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

Lanka's primary literary vehicle was a form of an ola-leaf manuscript whose leaves were approximately eighteen inches long and an inch and a half high, graven in the ancient Pali language which was a direct descendent of the Prakrit language the Buddha spoke. Both were related to India's Sanskrit. Pali transmuted over time into modern-day Sinhala. Back in British days, both Pali and Prakrit were so obscure few colonials bothered to learn them, hence the Mahavamsa was largely the preserve of the native Sinhalese until philologists became interested in it in this century. The first translation was made by the German Sanskritist Wilhelm Geiger in 1912.

Although commonly called ola-leaf manuscripts, the actual leaf used in all ancient Lankan writings was a section from the giant first frond of the talipot palm, which can be fifteen feet long as it uncoils scroll-like from the stem of the young tree. The leaf is cut, flattened, partly dried, and sectioned cookie-cutter style into the future manuscript leaves. These are smoothed with rounded stones, then gathered in stacks several hundred leaves thick and placed above the kitchen of a Buddhist refectory so the cooking smoke can dry and toughen them over a period of two years.

When ready, monks laboriously shaped each letter with an iron burin. In all their history, only three sizes of burins were ever developed to convey the immense body of Sinhala lore. The letters were about the size of fourteen-point type. Many visitors from the West have observed that Pali, Prakrit, Sinhala, Bengali, Hindustani, and many other Asian scripts are all dominated by curvilinear forms with virtually no straight lines. These scripts developed because any attempt to engrave a straight line either vertically or horizontally would split the dry leaf along the grain of its fibers. For the same reason there is no period or other dot-based punctuation; monks ended sentences with a tiny, graceful leaf. Illustrations are rare because they took up valuable space that could better be used for text. This is a pity because there was little transmission of daily-life vignettes of the type we find in European books of hours. One reason that illuminated manuscripts, cartouches from atlases, and paintings are so useful to contemporary historians is their abundance of vivid scenes from daily life which are tucked away in the back corners.

Ancient Lanka inherited—and invented—an enormous amount of Buddhist iconography, but not until the mid 1700s did anyone come along and paint scenes like those from van Eyck and Breughel, and these scenes are to be found in cave paintings rather than ola-leaf manuscripts. Today we have no direct evidence what everyday life was like; everything we know must be inferred from chronicles like the Mahavamsa and the very slow rate of change in Sri Lankan society.

The ola-leaf scribes missed another great opportunity as well. When completed (engraving a full leaf took two days), the leaf was rubbed with a gummy resin that had been blackened with carbon from coconut-oil lamps. This ink penetrated into the incising. The excess was then wiped off with a cloth so the unengraved portion of the leaf was ink-free; the leaf was then set aside to dry. If at this point one of history's fortuitous accidents had occurred and someone had placed an absorbent material on top of the freshly wiped leaf, the monks might have noticed an ink transfer to the new surface, forming a reversed but duplicate impression that would have led directly to a Lankan equivalent of the woodcut.

"Lanka" means "Beautiful Isle." The "Sri" or "Nobly" was added in 1972. Few other peoples have an account of their history so thorough and uninterrupted. The Mahavamsa was written by a Buddhist bhikkhu or monk named Mahanamasthivara during the reign of King Moggallana I about A.D. 500. Both lived in one of the great cities of the ancient world, Anuradhapura, whose ruins today cover several square miles of the island's north-central region. Anuradhapura thrived through 1,400 years and 123 kings, and was a trading entrepôt known to Romans and Chinese alike. Its riches also were known to vandal-like pirate raiders called the Cholas, who eventually succeeded in destroying everything but the city's stone columns.

Mahanamasthivara's literary efforts had few antecedents to reflect upon. One was the Sanskrit Ramayana, which glorified the Brahmanistic culture the Aryan peoples devised after they settled in India. Another was the Dipavamsa (History of the Island), a fifth century AD history lacking the Mahavamsa's epochal sense of time and its poetic qualities. There are many moralistic fable-like commentaries in the Mahavamsa. These came from the fanciful and

highly elaborated tales of the Jatakas, or legends of the previous incarnations of the Buddha. Another influence, the Dhammapada, is a series of fables illustrating Buddhist moral maxims. These were very convenient when Mahanamasthivara needed to deflect the royal wrath when he was obliged to pass judgment on royal acts.

