as 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” (Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravāda Tradition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 27).

14. See Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

15. Nāgas are agents both in our world and in the nāgaloka (subterranean nāga world). Nāgas are chthonic inhabitants of and movers on the waters and thus a salient vehicle for the movement of the dhamma from India to a new center, Sri Lanka, because they are an accepted part of the pan-Indic cosmos and yet are presented in the Sri Lankan context as autochthonous. They are karmically (bodhilogically) challenged because of their lack of human birth, and yet they are always seen in proximity to the Buddha or his relics.

16. As reviewed in chapter 5, scholars have in the past mined the vaṃsas primarily and productively for historical “facts.” In a representative dismissal of the power of narrative, Bimala Churn Law identifies the “value” of the vaṃsas as follows: “It is, however, important that one should read them with a critical eye as all records of popular and ecclesiastical tradition deserve to be read. Buried in the illumination of myths, miracles, and legends, there are indeed germs which go to make up facts of history, but they can only be gleaned by a very careful elimination of all mythical and unessential details which the pious sentiment of the believer gathered round the nucleus” (A History of Pāli Literature, 2 vols. [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1933], 2:540–541).

17. In other words, scholars’ concerns and agendas often predetermine their findings regarding the Mahāvaṃsa. When the Mahāvaṃsa is read for historical information, that information can be found; when it is read to justify or explain the modern Sinhalese Buddhist sense of mission, it can do so. But what results from such approaches is a shortsighted reading of a complex, multivalent text. By “mythic myopia,” I suggest that the text’s mythical elements should not be overlooked and should not be explained away as symbolic treatments of historical concerns (for example, the nāgas have been identified with aboriginal tribes, an identification that certainly affects the rhetorical force of the mythically imbued sections of the Mahāvaṃsa where they play a major role). By focusing on the literary dimensions of the Mahāvaṃsa, my reading, including an intentional focus on the mythical aspects, comes closer to the reading outlined in the text’s proem and offers a better sense of how the text might have “worked” for its fifth-century textual community.

18. I have chosen to translate saṃvega as “anxious thrill” and pasāda as “serene satisfaction,” although both terms encompass a wide semantic range. In his 1912 translation of the Mahāvaṃsa, Geiger translates them as “emotion” and “serene joy,” respectively. As indicated later, saṃvega (from saṃ + vij) has a range of meanings, including “agitation,” “fear,” “anxiety,” “thrill,” and, according to the Pāli Text Society’s Pāli–English Dictionary, “religious emotion (caused by contemplation of the miseries of this world).” Pasāda (from pa + sad) incorporates a sense of brightness, clearness, even purity (when referring to colors) as well as joy, satisfaction, happiness, good mind, virtue, and faith; a tertiary meaning extends it to repose, composure, and serenity (T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, eds., Pāli-English Dictionary [1921–1925; reprint, Oxford: Pāli Text Society, 1995]).

19. See Jonathan Walters, “Mahāsena at the Mahāvihāra: The Interpretation and Politics of History in Medieval Sri Lanka,” in Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, ed. Daud Ali (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 322–366, and especially Walters, “Buddhist History.”

20. See Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular, and “History and Gratitude in Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (2003): 579–604.

21. Trainor, Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism, esp. 82–84, 166–168; see also Kevin Trainor, “Pasanna/Pasāda in the Pāli Vaṃsa Literature,” Vidyodaya Journal of Social Sciences 3 (1989): 185–190, and “When Is a Theft Not a Theft? Relic Theft and the Cult of the Buddha’s Relics in Sri Lanka,” Numen 39, no. 1 (1992): 1–26.

22. Andy Rotman, “The Erotics of Practice: Objects and Agency in Buddhist Avadāna Literature,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (2003): 555–578, and Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

23. Maria Heim, “The Aesthetics of Excess,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (2003): 531–554, and The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention, and Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

24. Charles Hallisey, “Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 689–746; Charles Hallisey, “Devotion in the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Sri Lanka.” Ph.D. diss.; and Charles Hallisey and Anne Hansen, “Narrative, Sub-ethics, and the Moral Life: Some Evidence from Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 24, no. 2 (1996): 305–327.

25. Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). On kāvya, see Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb, eds., Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

26. John Strong, The Relics of the Buddha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

27. Robert DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

28. Steven Collins, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pāli Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); “Nirvāṇa, Time, and Narrative,” History of Religions 31, no. 3 (1992): 215–246; and “On the Very Idea of the Pāli Canon,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society 15 (1990): 89–126.

29. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice.

30. Anne E. Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

31. Partly to blame for the absence of this argument is the unwieldiness of the text in the original Pāli; few scholars are inclined to read it, and overreliance on Geiger’s 1912 translation (or, worse, on Ananda Guruge’s overtly nationalistic rendering published in 1989: Mahānāma, Mahāvaṃsa: The Great Chronicle of Sri Lanka, Chapters 1–37, trans. Ananda W. P. Guruge [Colombo, Sri Lanka: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1989]) affects the types of readings one derives from the text. And it is only in a footnote in an appendix that Steven Collins even suggests a retranslation of the key verse in the Mahāvaṃsa’s first chapter that might finally destabilize the reading of this text as a charter for Sinhalese supremacy (Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities, 598–599 n. 17); also see Kristin Scheible, “Priming the Lamp of Dhamma: The Buddha’s Miracles in the Pāli Mahavāṃsa,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33, nos. 1–2 [2010–2011]: 435–451).

32. There is some interest in the work of proems in Greek and Latin texts, but little in the proems of Sanskrit or Pāli texts.

33. Matthew Kapstein’s edited volume Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) brings together scholarship with a comparative focus. For those sympathetic to Joseph Campbell’s interests and methods, his unpublished essays on light have been posthumously edited and published. See Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, ed. David Kudler (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003).

34. Just think of one’s encounter with the Bible, beginning with Genesis 1:3, where God speaks for the first time, and it is to bring forth light, “Let there be light.” And for good measure, think of the emphasis on light in John 8:12, where Jesus proclaims, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007]).

35. Light in these forms pervades even the titles of great works, such as the tenth century Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka (Light of/on Tantra) or the Mahāyāna Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottamāsūtra (Sutra of Golden Light). Models for quality scholarship on these two texts that pays attention to the literary power of the metaphor of light include Paul E. Muller-Ortega, “Luminous Consciousness: Light in the Tantric Mysticism of Abhinavagupta,” in Kapstein, Presence of Light, 45–80, and Natalie D. Gummer, “Articulating Potency: A Study of the Suvarṇa(pra)bhāsottamāsūtra,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2000.

36. Light saturates the oldest layer of Indic literary production, the Rig Veda; its first verses in praise of the god Agni (himself fire) are filled with light-infused epithets such as “dispeller of the night” and “radiant one” (Rig Veda, book 1, hymn 1).

37. See Luis O. Gomez, The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996). The manifestation of light is a result of the Buddha’s dharma, a causal relationship that is made apparent in the name of the bodhisattva (prebuddha) who becomes the Buddha Amitābha (“whose light is unlimited”): Dharmakāra (Mine of Dharma; Gomez translates it as “Mine of Virtue”).

38. David L. McMahon, Empty Vision: Ocular Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahāyāna Buddhism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 72.

39. For an excellent study of light, location, and theology, see Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

40. Again if we look comparatively to the Bible, the crafty serpent in Genesis 3 sets the fall of humanity in motion.

41. Snakes also inspire creative scholarship. See Jeffrey Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

42. An interesting study of nāga worship and of several images can be found in Sadhu Charan Panda, Nāga Cult in Orissa (Delhi: B.R. Publishing,1986).

43. Scholars frequently suggest that the subjugation of autochthonous disorder is a vestige in narrative form of sociological patterns of local cultures being subsumed or supplanted by hegemonic ones.

44. As told in the adi parva (first section or book 1) of the Mahābhārata, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, among others.

45. See the Bhāgavata Purāṇa; accessible versions of nāga (and light) mythology are found in Cornelia Dimmitt and J. A. B. van Buitenen, Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Puranas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), and Heinrich Robert Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946).

46. Kalhaṇa, Rājataraṅgiṇī, 3 vols., trans. Aurel Stein (1900; reprint Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1979–1988); Harṣa, “How the Nāgas Were Pleased”; and “The Shattered Thighs,” by Bhāsa, trans. Andrew Skilton (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

47. The Lotus Sutra, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). This story is found in chapter 12: “Devadatta.”

48. Paul D. L. Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol, and Myth in Religion and Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 11. As a chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen of England and canon theologian of Exeter Cathedral, Avis is hardly a theological outlier.

49. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.

50. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 30.

51. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, esp. 10–13; Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism, esp. 9–10.

52. Brian Stock, “History, Literature, and Medieval Textuality,” Yale French Studies, no. 70 (1986): 12.

1. Steven Collins explicates pasāda, which is commonly felt at Buddhist stūpas, as “conviction in the religious value of what, or who, evokes the feeling” (Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pāli Imaginaire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 593 n. 2. Andy Rotman considers how the mental state of pasāda motivates good actions, specifically acts of generosity, defining “good people” (Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008]).

2. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

3. Mahāvaṃsa I.2: “porānehi kato.”

4. As I assert in chapter 5, I do believe that the Mahāvaṃsa (as we have received it) makes reference in a general way to the underlying content of the Dīpavaṃsa (as we have received it), although likely not to its precise form, even if both texts were not fixed at the time (as Pāli Text Society critical editions represent fixed texts today). Even though the phrase “Mahāvaṃsa of the ancients” within the Mahāvaṃsa likely refers to the Sinhalese source materials in the aṭṭhakathā (commentarial literature) that predate the compilation of the Dīpavaṃsa, the specific “flaws” to which the Mahāvaṃsa refers are present and obvious in the Dīpavaṃsa. Juxtaposing the two proems thus provides an opportunity to examine the Mahāvaṃsa’s literary ambitions.

5. Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 9–13.

6. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 45.

7. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, 77.

8. Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1993 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 8.

9. This is not to say that readers with agendas will abandon them after reading the proems. A cursory reading of the proems could still result in the overall impression that the Buddha preordained the island of Laṅkā to receive and protect the dhamma.

10. Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 9. For a more comprehensive explanation of model versus empirical readers, see Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

11. This passage from the Siyabaslakara is translated in Charles Hallisey, “Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 715. G. P. Malalasekera attributes the Siyabaslakara to Silāmegha Sena (846–66) (The Pāli Literature of Ceylon [1928; reprint, Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1994], 167–168).

12. Although J. Brough does not interpret the poetic “work” of this phrase the same way I have here, see his essay “Thus Have I Heard…,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13 (1949–1951): 416–426.

13. Madhuratthavilāsinī I.6–7, 9–10. The translation is from Buddhadatta Thera, Madhuratthavilāsinī, trans. I. B. Horner (London: Pāli Text Society, 1978), 2, parenthetical insertions in the original.

14. Ronald Inden, “Introduction: From Philological to Dialogical Texts,” in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13.

15. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, 144.

16. Steven Collins, “What Is Literature in Pāli?” in Pollock, Literary Cultures in History, 649, 650, 651. Considering the relatively short shelf-life of palm-leaf manuscripts in the warm and moist Sri Lankan climate and therefore the necessity for a continued interest in the copying and perpetuating of texts, it is remarkable we have the Pāli texts Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa in any form. That we do presumably points to some stability or continuity in their textual community regardless of support from royalty or lack thereof.

18. Cūlavaṃsa: Being the More Recent Part of the Mahāvaṃsa, trans. Wilhelm Geiger and C. Mabel Rickmers (from German into English) (London: Pāli Text Society, 1929), 260. See also Cūlavaṃsa, 2 vols., ed. Wilhelm Geiger (London: Pāli Text Society, 1925–1927).

19. S. G. Perera, A History of Ceylon, 2 vols., ed. H. C. Ray (Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1955–1959), 1:50.

20. Perhaps this difficulty is the reason the Dīpavaṃsa has but two published translations. See Dīpavaṃsa: An Ancient Buddhist Historical Record, ed. and trans. Hermann Oldenberg (1879; reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982); and The Dīpavaṃsa: A Historical Poem of the 4th Century A.D., in Pāli, ed. and trans. Bimala Churn Law, Ceylon Historical Journal 7 (July 1957–April 1958).

21. Wilhelm Geiger, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa and Their Historical Development in Ceylon, trans. Ethel Coomaraswamy (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Cottle, 1908), 68–69, 5.

