Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Clifford Holt is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities in Religion and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. He has written many books, including Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture, The Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformation, Politics and Culture, and The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art and Politics in Late Medieval Sri Lanka. He has also been awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.

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THE SRI LANKA READER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.................................................xiiiAcknowledgments.......................................................xvIntroduction..........................................................1I From Ancient to Early Modern........................................9II The Colonial Encounter.............................................133III Emerging Identities...............................................331IV Independence, Insurrections, and Social Change.....................589V Political Epilogue..................................................713Acknowledgment of Copyrights and Sources..............................735Suggestions for Further Reading.......................................745Index.................................................................751

Chapter One

Sri Lanka is an ancient land by any comparative standard. Drip ledge caves, with hewn or carved inscriptions written in the archaic Brahmi script and located in what is now the country's North Central Province, indicate that by the third century BCE Buddhist laymen believed that they were earning merit for a better rebirth by providing Buddhist monks with a refuge to pursue their monastic vocations. Theravada Buddhist monastic chronicles assert that by about this time, royal power, with its chief seat in Anuradhapura —a settlement that was to become eventually a great cosmopolitan city supported by a system of sophisticated irrigation works—converted to Buddhism as a result of missionary efforts led by children of the great Indian emperor Asoka. These remarkable texts, the Dipavamsa (Chronicle of the Island) and earlier sections of the Mahavamsa (Great Chronicle), were written in the classical Prakrit language of Pali, purportedly by monastic incumbents of the Mahavihara fraternity of the Theravada school of Buddhism during the fourth and fifth centuries CE, when Anuradhapura was in full cultural bloom. Aside from archaeological information now coming to light, these texts, while largely sectarian in perspective, still remain our earliest interpretive windows into Sri Lanka's distant past.

Anuradhapura was the ritual and administrative center of the island's chief kings from the third century BCE until the destruction of its infrastructure by imperial Cola invaders from Thanjavur, south India, in the early eleventh century CE. For thirteen centuries, the city's society and culture flourished, supported by a robust economy made possible by the control and distribution of water. The most outstanding feature of Anuradhapura society was the symbiotic relationship between royalty and monastery. At the time of their construction by the Anuradhapura kings in the early centuries of the first millennium, the massive Ruvanvelisaya, Abhyagiriya, and Jetavana stupas (reliquary mounds) built within the city's Buddhist monastic complexes were the largest man-made structures in the world after the pyramids of Egypt. By means of generous royal support and the ethic of gift giving or merit making by the laity, the Buddhist monastic sangha thrived. The Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hien (whose writings are excerpted in this Reader) mentions some five thousand monks in residence at the Abhyagiriya monastery and three thousand in the Mahavihara monastery alone. Each of the three major monasteries developed extensive administrative systems that served as the central bureaucracies for the many far-flung village temples that constituted their nikayas (chapters or sects). In effect, the sangha became the central source of literary and artistic culture and, in many ways, the economic arbiter of capital wealth. In the later centuries of the first millennium, Anuradhapura continued to be a cosmopolitan city. For many Sri Lankan Buddhists the city represents the pristine purity of a Sinhala Theravada Buddhist past, but in fact the monasteries of Anuradhapura (especially the Abhyagiriya and Jetavana) were quite eclectic in nature. Inscriptions and sculptures reveal that the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions were also well represented. Indeed, twentieth-century archeological finds indicate that the Mahayana cult of Avalokitesvara was widespread throughout the island from the eighth through at least the tenth centuries.

The Mahavamsa contains an account of the political gyrations that eventually led to the invasion by the Cola empire based in Thanjavur (modern Tamilnadu), which seems to have resulted in the almost total demolition of Anuradhapura's civic and monastic infrastructure in the eleventh century. The Colas established their new power base on the island in Polonnaruva, about 80 miles to the southeast of Anuradhapura, ostensibly to better fend off any counterattacks from the Sinhalese, whose royalty had fled to the southeast quadrant of the island. The Colas maintained their position for many decades into the eleventh century, before the Sinhalas captured Polonnaruva and turned it into their own capital. The Culavamsa (the extension of the Mahavamsa) extols the great irrigation works (Parakramabahu samudra) and building achievements (especially the monastic complex Alahena Pirivena, said to have been attended by some ten thousand monks) of Parakramabahu I and other kings, including Nissamka Mala. When the bhikkhusangha was reconstituted in Polonnaruva, only Theravada monks (and none from the Mahayana tradition) were ordained and supported; no bhikkunnishangha (order of nuns) was reestablished at that time. This composition of monastic Buddhism is still in place today.

It is clear from archeological and sculptural remains that the Polonnaruva capital also sustained a Hindu Saivite presence after its capture by the Sinhalese. Even the Culavamsa account contains numerous references to Saivite practices in the royal court, probably owing to the fact that Sinhala Polonnaruva kings revived the practice of marrying queens from south India. It is possible that the later blending of Hindu and Buddhist popular religion received its impetus from the social and political realities of the Polon naruva courts at this time. But Polonnaruva was also the venue for the writing of the first Sinhala literary compositions, especially those by the celebrated writer Garulugomi, which took Buddhist subjects for their substance.

Polonnaruva was sacked by Magha, an invader from Kalinga (modern western Orissa) in the thirteenth century, a disaster so thorough in nature that the Sinhala kings abandoned their splendid capital and began to retreat in a southwesterly direction situating themselves in a series of backwater capitals. The invasion was followed by another several decades later, this one led by Chandrabhanu of Sri Vijaya (modern Malaysia and Sumatra) who purportedly sought possession of the Buddha's tooth relic and thereby the right to rule over Lanka. Indeed, the entire thirteenth through fifteenth centuries marks a period of great social turbulence and political instability throughout the island and with it, the increasing political enervation of Sinhala kings. At the same time, this was a period of unprecedented migration of peoples from various regions of south India, many of whom were originally mercenaries enlisted to fight in the ongoing conflicts. Their presence further abetted a Lankan cultural fermentation, the increased mixing of Hindu and Buddhist elements seen, for example, in the...