In its English form, the Mahavamsa's 270 pages span the era between the first arrival of the Indo-Aryan people under a leader named Vijaya in 483 BC and the reign of King Moggalana I about AD 500. Its continuation was the Culuvamsa or Lesser Chronicle, written by Dhammakitti in the thirteenth century to chronicle the five-and-ahalf centuries of history between Moggalana I and Lanka's greatest king, Parakramabahu I (1153–1186). Another bhikkhu extended it to the fourteenth century, and a final bhikkhu brought it to 1795. Altogether these relations span 2,278 years in a single historical discourse. Just as it is almost unknown that the Jatakas are the world's first short stories, the Mahavamsa is the world's longestrunning history.

The Mahavamsa begins with an apocryphal visit of the Tathagata to various sites in prehistorical Lanka "through the air." These sites are still worshipped by white-garbed pilgrims on full-moon days. "Tathagata" is the name by which the Buddha referred to himself; it translates to "He who comes from nowhere and goes nowhere."

His visit is followed by almost biblical accounts of the genealogies of kings and councils of bhikkhus, most of which are enhanced with improbably large numbers—"Eighty-two-thousand were the sons and royal grandsons of King Sihissara", etc. On the other hand, the Mahavamsa's lush but illusionist style is evident from the outset:

The spirits of the air brought garments in five colors, and yellow cloth for napkins, and also celestial drink from Chaddanta Lake. Out of the naga (serpent) kingdom the nagas brought cloth colored like the jasmine blossom and without a seam, and celestial lotus flowers and collyrium and unguents; parrots brought rice daily from the Chaddanta Lake. Mice converted this rice, unbroken, into grains without husk or powder, and therewithal was was meal

provided for the royal family. Perpetually did honey bees prepare honey for him, and in the forges bears swung the hammers. Karavika birds, graceful and sweet of voice, came and made delightful music for the king. And being consecrated king, Asoka raised his younger brother, Tissa, son of his own mother, to the office of vice-regent. Here ends the consecration of the pious Asoka. {V, ¶27-33}

Even at the outset Mahanamasthivara is at pains to identify his chronicle with triumphant Buddhism. The Asoka of concern above became India's greatest emperor. Having killed or maimed 150,000 Kalingas in his attempts to expand his kingdom, he slowly grasped the futility of bloodshed and converted to the then relatively little known religion of the Buddha. He became the religion's greatest proponent and sent emissaries all over his kingdom and overseas to spread the faith.

One of these emissaries was his son Mahinda. The Mahavamsa relates how Mahinda transported himself and four theras (elders) "by the air" to the top of a hill in the rugged region of Mihintale about seven miles from the Lankan king Devanampiya Tissa's capital at Anuradhapura, in the north-central part of the island.

Tissa was hunting nearby. He spotted a majestic Great Elk or sambhur in a thicket. The animal bounded up the mountain. Tissa followed. At the top, the elk turned into a sage. The sage called to Tissa by name.

"What name does this tree bear, O King?" "This tree is a mango tree, sir. "Is there yet another mango besides this mango tree?" "There are many mango trees." "And are there yet other trees besides this mango and all the other mangos?" "There are many other trees, sir, but those are not mango trees." "And are there, besides all the mango trees, and all the trees that are not mango trees, yet other trees?" "There is this mango tree, sir." "Thou art wise, O King."

Tissa correctly grasped the concept that as one thing is everything, everything is one thing, though the two are not one and the same. One faith is a thread and the whole cloth is the truth. Then Mahinda goes on to a more pertinent point:

"Hast thou kinfolk, O king?" "There are many, sir." "And are there also some, O king, who are not kinfolk of thine?" "There are yet more of those than even my own kin." "Is there yet anyone besides your kinfolk and the others?" "There is myself, sir."

