Chapter title
The Mahavamsa Writers often describe Sri Lanka using the image, "a teardrop falling from the eye of India." That might do well for the appearance of the island on a map, but a metaphor for the island's culture might better be, "a drop of distillate from the alembic of Asia." With a populace embracing eight ethnic groups, four languages, five religions, a 2,500-year history, and one of the oldest written literatures, Sri Lanka is at once Asia distilled and an entity unto itself which no other country resembles. A pity, then, that the great epic of its founding and early history is probably the least read of all the world's epic works. The Mahavamsa is arguably even less familiar to most literary scholars than the Norsk Heimskrinngla or the Finnish Kelavela. Yet in Sri Lanka every schoolchild knows long passages of the Mahavamsa by heart. It is one of the most concise and poetic of all the epics, and its own history is as absorbing as the chronicle it relates. Together with its successor the Culuvamsa, it relates the 2,300-year span from the legendary arrival of an Indo-Aryan royal prince about 483 BC to 1795, when the British occupied ancient Lanka, renamed it Ceylon, and turned it into a colony. For many years the British thought the fabulous stories in the few available written copies of the Mahavamsa to be a form of speculative literature. Only in 1826 did a British colonial servant discover a long-lost commentary in a cave in the south of the island which established the factual nature of much of what the Mahavamsa related. The Mahavamsa or "Great Chronicle" was overlooked for so long for several reasons. It was never graven onto stone in its entirety, and the Buddhist monks who transmitted ancient Lanka's body of literature never developed the technique of printing. Until colonial times 235