23. T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhist India (New York: Putnam’s, 1903), 182.

24. Geiger, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, 12.

25. For a discussion of the memory verses and their function, see ibid., 8–14.

27. Geiger states, “We find therefore in the [Dīpavaṃsa] the first effort towards the poetical development of material, although it is certainly rather clumsy, whilst many parts of it bear the character of the old Ākhyāna style. It thus builds the bridge which leads from the latter to the Mahāvaṃsa, an epic written according to the laws of art” (ibid., 66).

28. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 30.

30. Collins, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities, 41.

31. Dīpavaṃsa I.14: “bujjhitvā sabbadhammānaṃ udānaṃ katvā pabhaṃkaro tad’eva pallañkavare sattāhaṃ vītināmayi.”

32. As we will see in chapter 2, the envisioning of the Buddha as “Light Maker” early on in the text also primes the reader-hearer for the idea of the light of the dharma (dhammadīpa).

33. Geiger, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, 5.

34. “Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsaṃbuddhassa.”

35. LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 30.

36. The term thuti (see note 37) refers to a type of praise text, hence the inclusion of the insertion “[text]” in my translation.

37. Dīpavaṃsa I.1–5:

38. Stephen Berkwitz notes that the ideal action resulting from a sensibility triggered by emotions is that of giving: “‘Virtuous persons’ are consistently depicted and fashioned by medieval Sri Lankan Buddhist histories as individuals who are compelled by emotions such as gratitude to engage in ethical reflection and ritualized acts of making offerings to relics shrines. Far from being counterproductive or risky and, therefore, something to be suppressed, certain emotions are rendered in Theravāda histories as crucial to one’s moral development” (“History and Gratitude in Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 [2003]: 584).

39. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, 13. For Blackburn’s adaptation of Brian Stock’s phrase textual community (used in his book The Implications of Literacy) in the Theravādin context, see pages 10–13.

40. Walpola Rahula notes that the development of gantha-dhura specialists at the Mahāvihāra was responsible in part for the vaṃsa production. “Originally gantha-dhura meant only the learning and teaching of the Tripiṭaka,” but, Rahula asserts, it later expanded to include other writing, such as “history” (History of Buddhism in Ceylon: The Anurādhapura Period 3rd Century BC–10th Century AC [Colombo, Sri Lanka: Gunasena, 1956], 161).

41. Daṇḍin’s text Kāvyādarśa articulates the literary value of thirty-six particular rhetorical devices and is a very early systematic analysis of literary value.

42. Ranjini Obeyesekere, Sinhala Writing and the New Critics (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Gunasena, 1974), 5. Obeyesekere refers to Siyabaslakara I.3 and provides the unpublished translation by Charles Hallisey: “Having worshipped them [Sarasvati and the old masters of the science of poetry], I will express some aspects of the science of poetry in Sinhala for two groups of people: those who do not know the older treatises (in Sinhala) at least in their summary form, and those who do not know Sanskrit.”

43. Geiger, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, 64.

44. “Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsaṃbuddhassa.”

45. Mahāvaṃsa I.1–4:

46. Rahula writes, “The rugged nature of its language and style, its grammatical peculiarities, its many repetitions and the absence of any plan or scheme in its narrative convince the reader that the Dīpavaṃsa is not the continuous work of one individual, but a heterogeneous collection of material like ballads of some unskilled versifiers who lived at different periods in different parts of the Island” (History of Buddhism in Ceylon, xxi).

47. Geiger writes about the hypothesized urtext, the Aṭṭhakathā-Mahāvaṃsa, upon which the subsequent Dīpavaṃsa is based: “Of this work the Dīpavaṃsa presents the first clumsy redaction in Pāli verses. The Mahāvaṃsa is then a new treatment of the same thing, distinguished from the Dīp. by greater skill in the employment of the Pāli language, by more artistic composition and by a more liberal use of the material contained in the original work” (Mahāvaṃsa, or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, trans. Wilhelm Geiger, assisted by Mabel Haynes Bode [London: Frowde for Pāli Text Society, 1912], x–xi).

48. “Sujanappasādasaṃvegatthāya kate.”

49. Dīpavaṃsa I.2: “Pītipāmojjajananaṃ pasādeyyaṃ manoramaṃ anekākārasampannaṃ cittikatvā suṇātha me.”

50. Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 161–162. Rahula also draws bolstering support from an observation of the rhetorical structure of the lists of kings in the Dīpavaṃsa: “The author of the Dīpavaṃsa, too, after enumerating the list of names from King Mahāsammata down to Prince Siddhattha, suddenly inserts the verse beginning with aniccā vata saṅkhārā, signifying the impermanence of worldly things, as if he had recited the whole list of names in the Mahāsammata dynasty in order to prove the impermanence of things! This, too, was in conformity with the idea expressed in the Commentaries” (162). See Dīpavaṃsa V.49.

51. Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 164.

52. Andy Rotman, “The Erotics of Practice: Objects and Agency in Buddhist Avadāna Literature,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (2003): 557. Also see Andy Rotman, Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Kevin Trainor also discusses the motive to act based on the feelings of pasāda aroused by seeing the relics of the Buddha perform miracles (Relics Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravāda Tradition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 167–171).

53. Steven Collins, “Nirvāṇa, Time, and Narrative,” History of Religions 31, no. 3 (1992): 242–243. Also see Steven Collins, “Oral Aspects of Pāli Literature,” Indo-Iranian Journal 35 (1992): 121–135, and William Graham, Beyond the Written Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

54. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), 208, quoted in Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 3.

1. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 6.

2. As we will encounter in chapter 5, Jonathan Walter’s assessment that the Dīpavaṃsa represents a “plea for survival” culminates the hypothesizing by generations of scholars about the social, historical, and political milieu of the Dīpavaṃsa’s textual community (“Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pāli Vaṃsas and Their Commentary,” in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 111).

3. Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 158.

4. Steven Collins, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pāli Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 593 n. 2.

5. To be “religiously moved” in this context is no mere abstraction. I agree with Stephen Berkwitz’s assessment of the pragmatic consequences of the heightening of one’s emotional states by the text. Stemming from his work on the Sinhala Thūpavaṃsa, he develops an argument where he is “not merely suggesting that historical narratives ‘evoked’ or ‘elicited’ feelings of gratitude from within the ‘hearts’ of medieval Buddhist devotees” but instead arguing that “gratitude is a cultural disposition instilled by historical narratives and then embodied in a moral subjectivity that is understood to condition devotional acts of making offerings (pūjā) to the Buddha’s relics” (“History and Gratitude in Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 [2003]: 582, emphasis in original).

6. Maria Heim, “The Aesthetics of Excess,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (2003): 546. Heim also notes that it “is a tool for the Tathāgata to stir up religious motivation in those mired in complacency and comfort” (547).

7. On serial similes, see Charles Hallisey, “Nibbānasutta: An Allegedly Non-canonical Sutta on Nibbāna as a Great City,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society 18 (1993): 97–130.

8. As quoted in Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, 159.

10. Charles Hallisey, “Tuṇḍilovāda: An Allegedly Non-canonical Sutta,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society 15 (1990): 163, quoted in Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, 162.

11. In chapter 3, I revisit these questions and examine how the character of the nāga facilitates the transference of meaning from text to interpreter. In the current chapter, I examine how light is used as a “code” for the elucidation of meaning, which has led me to see a clear connection between the meaning of the text and the character of the nāga.

12. Susan R. Suleiman, “Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism,” in The Reader in the Text, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 12.

13. “Sujanappasādasaṃvegatthāya kate Mahāvaṃse” (This Mahāvaṃsa made for the religious emotion [fear] and serene satisfaction of good people).

14. White, Content of the Form, ix.

15. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, 163. Here Blackburn refers to the use of the metaphor of the three sense doors in Sārārthadīpanī.

16. Poetry is a perfect genre to represent the pattern suggested here. We should consider what Michael Riffaterre has said about the function of poetic texts as conveyors of structured significance: “The chief characteristic of a poetic text, as opposed to the purely cognitive use of language, is that while the text seems to progress from image to image, from episode to episode, it is in fact repeating the same information. The text progresses syntactically and lexically, and it keeps adding meanings, but each step forward is actually a repetition of one significance. Each of these steps is only a transcodage of that significance from one means of expression to another…. The significance is found in the structure given by the text. Every subsequent transcodage is a variant of this structure” (“Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry,” New Literary History 4 [1973]: 238).

17. This recentering of the Buddhist world may have been part of a larger project to destabilize the centrality of northern India in the fifth and sixth centuries. On this recentering project, see Anne Monius’s examination of the sixth-century Tamil Maṇimekalai in Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially pages 100–115. Buddhaghosa considered all of Jambudīpa to be Majjhimadesa (Middle Lands), not just the northern India sites familiarly associated with the Buddha’s biography: “Tambapaṇṇidīpe anurādhapuraṃ majjhimadeso nāma.” “Majjhimadesa” is then extended to include even the city of Anurādhapura on Tambapaṇṇi (Sri Lanka) (as in Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Aṇguttara Nikāya, quoted in Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism, 106; see also Buddhaghosa, Manorathapūraṇī: Commentary on the Aṇguttara Nikāya, 5 vols., ed. Edmund Hardy and Max Walleser [London: Oxford University Press for Pāli Text Society, 1924–1956]).

18. I discuss this correction of mythological myopia elsewhere. See Kristin Scheible, “Priming the Lamp of Dhamma: The Buddha’s Miracles in the Pāli Mahavāṃsa,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33, nos. 1–2 (2010–2011): 435–451.

19. Richard F. Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London: Routledge, 1988), 141.

20. Pierre Maranda, “The Dialectic of Metaphor,” in Suleiman and Crosman, The Reader in the Text, 185, quoting Pierre Maranda, Mythology: Selected Readings (New York: Penguin, 1972), 15–16.

21. In this light, it is helpful to consider the semantic field of the term vaṃsa, which encompasses a range of temporal and spatial meanings such as the nodes on bamboo, the lineage (of teachers or of kings), and history in its most documentary sense. Any way you choose to translate vaṃsa, the dominant image is of something that grows outward from a single origin, and in this case the origin is the Buddha himself.

22. Dīpavaṃsa I.14: “bujjhitvā sabbadhammānaṃ udānaṃ katvā pabhaṃkaro tad’eva pallaṇkavare sattāhaṃ vītināmayi.”

23. It is because of this obvious physical transformation that the Buddha’s first disciples, former partners in ascetic practices who had shunned him as he followed the middle way, recognized and were attracted to the Buddha in the Deer Park at Sarnath. The light thus attracts followers, specifically the followers who are spiritually progressed enough to be profitably affected. In this case, it sets the scene for the first dissemination of the dhamma in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (the first sermon, the “turning of the wheel of dhamma”). Also, the Buddha is commonly described as being radiant and golden.

24. “We will use such expressions as life-wish, royal wish, imperial wish, world wish, life-account, world account, and world vision in place of such conceptually overloaded terms as myth, ideology, and worldview to denote the effects of certain activities that people carried out in the course of their lives, activities that were crucial to the ways of life they pursued. The transformation of heterogeneous life- and world wishes into more coherent and stable world accounts and, in some cases, visions, was crucial to the practices of disciplinary orders” (Ronald Inden, “Introduction: From Philological to Dialogical Texts,” in Inden, Walters, and Ali, Querying the Medieval, 23). Although I appreciate Inden’s emphasis on agency and malleability, I am not fully convinced of the utility of so many new words. I am intrigued by “world wish,” however, a concept that implies the hopeful and intentional revision of the world, perhaps amid negotiation, rather than the more static, ossified, and singular concept “worldview.”

25. Richard F. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings (London: Athlone Press, 1996), 71–72.

26. Jonathan Walters, “Suttas as History: Four Approaches to the Sermon on the Noble Quest (Aryapariyesanasutta),” History of Religions 38, no. 3 (1999): 259.

27. Dīpavaṃsa I.17: “Laṅkādīpaṃ varuttamaṃ”; I.19: “Laṅkādīpavaraṃ”; I.22: “Laṅkādīpavare.”

28. Dīpavaṃsa I.20–21:

29. Herman Oldenberg’s translation renders the beings “too low for (adopting the doctrine of) the Buddhas” (The Dīpavaṃsa: An Ancient Buddhist Historical Record, ed. and trans. Hermann Oldenberg [1879; reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982], 119).

30. Dīpavaṃsa I.24: “parinibbāyi suriyo.”

31. The insertion of historically verifiable elements—here posited as future happenings—does work to elicit confidence in the reader-hearer. At the time of the vaṃsas’ compilations, these future, prophesized events were in fact in the past. The effect of such insertions on the reader-hearer is confidence—he or she is reassured that events have unfolded according to the Buddha’s intended plan.

32. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 115, 116, 118.

33. Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1993 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 87.

34. Dīpavaṃsa I.36–37:

35. Dīpavaṃsa I.54: “Ṭhito naro iddhi vikubbamāno yakkho va mahiddhi mahānubhāvo khaṇiyaṃ ghanā meghasahassadhārā pavassati sītalavātaduddini.” It seems significant that the yakkhas mistake the Buddha as one of their own. The yakkhas are unworthy of even entering the path toward Buddhahood, according to this vignette.

36. The word for “body” here is kāye, and it carries the meaning of a collective body (as in an assembly) as well as of a physical body. The double meaning might here be intentional because the heat is viscerally perceived.

37. Dīpavaṃsa I.58–59:

38. Dīpavaṃsa I.66: “Buddho ca kho isinisabho sukhāvaho disvāna yakkhe dukkhite bhayaṭṭite anukampako kāruṇiko mahesi vicintayi attasukhaṃ amānuse.”

39. Dīpavaṃsa I.74: “Etehi aññehi guṇeh’ upeto manussavāso anekabhaddako dīpesu dīpissati sāsan’ āgate supuṇṇacando va nabbhe uposathe.”

40. It is beyond the scope of this project to consider here the interrelationship of literary devices and actual practices, but in relation to the Uposatha the Muluposatha Sutta (AN 3.70) should be consulted. In it, each of the Three Jewels—the Buddha, dhamma, and saṅgha—is in turn highlighted as the means, accessed through recollection, to transform a defiled mind into a cleansed one, primed for the arising of joy. This transformation structurally echoes the transformation from dark to light or from unprimed to primed reader that is at the heart of my argument. For example: “There is the case where the disciple of the noble ones recollects the Tathāgata, thus: ‘Indeed, the Blessed One is worthy and rightly self-awakened, consummate in knowledge & conduct, well-gone, an expert with regard to the world, unexcelled as a trainer for those people fit to be tamed, the Teacher of divine & human beings, awakened, blessed.’ As he is recollecting the Tathāgata, his mind is calmed, and joy arises; the defilements of his mind are abandoned, just as when the head is cleansed through the proper technique. And how is the head cleansed through the proper technique? Through the use of cosmetic paste & clay & the appropriate human effort. This is how the head is cleansed through the proper technique. In the same way, the defiled mind is cleansed through the proper technique. And how is the defiled mind cleansed through the proper technique? There is the case where the disciple of the noble ones recollects the Tathāgata…. As he is recollecting the Tathāgata, his mind is cleansed, and joy arises; the defilements of his mind are abandoned. He is thus called a disciple of the noble ones undertaking the Brahma-Uposatha. He lives with Brahma [the Buddha]. It is owing to Brahma that his mind is calmed, that joy arises, and that whatever defilements there are in his mind are abandoned. This is how the mind is cleansed through the proper technique” (Muluposatha Sutta: The Roots of the Uposatha (AN 3.70), trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Access to Insight, December 10, 2011, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.070.than.html).

41. Dīpavaṃsa II.2: “Tasmiñ Jetavane buddho dhammarājā pabhaṃkaro sabbalokam avekkhanto Tambapaṇṇivar’ addasa.”

42. Dīpavaṃsa II.5–6: “Sabbe mahiddhikā nāgā sabbe ghoravisā ahū sabbeva kibbisā caṇḍā madamānā avassitā // khippakāpi mahātejā paduṭṭhā kakkhalā kharā ujjhānasaññī sukopā uragā vilaratthikā.”

43. Dīpavaṃsa II.23: “Aññamaññaṃ na passanti tasitā nāgā bhayaṭṭitā jitam pi na passanti kuto saṃgāma kārituṃ.”

44. Dīpavaṃsa II.26–27: “Āloko ‘va mahā āsi abbhuto lomahaṃsano sabbe passanti sambuddhaṃ nabhe candaṃ va nimmalaṃ // chahi vaṇṇehi upeto jalanto nabhakantare dasa disā virocanto ṭhito nāge abhāsatha.”

45. Dīpavaṃsa II.32: “Saṃvejesi tadā nāge nirayadukkhena cakkhumā manussayoniṃ dibbañ ca nibbānañ ca pakittayi.”

46. Koṭi usually refers to space (as in the extreme reaches) or time (a division of time with reference to past or future in the context of saṃsāra). It can also refer to numbers, perhaps 100,000 (see T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, eds., Pāli–English Dictionary [1921–1925; reprint, Oxford: Pāli Text Society, 1995], 227).

47. If we were to read this passage creatively, looking for clues about the contemporary political and economic aims of the community responsible for the text’s creation, perhaps we might see the throne in the possession of these two kings as symbolic of contested royal patronage in general. The fact that the throne is thus turned over to the very head of the saṅgha, the Buddha himself, may be interpreted as a model for how the saṅgha should be supported. Also, the gift of the throne buttresses my assertion in the next chapter that relics of the Buddha seem to need to pass through the nāgas to become activated and efficacious for future generations.

48. Dīpavaṃsa II.39: “Patiṭṭhapiṃsu pallañkaṃ nāgā dīpānam antare, nisīdi tattha pallañke dhammarājā pabhaṃkaro.” It is possible that dīpa in this context simply means “place” because the two places are presumably the mountain and ocean areas where the two groups of nāgas are from.

49. Dīpavaṃsa II.57: “samāpatti samāpajji mettaṃ sabadisaṃ phari.”

50. See Dīpavaṃsa XVII.3–25, XVIII.18, and Mahāvaṃsa XV.8, 24. The park was given to the saṅgha by King Devānaṃpiyatissa; it contained the Mahāvihāra and later (by the time of the composition of our texts) the rival communities, the Abhayagirivihāra and the Jetavanārāma.

51. Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 49.

52. Perhaps beginning at an earlier point makes transparent a new tack of legitimacy. In the face of Mahāyāna influences seeping into Sri Lanka and resulting in the formation of rival vihāras (monastic complexes), here the Mahāvihāra posits a lineage of buddhas—multiple buddhas but here in a succession, a vaṃsa, an authoritative, single lineage. It is not so much invention as a conventional expansion of the Buddhavaṃsa (which dates to the second or first century B.C.E. and hails from India rather than Sri Lanka).

53. “Lokaṃ dukkhā pamocetuṃ,” which Wilhelm Geiger translates as “that he might release the world from evil” (Mahānāma, The Mahāvaṃsa, or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, trans. Wilhelm Geiger, assisted by Mabel Haynes Bode [London: Frowde for Pāli Text Society, 1912], 1). Translating dukkha as “evil,” however, imparts connotations that I believe undermine the gist of the text, which is that the island will be a refuge for humans in the future, an ideal location to develop themselves spiritually and ethically along the path toward buddhahood. Dukkha is not evil per se; it is just a condition of existence, and it is from this condition that the Buddha’s path can liberate one. What is important to take away from this verse is that the bodhisatta was inspired by coming in contact with Dīpaṅkara, the current Buddha of his day, and that coming into the presence of an enlightened being provokes one to become a certain kind of ethical agent in this world.

54. See John S. Strong, The Buddha: A Short Biography (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001).

55. Sumedha’s story is frequently told in Theravādin texts. An early rendition rich with light metaphors, the Dure Nidāna of the Jātakaṭṭhakathā Nidāna-kathā, can be found in The Story of Gotama Buddha: The Nidāna-kathā of the Jātakaṭṭhakathā, trans. N. A. Jayawickrama (Oxford: Pāli Text Society, 1990), 1–36.

56. The draw of the Buddha here is like the “entrapment” we considered in chapter 1. Here we see an inescapable appeal pulling worthy ones toward him; there we considered the effect of texts reaching out through the reader-hearers’ emotional responses to trap them into giving.

57. The story “Vakkali Sutta” in the “Samyutta Nikāya” section of the Sutta Pitaka: “Yo kho dhammaṃ passati, so maṃ passati // Yo maṃ passati, so dhammaṃ passati.”

58. Mahāvaṃsa I.20: “Sāsanujjotanaṭṭhānaṃ Laṅkā ñātā jinena hi / yakkhapuṇṇāya Laṅkāya yakkhā nibbāsiyā ti ca.” Geiger problematically translates sāsanujjotanaṭṭhānaṃ as “a place where his doctrine should (thereafter) shine in glory” (Mahānāma, The Mahāvaṃsa, Geiger 1912 trans., 3), when “glory” is not implied in the Pāli.

59. Jonathan Walters translates sāsana variously as “‘instructions,’ ‘dispensation,’ ‘religion’” (“Buddhist History,” 105).

60. Mahāvaṃsa I.43: “Evaṃ dīpaṃ imaṃ katvā manussāraham issaro.”

61. Mahāvaṃsa I.58–59: “Saṃgāmamajjhe ākāse nisinno tattha nāyako tamaṃ tamonudo tesaṃ nāgānaṃ bhiṃsanaṃ akā // Assāsento bhayaṭṭe te ālokaṃ pavidhaṃsayi te disvā sugataṃ tuṭṭhā pāde vandiṃsu satthuno.”

62. In chapter 4, I consider the function of nāgas as hoarders and protectors of the Buddha’s relics and how this function may explain the Buddha’s conversion rather than outright expulsion of this particular class of being. Being liminal agents, edge-dwellers, and world transgressors, the nāgas help to spread the doctrine.

63. Relating to this story cycle, for an analysis of “expected miracles” and the work that such miracles do for a reader, see Scheible, “Priming the Lamp of Dhamma.”

64. Mahāvaṃsa I.84: “Evaṃ Laṅkāya nātho hitam amitamatī āyatiṃ pekkhamāno tasmiṃ kālamhi Laṅkāsurabhujagagaṇādīnam atthaṃ ca passam āgā tikkhattum etaṃ ativipuladayo lokadīpo sudīpaṃ dīpo tenāyam āsi sujanabahumato dhammadīpāvabhāsīti.” Translated in Collins, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities, app. 2, 598, parenthetical insertions in Collins’s translation.

65. Collins, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities, 598–99 n. 17.

66. Ananda Guruge’s translation reflects this sentiment: “came to be resplendent as the righteous Dhamma” (Mahānāma, Mahāvaṃsa: The Great Chronicle of Sri Lanka, Chapters 1–37, trans. Ananda W. P. Guruge [Colombo, Sri Lanka: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1989], 496).

67. Collins, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities, 599 n. 17.

68. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 147 n. 134. Collins’s explanation here is a corrective to his earlier view: “It has long been recognised that the ideology of these vaṃsa texts is that of the dhammadīpa, the island which the Buddha prophesied would be the historical vehicle of his saving truth” (“On the Very Idea of the Pāli Canon,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society 15 [1990]: 100).

69. The image of light is so prevalent in Pāli texts, whether employed as a metaphor or used descriptively in the various epithets for the Buddha or considered a miraculous by-product, a visible marker of the supernatural, that I cannot list all references here.

70. Walpola Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon: The Anurādhapura Period 3rd Century BC–10th Century AC, 2nd ed. (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Gunasena, 1956), 156 n. 1.

71. On śleṣa, see Charles Hallisey, “Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Also, for an excellent analysis of śleṣa—double meaning, homophones, homonyms, and the like—in Sanskrit poetics, see Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

72. The image of a lamp with a wick needing to be primed would have been a ubiquitous one for the fifth-century community of production. Wilhelm Geiger gleans information about lamp use from the Mahāvaṃsa and Cūlavaṃsa: “Among the smaller household articles first of all lamps (dīpa) must be mentioned. The wicks were made of strips of stuff and the oil with which the lamps were filled, was sometimes a fragrant one (73.76), as the madhuka-oil pressed from the seeds of the tree Bassia laitfolia, or sesamum-oil (34.55–56), or camphor-oil (85.41; 89.43). The terrace of Duṭṭhagāmaṇī’s palace was lit with fragrant oil lamps (25.101). The ‘Brazen Palace’ in Anurādhapura caught fire from a lamp and was destroyed during the reign of that ruler’s successor (33.6)” (Culture of Ceylon in Mediaeval Times, ed. Heinz Bechert [Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1960], 47). He also notes how widely lamps were used in festivals, where temples and streets would be illuminated. Granted, all of this information is relayed through the text itself and cannot be verified by external sources.

73. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 125–141. Collins points to an odd verse indicative of the ideological impetus behind the composition of this commentary on the Mahāvaṃsa: “It is true that the commentary, Mhv-t 118–9, glosses dīpa in both loka-dīpa and dhamma-dīpa not only as pajjota-karaṇa, maker of light, but also, ignoring the word-play, as patitthā- (bhuta), foundation, basis. In the first case it gives no further exegesis; in the second Laṅkā is said to be a ‘basis’ for Buddhists (sāsanikajana) and for the Buddha himself, through his relics. Pāli commentaries, like other Southern Asian exegeses of poetry (kāvya), eschew historical accuracy and see as much meaning as possible in the texts they are explicating; this is a version of the ubiquitous practice of giving historically inaccurate but creative ‘etymologies’” (Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities, 599 n. 17).

74. Vaṃsatthappakāsinī I:1, translated in Walters, “Buddhist History,” 126, parenthetical insertions in the original.

1. Robert DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 35.

2. Values modeled include generally having a right attitude as well as the particular pāramīs (perfections) required for the cultivation of buddhahood, such as dāna (generosity) and sīla (morality).

3. Charles Hallisey and Anne Hansen, “Narrative, Sub-ethics, and the Moral Life: Some Evidence from Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 24, no. 2 (1996): 313.

4. Joseph Walser, “Nāgārjuna and the Ratnāvalī: New Ways to Date an Old Philosopher,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 25, nos. 1–2 (2002): 233–234.

8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin Press, 1964), 89.

9. I refer here to the phrase coined by Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

10. Although I refer later to other instances in Pāli texts where nāgas factor in the delivery of the narrative, this chapter is by no means a survey of all nāga references in Pāli literature, which would be an extensive project of its own. For a general, if outdated and incomplete, survey of the nāga in Indian literature, material culture, and religious practice, see Jean Philippe Vogel, Indian Serpent-Lore; or, The Nāgas in Hindu Legend and Art (London: Probsthain, 1926). For focused attention on images of nāgas, see Robert DeCaroli, “Shedding Skins: Naga Imagery and Layers of Meaning in South Asian Buddhist Contexts,” in Buddhist Stupas in South Asia, ed. Jason Hawkes and Akira Shimada (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 94–113.

11. Jonathan Walters, “Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pāli Vaṃsas and Their Commentary,” in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 150.

13. As E. B. Cowell notes in his preface to an edited translation of the Jātakas, “The Sutta and Vinaya Piṭakas are generally accepted as at least older than the Council at Vesāli (380 B.C.?); and thus the Jātaka legends must have been always recognised in Buddhist literature” (The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, 7 vols., ed. E. B. Cowell [1895–1913; reprint, London: Pali Text Society, 1963], 1:vi).

14. Achariya Dhammapāla, Paramatthadīpanī, Being the Commentary on the Cariyā-Piṭaka, ed. D. L. Barua (London: Pāli Text Society, 1939). Oskar von Hinüber notes that Dhammapāla was likely a South Indian, though he could have been from Sri Lanka, and that he did not use Mahāvihāran recensions of the Apadāna or, important to consider here, the Cariyāpiṭaka (A Handbook of Pāli Literature [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996], 137).

15. The Jātaka, Together with Its Commentary, 7 vols., ed. Viggo Fausbøll (1877–1897; reprint, London: Pāli Text Society, 1963).

16. The nāgaloka is a place for those nāgas who have accrued great merit and a fortunate rebirth. For example, when the mother of Bhūridatta, Samuddajā, first encounters the nāgaloka, with all of its jeweled pavilions and tanks and gardens, she asks her attendant, “This city is magnificently adorned, it is not like our city; whose is it?” “O lady,” esponds the attendant, “it belongs to your lord,—it is not those of scanty merits who win such glory as this,—you have obtained it by reason of your great merits” (The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 6:86).

17. There is even an actual, explicit birth story, thus highlighting Bhūridatta’s slippery ontology, yet another reason to choose this story among the three possible contenders.

18. Samuddajā (Ocean Born) has this name because she was born on the shore; even her name stresses the liminality of this character. She is also half-nāga, half-human, which then makes Bhūridatta one-quarter human. I wonder if this fraction of humanity is what avails the dhamma to him?

19. The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 6:87.

20. The appropriate place for ascetic practices is the human realm, where the choices one makes are most weighted. We know from Vinaya I:68, the story where a nāga infiltrates the saṅgha to be close to the Buddha but is discovered when he reverts to his nāga status while he sleeps, that nāgas are indeed capable of taking on human form in the human realm. But Bhūridatta chooses the form of a snake.

21. The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 3:170, 88.

22. Here we see the same fluidity among supernatural entities as we saw in chapter I of the Mahāvaṃsa, where the yakkhas initially mistake the Buddha for a yakkha. A being might be any sort of being; difference is not immediately apparent.

23. There may be apparently dishonest actions, such as taking a form other than one’s own, but telling a lie pushes the moral limit.

24. Jewels placed on riverbanks tend to have some sort of homing device and frequently vanish and return to the nāgaloka. This “homing” mechanism sets up an interesting reason for the nāgas’ sanctioned hoarding of Buddha relics. The connections with treasures or jewels and the Buddha’s relics are explored in chapter 4.

25. The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 6:98. I believe the captivity being referred to is in fact Bhūridatta’s nāga birth and not his subjugation under the snake charmer; the double entendre is rich.

26. Bhūridatta’s mother is in fact human, duped into believing she inhabits a beautiful earthly kingdom (the nāgarāja tricks her by commanding all the nāgas of the nāgaloka to assume human form). Bhūridatta thus has some human in him, although the nāga dominates and determines his soteriological aptitude in that birth.

27. The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 6:102.

28. This discourse recalls the reading of the Mahāvaṃsa’s emphasis on light and dark as a renegotiation or even co-optation of Vedic imagery for nascent Buddhist practical purposes. See chapter 2.

29. John C. Holt, The Religious World of Kīrti Srī (London: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19. Also see Bardwell L. Smith, “The Ideal Social Order as Portrayed in the Chronicles of Ceylon,” in Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka, ed. Bardwell L. Smith (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978), 48. Steven Collins says that the history of the vaṃsas is, “to be sure, ‘Sacred History,’ Heilsgeschichte, but it expresses and preserves an explicit sense of mundane historical continuity, both within the countries we now call Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, and in connecting these areas with the Buddha and Buddhism in India” (Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pāli Imaginaire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 255).

30. In Haunting the Buddha, Robert DeCaroli translates bhūta devatā as “spirit-deities,” lumping the various nonhuman, semidivine agents together in the term spirit, a loaded term to say the least. Bhūta (as past passive participle, “become” or “been”) is a common term for ghosts and spirits. I appreciate DeCaroli’s broader project about auxiliary beings’ proximity to the Buddha, especially articulated in his closing thoughts, but I think his terminology undermines the central, foundational importance of the cluster of symbols, the constellation of myths, and the abundance of practices that he designates “spirit religions” but that are in fact part and parcel of Buddhism. The appearance of (and arguably the prominence or centrality of) “spirit-deities” suggests to me that the distinction was never as abrupt or definite as is painted in modern scholarship or in “Protestant Buddhism.” Defending the term popular spirit religions, DeCaroli explains: “This term refers to the myriad popular religious practices in India which center on the propitiation and veneration of various local and minor deities. The term seems fitting because these beings hold a liminal position between the realms of ghosts (preta, bhūta) and the gods (deva) and frequently seem to share the nature of both. I do realize that combining several categories of supernatural beings under one title also poses certain problems. Given the fluidity and frequency with which the primary sources use these categories interchangeably and the uniformity in the Buddhist response to all these types of beings, however, it is helpful to use this collective term within the confines of the present discussion. Conversely, if I were to limit the discussion to just cases of one type (yakṣa, nāga, or devatā) I would only be able to explore a fraction of the available evidence detailing the monastic response to preexistent, non-Brahmanical, nonsoteriological forms of religious expression that center on the appeasement of a deity or deities who possess explicitly limited power” (Haunting the Buddha, 190 n. 17). Setting aside altogether what DeCaroli might mean by “nonsoteriological,” I think nāgas function in a different way. Whether pre-Buddhist elements incorporated into the Buddhist fold or designed by Buddhists, nāgas are not minor deities to propitiate. The first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa illustrates that it is not propitiation of the nāgas that occurs, but actual conversion. They are crucial characters in the cosmological and literary landscape who reveal what is important, including the Buddha’s relics, how to worship them, and how to feel gratitude for the opportunity to worship.

31. Acariya Dhammapāla explicitly classifies the Bhūridatta Jātaka as a text on the Sīlapāramitā—together with other stories gleaned from the Jātaka-Nidānakathā, Cariya-Piṭaka (and commentary), and Atthasālinī (see the editor’s preface in Dhammapāla, Paramatthadīpanī, vii–ix). In the final part of this chapter, on ethics, I turn to this classification of the Bhūridatta Jātaka as teaching about the “perfection of morality.”

32. Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga, trans. Bhikkhu Ñanamoli, 5th ed. (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1991), XIII.93, italics in this translation.

33. Perhaps it stretches Fernand Braudel’s term longue durée too much to apply it to the Buddhist understanding and experience of saṃsāra, yet the possibility of animal births through time must impact one’s sense of selfhood in the human present and must affect one’s reading of animal stories on some level.

34. Christopher Key Chapple, “Animals and Environment in the Buddhist Birth Stories,” in Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 133.

36. Philip Kapleau, Of the Same Root, Parabola, vol. 8, no. 2 (New York: Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, 1983), 76.

37. DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha, 11.

38. Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1946). For examples of those who trace their lineages to great nāgarājas (nāga kings), from Udayana to the Pallavas to the Khmer of Cambodia, see Vogel, Indian Serpent-Lore, 34–37. DeCaroli remarks that “images of the Buddha seated on the nāga Muchalinda, although almost non-existent in the north of India, are common on first- to third-century Andhran monuments. This shift in iconography may be due to the regional importance given to nāgas in the south and serve as a recognition of their important role as ancestral figures. Given the importance of spirit-deities to Buddhist expansion, it should not be surprising that the occurrence of spirit-deities on Buddhist monuments would be directly related to the popularity of those spirit-deities within the region” (Haunting the Buddha, 93).

39. The Story of Gotama Buddha: The Nidāna-kathā of the Jātakaṭṭhakathā, trans. N. A. Jayawickrama (Oxford: Pāli Text Society, 1990), 107.

41. The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 6:86.

42. Note that a nāga who has assumed human form also assumes natural human behaviors, such as nursing, which a fully reptilian snake would not do.

43. The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 6:87.

47. Hallisey and Hansen. “Narrative, Sub-ethics, and the Moral Life,” 313.

48. This is the argument by which Asoka retrieved the relics from the nāgas. Although the worship of the doṇa (measure) of relics by the nāgas was exemplary and far more elaborate than what the humans could do, it made more sense for the relics to return to the human world, where they could be worshipped by people, who are able to reach enlightenment. See Xuanzang [Hiuen Tsiang], Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, 2 vols., trans. Samuel Beal (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1884) 2:26–31; compare Vogel, Indian Serpent-Lore, 127. We will also see this argument developed in the next chapter, which tells the story of Soṇuttara retrieving the relics from the nāgaloka on the basis that the nāgas cannot proceed on the path of enlightenment in spite of their devotional appreciation of the relics.

49. The well-known story of the guardianship of the Mahāyāna Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) sūtras, in which the nāgas invited the philosopher Nāgārjuna to discover the cache, is explained thus: “It is said by some that when the Buddha began teaching his doctrine, he soon realized that men were not prepared to accept it in its fullness. They shrank from the extreme implications of his vision of the universal Void (śūnyata). Therefore, he committed the deeper interpretation of reality to an audience of nāgas, who were to hold it in trust until mankind should be made ready to understand…. Not until some seven centuries had past was the great sage Nāgārjuna, ‘Arjuna of the Nāgas,’ initiated by the serpent kings into the truth that all is void (śūnya)” (recounted in Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 68).

50. The Jātaka, Cowell ed., 6:97.

52. Hallisey and Hansen, “Narrative, Sub-ethics, and the Moral Life,” 314, parenthetical citations omitted.

53. Ibid., 312, parenthetical citation omitted.

55. Vinaya Piṭaka, I.63.

56. With this story in mind, it is worth considering the placement of the Vinaya within the entire canon because we see nāgas at the very outset: “The arrangement of texts in the Theravāda canon underlines the importance of Buddhist law, for it is contained in the first part of the Tipiṭaka, the ‘basket of the discipline’ (‘Vinaya-piṭaka’) followed by the ‘basket of the teaching’ (Sutta-piṭaka)” (Oskar von Hinüber, “Buddhist Law According to the Theravāda-Vinaya: A Survey of Theory and Practice,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 18, no. 1 [1995]: 8).