Mahanamasthivara's point is that the ruler is also ruled. This is the point at which the Mahavamsa leaves the apocryphal and dwells on the world. The Mahavamsa was the single pivotal document which defined ancient Lanka's political hierarchy, social contract, and religious underpinning.

The duty of the king was to protect the land, act as charismatic symbol of the people, and provide rain. Droughts were considered signs of an unworthy king. In those days there were only two ways to provide water: charms and canals.

The sprinkle charm in which water is symbolically sprinkled over a shoot or religious artifact has long been a part of Lankan culture; to this day an annual parade of the Sacred Tooth of the Buddha in Kandy is cast in the form of an elaborate theatrical charm involving hundreds of drummers, dancers, and elephants whose efforts will bring rain. (The parade is thoughtfully scheduled just prior to the autumn monsoon.)

Charms and processions make dubious weather forecasters. Hence Lankan kings joined Chinese emperors in writing the world's first job description for royalty: hydraulic engineer. For over 1,500 years both civilizations built and maintained reservoirs, canals, sluices, runnels, and drainages which would protect against the fickleness of monsoons. The Mahavamsa describes the diversion of entire rivers and the construction of reservoirs up to ten square miles in area with banks nine miles long.

Such waterworks added up to tremendous quantities of labor. The kings obtained it through a feudal polity called rajakariya, "the king's labor". Farmers were placed at the top of the civil hierarchy in a caste called govi-vamsa. Without Hinduism to give it a religious base, the Lankan caste system which the Mahavamsa describes is a system of occupational niches rather than a hierarchy of social and spiritual merit. There is, for example, no untouchable caste.

In consideration for their exalted status the govi-vamsas gave one-sixth of their produce to the king's officials. This provided so much revenue the kings were able to build massive irrigation works, palaces, roads, plus save a large surplus yet sell such quantities to India that the Mahavamsa describes Lanka as "The Granary of Asia". The govi-vamsas and other castes such as artisans and merchants also were required to donate certain periods of free labor for the king. In exchange they were given free shelter and provisions.

Taken out of the context of the lengthy, discursive passages of the Mahavamsa, the foregoing outline of Lankan socioeconomic structure does not convey the intense vividness of the Mahavamsa's telling — the dust that would have been almost always in the in the air, the straining muscles of rice-fed men with pipestem legs, the thigh-high mud when it rained, the cries of the workers when someone was hurt, how the wives and families lived, what the smells of cooking fires were like at night, the Buddhist monks moving among the people as society's only educators, that they taught by firelight because during the day the children worked alongside their fathers tapping the oxen along with sticks while staying warily clear of the lurching, yawing wagons sagging from broken granite and gneiss, that the surveyor's transit leveling the tops of the embankments was a sightline along two pots of water with a string stretched between them, that the earth was compacted by elephants shod in leather booties, and that the bund top was smoothed into a flat access road by herds of sheep or goats driven along them — a technique that has passed into our own time with the invention of a huge, water-filled cylindrical earth tamper used in highway construction whose outside surface is made of hundreds of steel knobs which compact and smooth the soil the same way the sheep did, and is called the "sheep's foot roller" for that reason.

Less evident to the casual reader is that the Buddhist monk named Mahanamasthivara had a Buddhist agenda. As he was writing the Mahavamsa Buddhism in Lanka had divided into two sects. One was called Theravada, which means "Doctrine of the Elders". The Theravada sect was the first to be introduced to Lanka and had for the most part enjoyed nonstop royal patronage. However, two centuries prior to Mahanamasthivara a king named Mahasena had favored a variant of Buddhism which we call Mahayana. In Theravada one attains Enlightenment via one's own direct efforts by practicing the law of the Dhamma as preached by the Buddha. In Mahayana one practices the law but postpones one's own Enlightenment in order to devote oneself to the aid of others. The immediate consequence was a class of beings called Bodhisattas or Buddhas-to-be whose virtues were rather like Catholic saints.

