Relocating the Light

Pāli is not typically considered a language that allows for much literary flourish, but literary moves are made nonetheless: patterns and rhetorical structures introduced in the first chapter determine how the rest of the historical narrative is literarily conveyed. This chapter argues that structurally significant patterns manifest in the proem itself are what determine the narrative arc of the text, and further explores the metaphor of light as it is employed in the story, paying attention to the way the proems had set up the reader to perceive the transformative richness and practical potential of such metaphors. By exploring this metaphor of light we will see how a certain pattern is developed whereby the physical space of Laṅkā is transformed to a lamp of the dhamma, a cetiya for the future remembrance and representation of the Buddha through relic veneration, while individual hearers are transformed ethically, resulting in the moral community primed for the responsibility of the dhamma. Just as a lamp is primed with oil to effectively receive the flame, so the reader of the Mahāvaṃsa is primed for the full, transformative force of the text by the proem and by the narrative strategies employed.

Conclusion

THE PĀLI Mahāvaṃsa has survived through fifteen hundred years of history to become a seminal text of Sri Lankan Buddhism. It has survived thanks in part to the scribes who were charged along the way with copying it (palm-leaf manuscripts do not hold up indefinitely in the Sri Lankan climate). It survived the early translation performed by George Turnour and the consequent attention it garnered from Western Orientalists. And it survived through numerous other intervening interpretations, finally making its way into the hands of modern interpretive communities and scholars alike. Modern scholars must be grateful to all these scribes and interpreters, without whom the text may not have survived at all. Yet we must not forget the work that these interpretations have exerted on our modern understanding of the text. As I hope to have shown by now, key operative facets of this text—its literary form, function, and aims as well as the emotionally provocative, religious work it can perform on the primed reader—warrant a reorientation of modern scholarship on this monumental text....

Historicizing (in) the Pāli Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa

Scholars and Buddhists alike have treated the Mahāvaṃsa as a history, provoking all the concomitant responsibilities and expectations and methods of interpretation assumed to be at work when one does (or reads and interprets) history. This chapter suggests that one of the primary concerns for the fourth and fifth century Mahāvihāran monks responsible for compiling the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa was to provide a vehicle for the continued presence and proximity of the Buddha through evocative, transformative literature. The vaṃsa thus works on the reader/interpreter in ways not entirely unlike the way history works on the modern scholar, but there is a significant difference. The Mahāvaṃsa explicitly states its objectives in religious terms; the text is not only didactic but is intended to create or support an ethically inspired community in its religious program.

Nāgas and Relics

Surveys the moral world illumined by this particular reading of the Mahāvaṃsa, and the role of the especially salient character of the nāgas in that world. This chapter argues that the nāgas drive the entire narrative arc of the text, beginning with the initiatory, physical visit of the Buddha, their successful conversion by the Buddha himself, through the acquisition, enshrinement, and right veneration of his relics. This chapter goes on to show how the textual community envisions the world without the enduring, living presence of the Buddha, where relics are a viable technology developed by a community seeking continues proximity to the Buddha. Nāgas are utilized as particularly salient characters to facilitate the ongoing connection with the Buddha as they help determine the value of relics, they locate and guard relics, they are simultaneously model worshippers and unworthy hoarders of relics, and they mark time and recall the Buddha by becoming relics. After exploring the tripartite classification of relics operative in the early medieval textual community responsible for the Mahāvaṃsa, we will investigate the nāgas’ relationships to relics of use (pāribhogika), corporeal relics (sarīrika), and representation or image relics (uddesika).

Nāgas, Transfigured Figures Inside the Text, Ruminative Triggers Outside

The useful snakelike character nāga drives the opening narrative of the Mahāvaṃsa: the fighting family of nāgas in fact provokes the Buddha’s visit to the island, and the invitation of a converted nāga prompts his subsequent return. This chapter defines and situates the nāga in Pāli Buddhist literature, especially in the case of the Bhūridatta Jātaka where the Buddha himself, in a previous birth, was a nāga. Crucial here are the various indications of its slippery ontological nature and thus the soteriological repercussions: nāgas are agents both in our world and in the Nāgaloka; the nāga is a chthonic inhabitant of/mover on the waters, 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 challenged because of their lack of human birth and yet they are always seen in proximity to the Buddha or his relics. Nāgas are liminal: neither human nor fully animal, these semi-divine agents are nonetheless capable of converting to Buddhism and are in fact key agents in the transmission of the dhamma, particularly to border regions. Nāgas are critical characters to effectively transfer the sāsana to Sri Lanka, just as they are critical characters to provoke the correct emotional states called for by the text; as characters, nāgas provoke the requisite imaginative capacity for the ethical transformations in readers called for by the text.

Instructions, Admonitions, and Aspirations in Vaṃsa Proems

If we read the proem, or opening poem of reading instructions, of the Mahāvaṃsa, especially in light of the proem of the earlier related text Dīpavaṃsa, we see that the traditional, historicizing, scholarly way of reading and using the Mahāvaṃsa misses the point: the Mahāvaṃsa is intended to effect a transformation in the reader/hearer through the cultivation of the highly prized Buddhist emotions of saṃvega (anxious thrill) and pasāda (serene satisfaction). The proems straightforwardly articulate the ethically transformative potential of the texts, a potential realized through proper reading by an appropriate audience (of “good people”). Following subtle and blatant cues within the text, this chapter considers a way to read the Mahāvaṃsa as literature, a corrective to the predominant historicizing focus, where the proem prepares a particular kind of reader and circumscribes a particular kind of textual community to help not only individual ethical transformation, but also to envision the Buddhist landscape with Sri Lanka at the center.

Introduction

IN THE study of religions, we find that certain key texts come to define their interpretive communities, for both the communities themselves and the scholars who study them.1 Texts are an appealing source for the cultivation of understanding; they seem stable and fixed in a way that a religious community, comprising people who change through time and contexts, simply is not. But a text is not a source unless it is brought to life through reading and interpretation, irrespective of the vicissitudes of time and context. Reading and interpretation necessarily negate, to some extent, the stability or fixedness of a given text, and the imagination at work in reading and interpretation opens up possibilities for transformation....