57. It is thus ironic that novice monks are called “nāgas,” perhaps reflecting their namesakes’ liminal status but good intentions. Perhaps this moniker also addresses the novices’ slippery nature—not all of them stay for full ordination—or their place or low status at the start of the soteriological path.

58. DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha, 50.

59. Collins, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities, 254–281; see especially Collins’s discussion of Paul Ricoeur’s idea, found in Time and Narrative (3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984–1988]), of “the structure of temporality as an ultimate referent” in both fictional and historical narratives (256–257).

1. For example, corporeal relics, bits of bones, and impure bodies repulsed the Nigaṇṭhas (Jains, followers of the teacher Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta, a contemporary of the Buddha), although Phyllis Granoff has argued that in the Dāṭhavaṃsa reference to the Nigaṇṭhas is not to a particular sect but to “any non-Buddhist who is hostile to the Buddhist faith” (“The Ambiguity of Miracles: Buddhist Understandings of Supernatural Power,” East and West 46 [1996]: 82). In Pāli texts, Mahāvīra is referred to as “Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta.” The third chapter of this later (thirteenth- or fourteenth-century) Dāṭhāvaṃsa tells of the trials the tooth relic of the Buddha is subjected to in order to appease the dubious Nigaṇṭhas’ challenge to its authenticity. The relic is burned by a fire (but it rises unharmed on a lotus pedestal), pounded on an anvil (but it responds by sinking halfway into the anvil and emitting rays of colored light), and finally tossed into an impure cesspool filled with corpses (but the power of the relic turns the pool into a sea filled with blooming lotuses). Some of the Nigaṇṭhas then validate the power of the relic but interpret it to be the tooth of Janāddana, or Viṣṇu, from one of his worldly incarnations. I recount the story here to point out the interesting comparative nature of my topic and to show that relics in Buddhism represent a significant shift in the Indic religious landscape. For the story of the tooth relic, see The Dāṭhāvaṃsa (A History of the Tooth-Relic of the Buddha), ed. and trans. Bimala Churn Law (Lahore: Motilal Banarsidass, 1925), and John S. Strong, The Relics of the Buddha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 12–18.

2. Throughout Buddhist narratives, nāgas function to draw attention to what is most important. For example, in many sources the nāgas Nanda and Upananda bathe the baby Siddhattha Gotama; nāgas support the Buddha’s jeweled throne at Śrāvastī as he performs the miracle of the Double (see the Lalitavistara); and after his cremation, they transport the doṇa (portion) of his relics that had washed out to sea in a flood to their nāgaloka for safekeeping (see the Mahāparinibbāṇa-sutta, also recalled in the vaṃsas). As told in the Buddhavaṃsa and Jātaka Nidāna-kathā accounts of Gotama’s biography, when he reaches enlightenment, it is the nāgarāja Kāla (Kālika) who first recognizes and announces the momentous event as the Buddha’s rice bowl floats upstream on the river Nerañjana and sinks, hitting all the bowls of the former Buddhas and rousing that nāgarāja from his slumber. The nāgarāja functions here as a translator of the sign (the clink) to the rest of the universe. Significantly, time is portrayed as being of little consequence to the long-lived nāgarāja, and he perceives the passage of vast swaths of time as the difference between “yesterday and today.” See The Story of Gotama Buddha: The Nidāna-kathā of the Jātakaṭṭhakathā, trans. N. A. Jayawickrama (Oxford: Pāli Text Society, 1990): “And sinking at a whirlpool [the bowl] went to the abode of the nāga king Kāla, and making a clanging noise striking against the bowls used by the three previous Buddhas placed itself as the bottommost among them. The nāga king Kāla heard that sound and began to sing songs of praise in many hundred verses, saying ‘A Buddha was born yesterday, and again another today.’ For to him all this interval during which the great earth rose filling the sky to the extent of a yojana and three gāvutas was like yesterday and today” (93).

3. As suggested in chapter 3, the Jātaka stories, as a significant inclusion in the Pāli canon and an “open” interpretive site, may be more related to the vaṃsas than previously considered.

4. Mahāparinibbāṇa-sutta, Dīgha Nikāya 16.6.28 reads:

According to the commentary (Sumangalavilāsinī 2:615), this concluding verse explaining that one of eight portions of the Buddha’s relics is being preserved in the nāgaloka was a later addition by the theras (monks) of Sri Lanka. It is especially interesting to note the nāga’s presence among the most honored beings (gods, kings, and noblest men) and not ensconced in a list of bhūta devatā. In his translation, Maurice Walsh omits the line explaining that another tooth of the Buddha was kept “in Gandhāra city” (John Strong, personal communication, 6/8/2016).

5. The nāga here also mediates symbolically between the righteous royal and the Buddha; in all of the examples given, the nāga stands in between the rulers and their experience of the relics. See, also, John Strong’s discussion of this episode as it appears in the Aśokāvadāna in The Legend of King Aśoka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 122–125.

6. Monier Monier-Williams, Sanskrit–English Dictionary (1899; reprint, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1976), 910, and T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, eds., Pāli–English Dictionary (1921–1925; reprint, Oxford: Pāli Text Society, 1995), 590. Also see Steven Collins, “On the Very Idea of a Pāli Canon,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society 15 (1990): 100, and Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pāli Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 254–258, as well as Kevin Trainor, Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravāda Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 72–75.

7. In other words, the Mahāvaṃsa both chronicles or documents narratives of power and exerts power (in a worklike way) on the reader-hearer. See chapter 1 for a discussion of Dominick LaCapra’s helpful terms documentary and worklike.

8. Greenwald states that the purpose of her study is to “explore how historiography both mediates and justifies the contradiction inherent in a Buddhist king who would go so far as to place a relic of the Buddha in his battle lance and call for a company of 500 monks to escort his troops to war” (“The Relic on the Spear: Historiography and the Saga of Duṭṭhagāmaṇī,” in Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka, ed. Bardwell L. Smith [Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978], 13).

9. Mahāvaṃsa XXV.109–111: “Saggamaggantarāyo ca nātthi te tena kammunā, diyaḍḍhamanujā vettha ghātitā manujādhipa, saraṇesu ṭhito eko, pañcasīle pi cāparo, micchādiṭṭhī ca dussīlā sesā pasusamā matā. Jotayissasi ceva tvaṃ bahudhā buddhasāsanaṃ, manovilekhaṃ tasmā tvaṃ vinodaya narissara” (From this act of yours there is no obstacle to the way to heaven. In this world the Lord of Men has killed only one and a half human beings. One was steadfast in the Refuges, and the other in the Five Precepts; the remainder, like beasts, had bad character and wrong views. But in many ways you will cause the buddhasāsana to shine, therefore, Lord of Men, remove the perplexity from your mind).

10. Mahāvaṃsa XVII.3: “dhātusu diṭṭhesu diṭṭho hoti jino.” This recalls the Buddha’s didactic but reproachful formula “he who sees the dhamma, sees me; he who sees me, sees the dhamma,” uttered to Vakkali, a monk exceedingly desirous of the Buddha’s image (Saṃyutta Nikāya 3:120). The Vakkali sutta emphasizes the deleterious effect of too much emotion, the power of the affective domain.

11. There are a few notable exceptions: Kevin Trainor considers the nāga in the section “The Theft of Presence” in his book Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism, 125–135, and in his article “When Is a Theft Not a Theft? Relic Theft and the Cult of the Buddha’s Relics in Sri Lanka,” Numen 39, no. 1 (1992): 1–26. Also see Strong, Relics of the Buddha, esp. 168–169.

12. This is not to say that the nāgas are models for human relationships with the relics. By “model agent,” I am suggesting the exemplary agency displayed through the character of the nāga regarding relics and relic veneration. The nāgas are anything but apathetic or passive in their connection to the Buddha; they are active agents in constructing an enduring relationship with the absent teacher. In this way, they are “model agents,” and their narratives illustrate the active nature of the thought and practice behind relic veneration.

13. There is an interesting parallel between the traditions narrating the pedigree and hagiography of Christian relics and the vaṃsas I focus on. Patrick J. Geary points out, “Thefts were, however, more than random acts or good stories appearing from time to time across Europe. They were perpetrated (or more frequently, alleged) at particular moments of crisis by members of religious or secular communities as means of crisis intervention. Further, not only were thefts similar to each other in the types of crises that gave them birth, but in many cases contemporary descriptions of them betray their authors’ awareness that in describing thefts they were writing in a particular hagiographic tradition, that of furta sacra, which had its own limitations, topoi, and forms” (Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages [1978; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], xiii).

14. John Strong observes the same phenomenon and extends the nāga layover to the period of provisional ordination experienced by novices in the saṅgha. He writes, “The nāga state is thus something that needs to be abandoned, but it is also something that needs to be passed through on the way to its abandonment. The same may perhaps be said of relics, for which enshrinement in a stūpa may be a kind of ordination. No relic can become enshrined without undergoing a ‘rite of passage,’ symbolized here by ‘passing through’ or at least being in the possession of nāgas” (Relics of the Buddha, 168). Could it be said that the nāgas, as characters in the Mahāvaṃsa, function in an imagination-provoking way as “novice humans”? (Thanks to Anne Monius for this observation; personal communication, 2006). As we saw in the previous chapter, by taking a nāga birth (as told in Bhūridatta Jātaka), the bodhisatta was cultivating the perfection of sīla (morality), one of ten requisite pāramitā (perfections). Could the experience of a nāga birth be somehow requisite on the path toward a fulfilled existence as a human Buddhist, aspiring for nibbāṇa?

15. Stanley Tambiah writes, “So he [Ānanda] concludes that only a great wisdom tree that has been ‘associated’ with a Buddha is fit to be a cetiya [sanctuary or sanctified place], whether the Buddha is still living or is extinguished” (The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 202). Also see the Kalingabodhi Jātaka story retold in the next section.

16. In the three pre-parinibbāṇa (final extinguishing) visits the Buddha makes to the island of Sri Lanka (as told in the fourteenth-century work Dhātuvaṃsa), he brings along the nāgarāja Sumana from his own hometown in India and Sumana’s nāga retinue to be his personal assistants. The Buddha then leaves them in Sri Lanka to identify and stand guard over the sacred spots he visited until shrines and relics can be established there in the future. For a discussion of this story, see Trainor, Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism, 146–147.

17. See the Theravāda Vinaya I.3–4 and The Story of Gotama Buddha, Jayawickrama trans.

18. The term cetiya (Sanskrit, caitya) refers to a sanctuary or sanctified place. It also became a designation for stūpas, or memorial monuments, throughout Southeast Asia.

19. This story has a correlation in the Mahāyāna traditions about the Buddha’s spiritual relics, the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) texts. The story has it that the relics were kept by the nāgas in the nāgaloka to await a human sufficiently capable for their interpretation and introduction to the human world. This human turned out to be Nāgārjuna.

20. As we have seen, the tradition is explicit that nāgas, in their corrupt birth station, are incapable of reaching enlightenment. This inability does not, however, diminish the their intense desire to be near the Buddha or his relics. As we saw in chapter 3, the nāgas even take human form in order to join the saṅgha, although their inclusion is prohibited in the Vinaya.

21. The same general story appears in the later Dhātuvaṃsa, but there the novice is named Siva; see the discussion of this story in Trainor, Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism, 131–134, and in Strong, Relics of the Buddha, 81.

22. A human birth is regarded as extremely fortunate; as a human, one has the opportunity to make the difficult ethical choices that contribute to one’s cultivation, whereas other births may not be soteriologically conducive. For example, the Sangīti Sutta (D III.261) claims that human and god births are deemed good, whereas birth in the hells as peta (hungry ghosts), asura, or animals is undesirable.

23. Trainor writes: “Buddhist relics, as material objects around which particular ritualized activities are centered, draw their meaning and authority from their alleged connection with powerful religious figures from the past. The practice of relic veneration therefore functions as a ‘technology of remembrance and representation,’ i.e., as a cultural strategy for bridging temporal and spatial separation through a complex interaction of material objects, abstract notions, emotional orientations, and ritualized behaviors. The cult of the Buddha’s relics has to do, in some basic sense, with the problem of remembering and representing the Buddha, who is believed by his followers to have utterly passed away from history over 2,500 years ago” (Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism, 27).