Today Sri Lankan Buddhism is a rich syncretism of these two interpretations, blended with worship of the Hindu gods and with holdover shamanistic practices from animist spirit religions which flourished in Lanka long before either Buddhism or the Mahavamsa. However, Mahanamasthivara was faced with the task of permanently engraving the primacy of Theravada on royal minds. His method was to raise Lankan royalty to a status akin to the Buddha himself. He made the island's kings responsible for the health and happiness of the Theravada doctrine by proposing that a good king would achieve Enlightenment without any further effort than being a good king. The bad kings? Well, Buddhism has a hell, too, a sort of super-purgatory named Avici. However, as nothing is permanent in Buddhism except Enlightenment, the length of one's stay in Avici is measured by the acts that sent you there.

However, the true danger to Theravada came from unexpected directions, one without and one within. A little before the year 1000 invading Cholas from Hindu India utterly destroyed the great Theravadan capital Anuradhapura where Maha-namasthivara once wrote. The Cholas built a new capital fifty miles away whose deities bore names like Vishnu, Shiva, Skanda, and Parvati.

Hindu gods had in fact been around all through the Buddhist era. The royal religion before Devanampiya Tissa's conversion was the

variant of Brahminism that evolved into Hinduism. Several times the Mahavamsa mentions the presence of Brahmin priests advising royalty along with Buddhist bhikkhus. Everyday people have long embraced both religions. A person venerates the Dhamma of the Buddha but solicits help from the gods of the Hindus — the elephantheaded god Ganesh is particularly useful when facing a tough examination. Popular worship has always been a fertile blend of the Buddhist Law, the Hindu gods, and a vast multitude of local deities arrayed in a hierarchy of devas (godlings lower than the Hindu gods), gandhabbas (musicians of the heavens), nagas (serpent gods which are the Lankan equivalent of Chinese dragons), and Yahksas (demons controlling the forces of nature). The fact that the Mahavamsa makes little mention of these ancient folk gods isn't a matter of selectivity as much as it is a statement that all things, even the gods and heavens and hells, are impermanent. After all, the gods envy humans because only humans can attain Enlightenment.

The wide diversity of Mahanamasthivara's styles and themes mark him as a gifted writer at home with a complex language. When he deals with the mythological origins of the Sinhalese people he embellishes an existing folk tale to the point where it becomes as allegorical as Romulus and Remus: In a country of the Vangas [Bengals], in the Vanga capital, there once lived a king. The king's consort was the daughter of the king of the Kalingas to the north. By his spouse the king had a daughter. The soothsayers prophesied her union with the king of beasts.

Very fair was she and very amorous, and for shame the king and queen could not suffer her. Alone she went forth from the house, desiring the joy of independent life. Unrecognized, she joined a caravan traveling to the Magadha country.

On the way there, in the Lala country a lion, sinha, attacked the caravan in a forest. The other folk fled this way and that, but the daughter fled along the way by which the lion had come. When the lion had taken his prey and was leaving the spot, he beheld her from afar. Love for her laid hold of him and he came towards her with waving tail and ears laid back. Seeing him, she bethought her of the

prophecy of the soothsayers which she had heard, and without fear she caressed him, stroking his limbs.

The lion, roused to the fiercest passion by her touch, took her upon his back and bore her with all speed to his cave. There he was united with her and from this union with him the princess in time bore twin children, a son and a daughter.

The son's hands and feet were formed like a lion's and therefore she named him Sinhabahu. The daughter she named Sinhasivali. When Sinhabahu was sixteen years old he questioned his mother on a doubt that had arisen within him, "Why are you and our father so different, dear mother?

She told him all. Then he asked, "Why do we not go forth from here?" And she answered, "Thy father has closed the cave up with a rock." Sinhabahu therefore took up the rock upon his shoulder and carried it a distance of fifty yojanas, going and returning in the same day. [A yojana is about twelve miles.]

Then one day when the lion had gone forth in search of prey, Sinhabahu took his mother on his right shoulder and his sister on the left, and went away with speed. They clothed themselves with the branches of trees, and so came to a border village. There, by chance, was a son of the princess's uncle, a commander in the army of the Vanga king.

When he saw the three he asked who they were and they said, "We are forest folk." The commander bade his people give them clothing and these turned magically into splendid garments. He offered them food on dried leaves and as they touched the food the leaves turned to bowls of pure gold.

Amazed, the commander said to them, "Who, indeed, are you?" The princess told him her family name and clan. Then the commander took them to the capital of the Vangas.

When the lion returned to his cave he was so sorrowful with grief he neither ate nor drank. Seeking his consort and his children he went to the border villages, but every one was deserted when they saw him coming. The border people came to the king and told him, "A lion ravages thy country; ward off this danger, O King!"

Since the king found no one who could ward off the danger he had a thousand pieces of money led about the city on an elephant's

back and this proclamation was made: "Let him who kills the lion receive these!" But no one came forward. The king then offered two thousand, and then three thousand.

Twice did Sinhabahu's mother restrain him. The third time, without asking his mother's permission, he took the three thousand pieces of money so that he might build a kingdom of his own with the reward for slaying his father.

They presented the youth to the king, and the king spoke thus to him: "If thou shalt take the lion I will give thee at once the kingdom."

Sinhabahu went to the lion's cave and the lion came forward for the love of his son. Sinhabahu shot an arrow to slay him. The arrow struck the lion's forehead, but because of the lion's tenderness towards his son it rebounded and fell to the earth at the youth's feet. Sinhabahu shot three more arrows and they each rebounded to his feet. Then at last did the king of beasts grow wrathful, and because of his wrath an arrow sent at him finally was able to pierce his body.

Sinhabahu took the head of the lion with the mane and returned to the city. Just seven days before, the king of the Vangas had died. The ministers rejoiced over his deed, and upon hearing that he was the king's grandson and on recognizing his mother as the princess who had been sent away, the ministers met all together and said of one accord, "Sinhabahu, be thou our king!"

He accepted the kingship but handed it over then to his mother's husband the commander, and he went to Sihisivali to the land of his birth. There he built a city and they called it Sinhapura, City of the Lion. In the forest stretching a hundred yojanas around he founded a thousand villages. He made his sister Sinhasivali his queen and as time passed she bore twin sons sixteen times.

The eldest was named Vijaya. In time the king consecrated Vijaya as vice regent. But Vijaya was of evil conduct and his followers did many intolerable deeds of violence with him. Angered by this the people told the matter to the king. The king severely chastised his son. But matters soon fell to the way they had been, the second time and then the third did they king chastise Vijaya. The angered people came thence to him and said, "You must kill thy son."

But instead Sinhabahu caused Vijaya and his seven hundred followers to be shaven over the head, which signifies the loss of

freedom, and he put them on a ship and sent them forth upon the sea, and their wives and children also, in a separate ship for each. The ships landed on three separate islands. The island where the children landed was called Nagadipa, from "naga", The Naked Ones. The island where the women landed was called Mahiladipaka, the Island of the Women.

Vijaya landed at Lanka, in the region called Tambapanni, for the color of its sands. He landed there on the very day the Tathagata lay down between two sala trees to pass into parinibbana. {VI, ¶1-47

The Mahavamsa establishes much of Lanka's nationalist legend with this story. First, the lion, sinha, is the father of the Sinhalese and the progenitor of the Sinhala language. Today's Sri Lankan flag is emblazoned with a lion holding a sword. The far-off mythical city called Sinha Pura is today's Singapore, an allusion of the future maritime greatness of the Sinhalese people. However, Mahanamasthivara takes his greatest pains to establish a direct connection between Vijaya and the Buddha by proclaiming that Vijaya stepped onto Tampabanni's shores the very instant the Buddha passed from this life. This brief tale thus lays the theoretical groundwork for the Mahavamsa's extensive descriptions of Sinhalese history and panoply.