24. Charles Hallisey has used a resonant concept from Pierre Nora, lieux de memoire (memory sites), as a helpful way to think about stūpas and cetiyas (“Relics as Memory Sites in the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Sri Lanka,” papercirculated for the American Academy of Religion seminar on Buddhist relic veneration, various locations, 1994–1997, copy in author’s files). The lieux de memoire are an especially helpful technology developed out of necessity in the absence of milieux de memoire (contexts of memory); in the Buddhist case, the former would be the relic-enshrining stūpas, whereas the latter would be the presence of the Buddha himself. See Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

25. See Anāgatavaṃsa, ed. J. Minayeff, Journal of the Pāli Text Society 2 (1886): 33–53, and its translation in Buddhism in Translations, ed. Henry Clarke Warren (1896; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1976), 481–486. Even though the Anāgatavaṃsa likely dates centuries after the Mahāvaṃsa (the date is uncertain, but it is a late Pāli text), the idea of the relics disappearing at the end of a Buddha era was known and discussed in the fifth century.

26. Kalingabodhi Jātaka (number 479), in The Jātaka, or The Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, vol. 4, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 142–148.

27. Jonathan Walters asserts that the vaṃsas are “‘successions’ of the Buddha’s presence” rather than “mere chronicles of events” (“Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pāli Vaṃsas and Their Commentary,” in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 99. The Jātakas are also literarily successions of the Buddha’s presence, albeit in his pre-Buddha form as the bodhisatta, perfecting himself through various births.

28. The term uddesika later comes to mean “images,” particularly of the Buddha, but also, in later Thai understandings, of secondary or reflective pāribhogika relics (relics of use) such as cuttings or seedlings from the original bodhi tree. Trainor notes that this tripartite classification is well developed by the fifth-century commentarial period. He draws attention to “evidence of an earlier twofold classification” in the Milindapañha 341, (trans. 2.188) (Relics, Ritual, and Representation, 89).

29. Kalingabodhi Jātaka (number 479), in The Jātaka, Rouse ed., 4:142.

30. “Vandami cetiyam sabbam sabbatthanesu patitthtam / Sarīrika dhatu maha bodhim Buddharupam sakalam sada” (Richard Gombrich, Buddhist Precept and Practice, 2nd ed. [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991], 124, which gives Gombrich’s own text as well the Pāli verses and Gombrich’s English translation).

31. The later Pāli Dhātuvaṃsa considers Sumana a nāga, not a deva, who lived in a lotus pond near the Buddha, where he was “filled with mental joy from beholding the great splendor of the Buddha’s physical form [tāthāgatassa rūpasobhaggappattaṃ attabhāvaṃ oloketvā]” (quoted in Trainor, Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism, 146).

32. Again, this narrative may suggest that the Mahāvaṃsa was arguing for the veneration of relics in a context that may have been less than favorable to such practices. Although this suggestion is entirely speculative, we may benefit from considering what Laurie Patton has concluded in Myth as Argument: The Bṛhaddevatā as Canonical Commentary (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996).

33. Mahāvaṃsa XII.2: “paccantesu.” This reminds me of the Sangīti Sutta classification of inauspicious birth sites, which explicitly designates birth in a border country (without access to the Buddha, dhamma, and saṅgha) as inauspicious.

34. It is noteworthy that Asoka laments the tree’s departure with a verse recalling the transfer of light imagery from Mahāvaṃsa I in the halo around the bodhi tree: “Emitting a net like rays [of light], the great bodhi tree of the Ten-powered One departs!” (Mahāvaṃsa XIX.15: “muñcamāno mahābodhirukkho, dasabalassa so jālaṃ sarasaraṃsiṃ va gacchati vata re iti”).

35. Mahāvaṃsa XIX.19: “devatāhi anekāhi pūjānekā pavattitā, gahetuṃ ca mahābodhiṃ nāgākaṃsu vikkubbanaṃ” (Various offerings were proffered by various divine beings, and the nāgas performed a miracle to seize the Mahābodhi).

36. This story is recounted in Mahāvaṃsa XIX.17–23. Jean Philippe Vogel notes, “In the corresponding passage of the Dipavaṃsa, xvi, 8–29, the Nāgas are mentioned among the classes of beings which worship the Bodhi-tree on its way to Ceylon, but we read of no attempt on their part to seize it” (Indian Serpent-Lore; or, The Nāgas in Hindu Legend and Art [London: Probsthain, 1926], 24 n. 2). Actually, in the Dīpavaṃsa account, the nāgas do in fact seize it—the text explains that the boat is stalled and whisked away to the nāgaloka. Vogel misread.

37. Mahāvaṃsa XIX.21–23:

38. On the process of Buddha image consecration, see Donald Swearer, “Hypostasizing the Buddha: Buddha Image Consecration in Northern Thailand,” History of Religions 34, no. 3 (1995): 263–280, and Becoming the Buddha: The Ritual of Image Consecration in Thailand (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

39. The relic’s eventual recovery is a sort of “expected miracle,” to use art historian Robert Brown’s useful phrase (“Expected Miracles: The Unsurprisingly Miraculous Nature of Buddhist Images and Relics,” in Images, Miracles, and Authority in Asian Religious Traditions, ed. Richard H. Davis [Boulder: Westview Press, 1998], 23–36). On the epistemology relying on expected miracles, see Kristin Scheible, “Priming the Lamp of Dhamma: The Buddha’s Miracles in the Pāli Mahavāṃsa,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33, nos. 1–2 (2010–2011): 435–451.

40. Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Mahāparinibbāṇa-sutta, however, refuses to address the final verses dealing with the Buddha’s prediction that this final one-eighth portion of his relics will be enshrined in Laṅkā, probably because it was assumed at the time the commentary was produced that this material was an accretion. In Sumaṅgala-vilāsinī 2.615, he writes that the closing verses of the Mahāparinibbāṇa-sutta were “spoken by the Elders of Tambapaṇṇi” and thus not original Buddha-vacanā (word of the Buddha).

41. An interesting comparison can be made here to Nāgārjuna’s retrieval of the Prajñāpāramitā texts—dharma relics (dharmadhātu)—which the nāgas held until humans were sufficiently capable of understanding them.

42. What I refer to here as a “conventional reading of the Soṇuttara story as a model for the nascent state–saṅgha relationship” dominates in Gananath Obeyesekere, Frank Reynolds, and Bardwell L. Smith, The Two Wheels of Dhamma: Essays on the Theravāda Tradition in India and Ceylon, ed. Bardwell L. Smith (Chambersburg, Pa.: American Academy of Religion, 1972); the essays in Smith, Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka; and Trainor, “When Is a Theft Not a Theft?” This reading maintains that there is a mutual reliance between the king and the saṅgha that is exemplified in the stories of the acquisition of relics. For example, the dhammarāja (dhamma king) himself, Asoka, is the one who initiates the process of the transfer of the sāsana to Laṅkā when he sends Mahinda there (Mahāvaṃsa XIII), and it is he who bestows the first set of relics on the island (Mahāvaṃsa XVII), and, of course, it is King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī who builds the Mahāthūpa for the saṅgha while the saṅgha procures the relics for its enlivenment (Mahāvaṃsa XXXI).

43. Geary, Furta Sacra.

44. Relics, at least of the sarīrika (corporeal) variety, are available only at times when the Buddha is no longer living but has passed into parinibbāṇa. As we have seen, however, the next Buddha will not arise until after all the vestiges of the previous Buddha (his sāsana: the relics, teachings, and saṅgha) have disappeared. Relics thus exist in a time of both lamentation and the development of technologies to re-present the absent Buddha as well as in a time of anticipation of the imminent coming of the next Buddha.

45. If there is any remaining doubt about the snakelike ontology of the nāga, the image of Vāsuladatta sheds it: “Having created thousands of various hoods, he, the great powered [nāga], lay down [puffing] smoke and fire. Having created thousands of various snakes [ahī] like himself, he made them all lie about in a circle” (“Anekāni sahassāni māpetvāna phaṇāni ca dhūmāyati pajjalati sayitvā so mahiddhiko // Anekāni sahassāni attanā sadise ahī māpayitvā sayāpesi samantā parivārite” [Mahāvaṃsa XXXI.54–55]).

46. Mahāvaṃsa XXXI.56: “Bahū nāga ca devā ca osariṃsu tahiṃ tadā, yuddhaṃ ubhinnaṃ nāgānaṃ passissāma mayaṃ iti.”

47. Mahāvaṃsa XXXI.62: “Mahāsakkāraṭhānamhā appasakkāraṭhānakaṃ.”

48. In his discussion of the later Sinhala Thūpavaṃsa, Steven Berkwitz notes that “the Sinhala Thūpavaṃsa’s presentation of this event appears focused on highlighting the moral dilemma related to acquiring those relics. The issue over who deserves to have relics to venerate is purposefully drawn out in order to exercise the moral reasoning of an audience” (“The Ethics of Buddhist History: A Study of the Pāli and Sinhala Thūpavaṃsas,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999, 163).

49. It is very interesting to note how this scene is radically embellished by later Mahāvihāran interpreters. In the Sinhala Thūpavaṃsa, the nāgas ask, “Is it only for humans that this suffering of saṃsāra is acute? Is it only for humans that nirvāṇa is sweet? Is it only for humans that the Dear Lord, who is the Buddha, fulfilled the perfections and became a Buddha?” (quoted in Steven Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular: The Power of the Past in Late Medieval Sri Lanka [Leiden: Brill, 2004], 170–171).

50. See Trainor, “When Is Theft Not a Theft?” 8–10.

51. Mahāvaṃsa V.73: “Tato rājā pasanno so diguṇena dine dine bhikkhū saṭṭhisahassāni anupubbena vaḍḍhayi” (Thereafter, with happy faith the king doubled each day the bhikkhus [who were to receive alms] until they were 60,000).

52. Mahāvaṃsa V.91–92: “Dvattiṃsalakkhaṇūpetaṃ asītivyañjanujjalaṃ vyāmappabhāparikkhittaṃ ketumālābhisobhitaṃ / nimmāyi nāgarājā so buddharūpaṃ manoramaṃ.”

53. Mahāvaṃsa V.92–93: “Taṃ disvātipasādassa vimhayassa ca pūrito / etena nimmitaṃ rūpaṃ īdisaṃ kīdisaṃ nu kho tathāgatassa rūpaṃ ti āsi pītunnatunnato.”

54. Mahāvaṃsa V.93: “āsi pītunnatunnato.”

55. Mahāvaṃsa V.94: “Akkhipūjaṃ ti saṃñātaṃ taṃ sattāhaṃ nirantaraṃ mahāmahaṃ mahārājā kārāpesi mahiddhiko.” Wilhelm Geiger translates akkhipūja as “feast of the eyes” in Mahānāma, The Mahāvaṃsa, or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, trans. Wilhelm Geiger, assisted by Mabel Haynes Bode (London: Frowde for Pāli Text Society, 1912), 34.

56. Mahānāma, Mahāvaṃsa: The Great Chronicle of Sri Lanka, Chapters 1–37, trans. Ananda W. P. Guruge (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1989), 496.

57. This notion of pegging down relics to a location recalls the Burmese practice of driving a stake into the ground to symbolically pin down the head of the great serpent in the correct position before the construction of a stūpa. For an examination of the significance of the transportability of the relics, see Strong, Relics of the Buddha.

1. An extensive discussion of the boundaries and ramifications of the genres of history and literature is well beyond the scope of this project. This topic has provided fodder for numerous intellectual historians. Relating precisely to the Buddhist historical imagination exemplified in the Pāli (and in this case Sinhalese) vaṃsas, an overview can be found in Stephen Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular: The Power of the Past in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 135–181.

2. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 86–89, especially White’s discussion of the use of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony in the representation of history as elements that underscore its fictive qualities. Also see his introduction to his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

3. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 30.

4. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988), esp. vol. 3.

5. Anne E. Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 159.

6. Gregory Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 2–12, 114–115.

7. For the inscriptions, see Epigraphia Zeylanica, 8 vols. to date (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Department of Government Printing, 1904– (in progress); Inscriptions of Ceylon, ed. and trans. Senarat Paranavitana, Archaeological Survey of Ceylon (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Ceylon Department of Archaeology, 1970); Lakshman S. Perera, The Institutions of Ancient Ceylon from Inscriptions, vol. 1 (Kandy, Sri Lanka: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2001); Robin A. E. Coningham, “Monks, Caves, and Kings: A Reassessment of the Nature of Early Buddhism in Sri Lanka,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 222–242.

8. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–35. Ricoeur advises one to apply the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in one’s interpretation of a text to penetrate the text’s surface concerns to reveal the ideology that actually motivates the text.