As he moves out of legend into history, Mahanamasthivara succumbs to the instinct to sanctify the relation between royalty and Sangha with descriptions of opulence which may seem excessive to our taste but must have pleased his royal patrons no end. In Lanka the preeminent symbol of Buddhist faith was (and still is) the dagoba. Originally a heap of dirt with a stick jutting from the top to symbolize Mount Meru, the great mountain at the center of the cosmos, by Mahanamasthivara's time it had become a dome made of solid brick with a great cone-shaped tower on top. The largest were immense — three of them in Anuradhapura are the most massive solid objects on earth after the largest two pyramids. Mahanamasthivara describes one of these relic chambers as follows:

At the four quarters of the heaven stood the figures of the Four Great Guardians of the World [Dhatarattha, Virulha, Virupakkha, and

Vessavana], and the thirty-three gods and the thirty-two celestial maidens, and the twenty-eight chiefs of the yahksas. Above these devas raised their folded hands with vases filled with flowers, devatas dancing and playing musical instruments, devas with mirrors in their hands, and devas bearing flowers and branches, devas with lotus blossoms in their hands, rows of arches made of gems and rows of dhammacakkas [eight-spoked Wheels of the Dhamma; a sun symbol], rows of sword-bearing devas, and devas bearing pitchers. Above their heads were pitchers filled with fragrant oil with wicks of dukula fibers continuously alight. In an arch of crystal there was in each of the four corners a great gem and four glimmering heaps of gold, precious stones, pearls, and diamonds. On the wall made of fat-colored stones sparkling zig-zag lines [chatoyant gems such as cat's-eye], serving as an adornment for the relic chamber. The king commanded the artisans and bhikkhus to make all the figures in the relic chamber of massive wrought gold. {XXX, ¶89-97}

As befitting a faith whose founding belief is non-attachment to things of this world, all this opulence was sealed in layer upon layer of brick until the structure reached as high as forty stories and equally large in diameter at the base. The very few relic chambers which have been opened testify to the accuracy of Mahanamasthivara's description.

The Mahavamsa chronicles other matters besides the nexus between monkish piety, royal opulence, and the dutiful labor of serfs. Battles are lost as often as won, victory pays no attention to the virtue of the combatants, sons are as traitorous as often as loyal, daughters abscond with commoners, and malaria makes short work of grand schemes. The Mahavamsa and the Jataka stories are a fertile source of new plots of use to novelists. There is even the first recorded morality tale involving road kill:

At the head of his bed, King Elara caused to be placed a bell hung from a long rope so that those who desired judgment at law might ring it at any time.

Now Elara had only one son and one daughter. When one day the son was going in a car (a large elephant-drawn cart) to Tissa Lake, he unintentionally ran over the neck of a young calf lying with its mother by the side of the road, killing it. The cow came and tugged at the bell in its bitterness of heart and the king caused his son's head to be severed from his body by that same wheel in the same way. {XXI, ¶15-18}

Finally, there is a character who would have been dear to the heart of Shakespeare, Queen Anula. Her few years at court (48-44 BC) match the lusty treachery of any monarch in literature:

After Coranaga's death Mahacula's son Tissa ruled three years. But Coranaga's spouse, the infamous queen Anula, did him to death with poison because she was enamored of one of the palace guards whose name was Siva. Anula placed the government into the hands of Siva.

Siva made Anula his queen. He reigned a year and two months. But Anula, who was now enamored of Damila Vatuka, poisoned Siva. Vatuka, who had been a carpenter in the capital, made Anula his queen and reigned a year and two months.

One day Anula saw a wood carrier named Tissa. She fell in love with him. She killed Vatuka with poison and put the government into Tissa's hands. Tissa ruled for one year and one month. But Anula, now enslaved in passion for a temple brahmin named Niliya, put Tissa to death by poison and put the government in Niliya's hands. Niliya likewise made Anula his queen and reigned with her support, for six months. Even while married Anula pleased thirty two of her palace guards. When she poisoned Niliya, she reigned by herself alone for four months.

King Mahaculika's second son, Katakanna Tissa, had fled from fear of Anula and taken the royal insignia with him. He returned with an army. He killed the wicked Anula by poison, and reigned twentytwo years. {XXXIV, ¶15-30}