9. Rather than being condemned to relativism and the unproductive interpretations that result from such a sabotaging method of reading, I acknowledge that multiple readings are possible with any text and that readings are influenced by the reader’s concerns and dispositions. This does not, however, mean that all readings are equal. Literary theorists can argue about it. I merely suggest here that if you approach the vaṃsas intent on finding historiography, you will see what looks like historiography at work in the text. But that reading is framed by your context, and several other readings are possible from other contexts or from other dimensions of the text. On this point, see Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

10. G. P. Malalasekera gives the dates 664–673 B.C.E. for Dāṭhopatissa, identifying him as the king called “Bhāgiṇeyya-Dāṭhopatissa” in the Vaṃsatthappakāsinī (introduction to Vaṃsatthappakāsinī: Commentary on the Mahāvaṃsa, 2 vols., ed. G. P. Malalasekera [1935–1936; reprint, London: Pāli Text Society, 1977], 1:cv). Note that Malalasekera also refers to this text as the “MṬ,” or Mahāvaṃsa Ṭīkā, an applied designation that is never used within the Vaṃsatthapakkāsiī itself, which sometimes refers to itself as the Padya-(Pajja-) padoruvaṃsa-vaṇṇanā, or the “Commentary on the Padya-(Pajja-) padoruvaṃsa-vaṇṇanā” (the Mahāvaṃsa) (ibid., cvii).

11. Wilhelm Geiger, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa and Their Historical Development in Ceylon, trans. Ethel M. Coomaraswamy (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Cottle, 1908), 82.

12. Malalasekera, introduction to Vaṃsatthappakāsinī, 1:cix. Malalasekera repeats the claim that soon after Buddhaghosa finished compiling material in Pāli from original Sinhalese sources, these sources went into disuse, and the Mahāvaṃsa “bore to the Sinhalese chronicles exactly the same sort of relation as Buddhaghosa’s works did to the scriptural Aṭṭhakathā” (1:cix). The Vaṃsatthappakāsinī must therefore have been compiled prior to the loss of the source material.

13. Steven Collins agrees with the compilers of the Critical Pali Dictionary that Geiger’s arguments for this nomenclature are “unpersuasive” and that the title Cūlavaṃsa should be dropped in favor of the “indigenous practice of referring to the whole work as the Mahāvaṃsa or Great Chronicle” (“What Is Literature in Pali?” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], 652–653 n. 5). Geiger is primarily responsible for this nomenclature. See Mahānāma, Mahāvaṃsa, ed. Wilhelm Geiger (London: Pāli Text Society, 1908); Mahānāma, The Mahāvaṃsa, or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, trans. Wilhelm Geiger, assisted by Mabel Haynes Bode (London: Frowde for Pāli Text Society, 1912); Cūlavaṃsa, 2 vols., ed. Wilhelm Geiger (London: Pāli Text Society, 1925–1927); and Cūlavaṃsa: Being the More Recent Part of the Mahāvaṃsa, trans. Wilhelm Geiger (into German) and C. Mabel Rickmers (from the German into English) (London: Pāli Text Society, 1929). The text itself does not claim the title Cūlavaṃsa (Lesser Vaṃsa) and instead envisions itself as a continuous whole, even if authors or compilers several centuries removed from each other are responsible for penning the two sections. It has become common practice to refer to these two sections as separate texts, and I have in fact been concerned only with the earlier segment. In Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Anne Blackburn successfully thwarted Geiger’s accepted convention when, following the eighteenth-century monastic convention in the text she discusses, the Sārārthadīpanī, she refused to separate the two sections, calling the entire text Mahāvaṃsa. Of course, this approach reflects the very argument of the later text itself, that it is in fact a legitimate continuation of the earlier text, and the concerns of the textual community that is her focus. The split in the narrative comes at the conclusion of King Mahāsena’s reign, which concludes the earlier Mahāvaṃsa, and the reign of King Sirimeghavaṇṇa (reign beginning around 362), which begins the later Mahāvaṃsa (which Geiger titled Cūlavaṃsa). This king restored the primacy of the Mahāvihāra, according to the text, and thus made right what his father had destroyed.

14. Parākramabāhu was both a reformer of Buddhist practices and culture as well as a successful unifier of the land—he brought together three kingdoms to unify the island of Sri Lanka under one vision.

15. For how a given reading of history says more about contemporaneous concerns than about the “facts” of the past, see Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

16. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 156. Ronald Inden also responds to and extends several of Collingwood’s ideas of history, most notably his concepts of “complex agency” and “scale of texts”: “[Collingwood’s] discussion of agency in connection with historical knowledge seems to offer a way both of criticizing current intellectual practices and of formulating an attractive alternative to the individualist and structuralist, as well as the antistructuralist, approaches in cultural history” (“Introduction: From Philological to Dialogical Texts,” in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 11).

17. Brian Stock, “History, Literature, and Medieval Textuality,” Yale French Studies, no. 70 (1986): 16.

18. Jonathan Walters, “Suttas as History: Four Approaches to the Sermon on the Noble Quest (Ariyapariyesana Sutta),” History of Religions 38, no. 3 (1999): 282.

19. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 209.

20. With such a long history of colonialization (from the Portuguese in 1505 through the Dutch in the seventeenth century and the British occupation beginning in 1796 and continuing to 1948), it is understandable that the Mahāvaṃsa was regarded as a viable resource for autonomous, authentic identity construction. See Steven Kemper, The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Also consider the way D. S. Senayake framed independence in terms of Sinhala identity in 1939 when he said that the Sinhala “are one blood and one nation. We are a chosen people. Buddha said that his religion would last for 5,500 [sic] years. That means that we, as the custodians of that religion, shall last as long” (quoted in Tessa J. Bartholomeusz, In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka [London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002], 142, “[sic]” added by Bartholomeusz).

21. For example, as examined in chapter 2, in Mahāvaṃsa I.20 Geiger translated a particularly influential verse to state that the dhamma would thereafter “shine in glory” in Lanka (see note 59, chapter 2). There is no word for “glory” in the verse—the word used in the compound sāsanujjotanaṭṭhānaṃ simply means “shine.” My impression is that scholars who would not intentionally perpetuate in their own critical work any misreadings conducive of a nationalist interpretation have nevertheless done so. For example, Berkwitz refers to this verse in a documentary way, stating that perceptions of Laṅkā “as the place where his [the Buddha’s] Dharma should thereafter shine in glory are often highlighted as the ancient roots of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism” (Buddhist History in the Vernacular, 35).

22. Heinz Bechert, “The Beginnings of Buddhist Historiography: Mahāvaṃsa and Political Thinking,” in Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka, ed. Bardwell L. Smith (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978), 7–8.

23. That the king was identified as a cakkavattin (cakravartin in Sanskrit; usually translated as “world-conquering monarch,” although “wheel turner” is more accurate) challenges the idea that there could be a specifically “state” ideology. As Benedict Anderson sees it, “Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another” (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983; reprint, London: Verso, 1991], 19). According to the Mahāvaṃsa, the king at the time of Mahinda’s mission to Sri Lanka, Devānaṃpiya Tissa, underwent a second coronation with accoutrements from Asoka, including a crown. Prior to that, kings had only a staff to designate their sovereignty. The extra accoutrements might indicate an ambitious move by Devānaṃpiya Tissa to exceed the boundaries of his local Anurādhapura kingship, although their presence is most frequently understood as Asoka’s move to include Sri Lanka in his realm.

24. Richard Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London: Routledge, 1988), 142.

26. Bardwell L. Smith, “The Ideal Social Order as Portrayed in the Chronicles of Ceylon,” in Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka, ed. Bardwell L. Smith (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978), 48.

27. The term Heilsgeschichte is most properly translated as “salvation history,” which works for “Christian theology.” Salvation, however, is not the most salient term in the Theravāda understanding of soteriology.

28. The first line of the proem of the Mahāvaṃsa does employ the term suddha (pure): “Namassitvāna saṃbuddhaṃ susuddhaṃ suddhvaṃsajaṃ” (Having paid honor to the pure buddha of the pure lineage). But here it refers to the Buddha and not to anything terrestrially Lankan. The idea of the Buddha’s predestination of Laṅkā is from Mahāvaṃsa I.20: “Sāsanujjotanaṭṭhānaṃ Laṅkā ñātā jinena hi/ yakkhapuṇṇāya Laṅkāya yakkhā nibbāsiyā ti ca” (For Lankā was known by the Conqueror as a place where the sāsana would shine, and that from Laṅkā full of yakkhas, the yakkhas must be removed). But the Buddha here is pictured as omniscient and making an observation, not prescribing or determining the land’s future sacrality.

29. David Little, The Invention of Enmity (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993), 26.

30. Alice Greenwald, “The Relic on the Spear: Historiography and the Saga of Duṭṭhagāmaṇī,” in Smith, Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka, 14.

31. Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 522.

32. By “religious” here, I refer to both the personally powerful, ethically transformative aims as well as the circumscription of a particular community of faith and the beliefs that hold such a group together.

33. Mahāvaṃsa XXXII.81–83:

34. H. L. Seneviratne, “Identity and the Conflation of Past and Present,” in Identity, Consciousness, and the Past: Forging of Caste and Community in India and Sri Lanka, ed. H. L. Seneviratne (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6.

35. Bartholomeusz, In Defense of Dharma, 21.

36. White, Content of the Form, 5.

37. Although it is beyond the purview of the present examination, a comparative study of the early vaṃsas and the Sanskrit Mahāpurāṇas, especially with a focus on their literary elements, would be helpful.

38. Steven Collins, “On the Very Idea of a Pāli Canon,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society 15 (1990): 100.

39. Buddhaghosa, Samanta-Pāsādikā, ed. J. Takakusu (London: Pāli Text Society, 1924), I.62, 70, 71, 74, 75. Jonathan Walters notes that this reference to the Dīpavaṃsa as purāṇa has the effect of “implicitly comparing it with the Theist Purāṇas, originary accounts which also had accounts of royal lineages as one of their topics.” He also notes that “it is possible that when Buddhaghosa cites ‘the ancients’ (porāṇā) he means not the Dpv [Dīpavaṃsa] itself but the source of Dpv, that is, the Sīhalaṭṭhakathā-Mahāvaṃsa (and/or the men who wrote it), in which case these Dpv verses are also quotations from that ancient source” (“Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pāli Vaṃsas and Their Commentary,” in Inden, Walters, and Ali, Querying the Medieval, 119).

40. Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular, 3.

41. Carolyn Dewald, “Does History Matter? Meaning-Making and the First Two Greek Historians,” in Historical Knowledge in Biblical Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner, Bruce D. Chilton, and William S. Green (Blandford Forum, U.K.: Deo, 2007), 34–35.

42. Considering the wide variety of literariness of Pāli vaṃsas, Collins writes, “The earliest, the Dīpavaṃsa (Chronicle of the Island)—i.e., Sri Lanka—is a clumsy verse composition with grammatical and other errors, made probably in the third or fourth century C.E.” (“What Is Literature in Pāli?” 652).

43. Walpola Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon: The Anurādhapura Period, 3rd Century BC–10th Century AC, 2nd ed. (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Gunasena, 1956), xxi.

44. Vaṃsatthappakāsinī 36.7, 36.9, 42.1, 47.31, 48.1, 48.3; see Malalasekera’s introduction to Vaṃsatthappakāsinī, 1:lvi–lvii.

45. The example given by Malalasekera is from Vaṃsatthappakāsinī 36.5: “Mahāvaṃsan ti laddhanāmaṃ Mahāvihāravāsīnaṃ vācanāmaggaṃ Porāṇaṭṭhakathaṃ” (introduction to Vaṃsatthappakāsinī, 1:lviii).

46. Ibid., 1:lvii. For the references to Oldenberg and Geiger, see Dīpavaṃsa: An Ancient Buddhist Historical Record, ed. and trans. Hermann Oldenberg (1879; reprint, London: New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982), 4, and Mahānāma, The Mahāvaṃsa, Geiger 1908 ed., 64.

47. For a catalog of a large body of sources for the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa (including Uttaravihāra-aṭṭhakathā, Vinayaṭṭhakathā, Dīpavaṃsaṭṭhkathā, Sīmākathā, Cetiyavaṃsaṭṭhakathā, Mahābodhivaṃsakathā, Sumedhakathā, Sahassavatthu-aṭṭhakathā, and several vaṇṇanā [commentaries]), none of which is extant but is evident through later references and quotations, see Malalasekera, introduction to Vaṃsatthappakāsinī, 1:lxv–lxxii.

48. Dīpavaṃsa, Oldenberg ed., 3.

49. Malalasekera, introduction to Vaṃsatthappakāsinī, 1:lxii–lxiv, where Malalasekera sums up Geiger’s and Adikaram’s arguments.

50. Ibid., 1:lxxiv, citing Vaṃsatthappakāsinī 46–51.

51. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. R. Anderson and Talcot Parsons (London: Hodge, 1947), 363–373.

52. Latter-day suttas are routinely cast in the authoritative and legitimizing voice of the Buddha. Mahāyāna suttas frequently used Śakyamuni as the narrator or as the character in a narrative who introduces another Buddha (for example, Śakyamuni introduces and extols the many virtues of Amitābha in the Sukhāvativyūha sutra). See Luis O. Gomez, The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996).

53. K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 9.

54. Collins, “On the Very Idea of a Pāli Canon,” 99–100.

55. G. P. Malalasekera, The Pāli Literature of Ceylon (1928; reprint, Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1994), 128.

56. Although the account of the Buddhist councils is also represented early in each text, expressly connecting the monastic community in Laṅkā to translocal, foundational Buddhist concerns, I am here interested only in the story cycles that revolve around the island of Laṅkā itself. The stories of events on the island of Laṅkā proper are all fixed to a timeline that defies the timelessness of the Eliadean illud tempore; events correspond with events from mainland India, even if they happen in Laṅkā.

57. This is not to say that Duṭṭhagāmaṇī is only a good hero. Certainly in the text’s future-thinking mode, the extensive attention lavished on this hero, significantly a king and even more significantly a king who is understood to become Metteyya’s (the future Buddha’s) right-hand man in the future, is an important statement about the role and obligations of royalty. Here I suggest that Duṭṭhagāmaṇī’s royal function is secondary to the role he will have in a different sort of lineage of the future, one where he will be directly proximate to the Buddha and thus an ideal exemplar of the devout Buddhist practitioner, and that this special role is due to the ethical and behavioral choices he made in his past role as king.

58. See Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular, chapter 2, for a full literature review of recent and past scholarship.

59. Mahānāma, The First Twenty Chapters of the Mahāwanso and a Prefatory Essay on Pali Buddhistical Literature, trans. George Turnour (Cotta, Sri Lanka: Cotta Church Mission Press, 1837). See Walters, “Buddhist History,” 157.

60. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 99. Also consider Steven Collins’s understanding of the relationship between time and concerns for nirvāṇa, where the Mahāvaṃsa can be interpreted as a way to bring the Buddha’s nibbāna-conducive proximity into different time periods (Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pāli Imaginaire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]).

61. Jan Nattier, Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1991), 8–9.

62. B. G. Gokhale, “The Theravāda-Buddhist View of History,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 85, no. 3 (1965): 355.

63. Collins cites several canonical references (together with corresponding commentaries) to “suttantā kavikatā kāveyyā” and notes the early Buddhist tradition’s aversion to unnecessary poetics: “The sterner side of the Teaching easily disapproves of literary frivolity. The Buddha laments the future decline of his Teaching, contrasting sermons given by himself with those to be given in the future by his disciples, which will be merely ‘literature made by kavis’” (“What Is Literature in Pāli?” 670).

64. Malalasekera, The Pāli Literature of Ceylon, 146.

65. Wilhelm Geiger, introduction to The Mahāvaṃsa, or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, li, lvii.

66. See Dīpavaṃsa V.51–52:

67. Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 303. Also see G. C. Mendis, The Pāli Chronicles of Sri Lanka (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Karunaratne & Sons, 1996).

68. Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 303–304.

69. Ibid., 303. Rahula notes that even in contemporary usage a monk’s name refers to the location of reception of the upasampadā (higher ordination), even if that monk lives elsewhere.

70. That a threatened existence is related to a community’s literary productivity has been pursued vis-à-vis the writing down of the Pāli canon, which is commonly thought to have occurred in the first century B.C.E. after famine threatened the stability and continuity of the monastic lineage responsible for its oral preservation. This idea, however, is counter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s argument in Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress [1750; reprint, Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987]) that it is leisure that breeds literary and artistic achievement. Berkwitz challenges the common assumption that in the premodern Lankan context the vaṃsas were produced in stressful times: “And while it is possible to argue that monastic competition between the Mahāvihāra fraternity of monks and its rivals in the Abhayagiri and Jetavana fraternities contributed to the writing of the Mahāvaṃsa in the sixth century, the flourish of history writing after King Parākramabāhu’s forced unification of the Saṅgha in the twelfth century suggests that the existence of the sole-surviving Mahāvihāra fraternity probably did not need further justification” (Buddhist History in the Vernacular, 150).

71. There is quite a discrepancy in dates given in scholarship on the royal history of Sri Lanka. Most scholars, such as Rahula, give Vaṭṭagāmaṇī’s dates as 29–17 B.C.E. (History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 305). R. A. L. H. Gunawardana gives Vaṭṭagāmaṇī’s reign as 89–77 B.C.E. (Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979], 7), dates that obviously conflict with those given for Duṭṭhagāmaṇī, 101–77. The sixty-year discrepancy is due to the different calculations made by scholars interpreting the Mahāvaṃsa.

72. Gunaratne Panabokke, History of the Buddhist Saṅgha in India and Sri Lanka (Sri Lanka: Postgraduate Institute of Pāli and Buddhist Studies, 1993), 106–107.

73. Collins, “On the Very Idea of a Pāli Canon,” 96.

74. E. W. Adikaram, Early History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Migoda, Sri Lanka: Puswella, 1946), 79.

75. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 111.

77. Ibid. Walters directs attention to Inscriptions of Ceylon, 2.1:46, and Epigraphia Zeylanica, 7:99–106, and notes, “No unambiguous evidence for royal donations to the Mahāvihāra exists from this period. However, a donation to the Mahāvihāra dated to the reign of Bhātika Tissa II [c. 143–67] was made by one of his ministers [see Inscriptions of Ceylon, 2.1:116–17]” (“Buddhist History,” 112, n. 17).

78. Collins, “On the Very Idea of the Pāli Canon,” 96. Also see Gunawardana, Robe and Plough, 7–37.

79. Adikaram, Early History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 94.

80. De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 47.

81. Collins, “What Is Literature in Pāli?” 651.

82. For an excellent overview, see Jonathan Walters, “Mahāsena at the Mahāvihāra: The Interpretation and Politics of History in Medieval Sri Lanka,” in Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, ed. Daud Ali (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 322–366.

83. Also see Walter’s excellent examination of the Dīpavaṃsa account in which he suggests that its composition was close enough in time to the mentioned events that the monks would have remembered them all. He suggests the Dīpavaṃsa moniker “Dummitta” (Bad Friend) substituted for “Saṅghamitta” (Friend of the Saṅgha) implies that the Dīpavaṃsa compiler monk(s) “still remembered” the grievous acts against them. He concludes that “this text was written as a polemical work within the context of contemporary debate centered upon the events of Mahāsena’s reign” (“Buddhist History,” 113–114).

84. Rahula exemplifies this conclusion. Because of quotations in Buddhaghosa’s Samantapāsādikā that say their source is the Porāṇas, similar but not the same as the Dīpavaṃsa, “it can be conjectured that the ancient Sinhalese Aṭṭhakathā formed the sources of the [Dīpavaṃsa]” (History of Buddhism in Ceylon, xxi).

85. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 114–115.

86. Hugh Nevill, manuscript catalog, cited in Malalasekera, The Pāli Literature of Ceylon, 136.

87. Ibid., 137, italics in original.

88. Geiger, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, 64.

89. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 114.

90. Malalasekera, The Pāli Literature of Ceylon, 135.

91. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 117.

92. Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 139.

93. Mahāwaṇsa-Ṭīkā, ed. Baṭuwantuḍāwe and Ñāṇissara Bhikshu (Columbo, Sri Lanka: Cottle, 1895), 502, 35.

94. Geiger, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, 41.

95. Geiger, introduction to Mahānāma, The Mahāvaṃsa, or, The Great Chronicle of Ceylon, xi. In his earlier work, The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, Geiger had declared that although the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa “were not only in agreement with regard to the matter contained in each, but also with regard to the order in which this matter was arranged,” allowing for no doubt that “either the M. has borrowed its material and arrangement from the D., or else both the M. and the D. have borrowed from the same sources,” with the latter conclusion being more probable (14).

96. Collins, “What Is Literature in Pāli?” 652.

97. Mendis, Pāli Chronicles of Sri Lanka, 93.

98. Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism, 140–141 n.

99. Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular, 151.

100. Ibid., 27. For a very good survey of the merits and problems of the scholarship on Buddhist histories to date, especially regarding scholars’ assessments of their “trustworthiness” as historical documents, see chapter 2, “Buddhist History Now and Then,” in Berkwitz, Buddhist History in the Vernacular, esp. 40–61. For an excellent review of the nineteenth-century representations of Sri Lankan Buddhism, see Kevin Trainor, Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravāda Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5–23. For a review of colonial and national readings of the Pāli vaṃsas, see Jonathan Walters, “Appendix: Colonial and National Readings of the Pāli Vaṃsas,” in Inden, Walters, and Ali, Querying the Medieval, 152–164.

101. Regarding how the later vaṃsas repeat patterns, Berkwitz seems to distance the vernacular, later medieval vaṃsa he analyzes from the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa. “Instead of seeing the Sinhala Thūpavaṃsa as a text wholly derivative of the Mahāvaṃsa and written to legitimate a political ideology reflecting modern interests, this and other ‘vernacular’ vaṃsas that were composed during a period of political turbulence in late medieval Sri Lanka had a different significance altogether. These texts were more likely written as a new polity was emerging from a condition of disunity and weakness than as a mature polity attempting to reassert a so-called ‘Buddhist hegemony.’ As such, they may well represent attempts of defining and consolidating new communities in what Raymond Williams has called an ‘emergent culture,’ which is characterized by the creation of new meanings, values, and relationships vis-à-vis older, more dominant systems” (Buddhist History in the Vernacular, 34, quoting Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 123).

102. Stephen Berkwitz, “History and Gratitude in Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (2003): 598, citing the distinction between “literal” and “literary” articulated by Luis Gomez in Land of Bliss, 51–52.

103. Walters, “Buddhist History,” 121–122.

104. Ibid., 122, 120.

105. Seneviratne, “Identity and the Conflation of Past and Present,” 5.

107. It would behoove us to consider Benedict Anderson’s often-cited brainchild “imagined communities” as we interpret the modern use and abuse of the Mahāvaṃsa. A full critique of both Sinhalese and Western scholarly use of the Mahāvaṃsa, however, is beyond the purview of this work.

108. In The Presence of the Past, Steven Kemper has done the best job presenting the various ways the past as conceived by the Mahāvaṃsa intrudes on and supports certain positions vis-à-vis Sinhalese identity and hegemony in Sri Lanka.

109. Bardwell L. Smith, “Sinhalese Buddhism and the Dilemmas of Reinterpretation,” in Obeyesekere, Reynolds, and Smith, Two Wheels of Dhamma, 87. Note that this essay was published after decades of ratcheting political rhetoric in Sri Lanka but about a decade before the beginning of the civil war in 1983.

110. As Berkwitz points out, “Not all ‘pasts’ are created equally, of course, but all accounts of the past are created” (Buddhist History in the Vernacular, 25).

1. Bardwell Smith offers a typical rendering of the nāga as a symbolic force of chaos in need of subjugation by the Buddha: “These mythic beings are to be seen not literally as beasts, but as symbols of disorder, whose power is sought on the Dhamma’s behalf…. On two of his legendary three trips to Laṅkā the Buddha encounters these forms of the demonic, reducing disorder to impotency, and ultimately enlists them in service to the Dhamma” (“Kingship, the Saṅgha, and the Process of Legitimation in Anurādhapura Ceylon: An Interpretive Essay,” in Buddhism in Ceylon and Studies on Religious Syncretism in Buddhist Countries: Report on a Symposium in Göttingen, ed. Heinz Bechert [Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978], 103).

2. The most interesting of this sort of historicist “scholarship” is E. M. C. Amunugama, The History of Ancient Aryan Tribes in Sri Lanka: Yaksas, Nāgas, Devas, Sakyas (Colombo, Sri Lanka: J. R. Jayewardene Cultural Centre, 1994).

3. Luis Gomez explains the difference between modern and premodern Buddhist readers and interpreters of texts. He suggests that whereas modern readers’ imaginations are inhibited by their “literal mind[s],” the premodern Buddhists (such as those of the Mahāvaṃsa’s textual community) would engage a “literary mind,” wherein a poetic project arouses the hearers’ imagination and subsequent emotional responses (introduction to The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996], 52–53).