Abstract
Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270
Highlights
When we speak of ‘Pali literature’ it is perhaps understandable that many people will think of the Tipiṭaka or ‘Pali canon’, as it is often referred to in Western academic writings
This book is the first intellectual history of what was the most culturally productive period in Sri Lanka’s premodern era.10. It is less concerned with cataloguing the doctrinal positions of the reform-era Saṅgha than with describing broader changes in the monastic community’s religious orientation as expressed primarily in the Pali literature composed during the reforms and in the role played by these works in facilitating the reform process
While we can speculate that the scholar-monks of the reform era engaged with these ideas as part of a larger cultural package that had entered the Saṅgha through the travels of monks such as Ratnamati, we should keep in mind that the study of Buddhist Sanskrit works among the monks of the three fraternities in Sri Lanka had a much longer history too, in particular during the period of Pallava dominance in the seventh and eighth centuries
Summary
Throughout history Buddhists have held vastly different views about the language in which the Buddha taught. One of the most important commentators in Buddhist history was a fourth or fifth-century South Indian scholar fittingly known as Buddhaghosa or ‘voice of the Buddha’ who wrote a number of definitive works in Sri Lanka elucidating and developing upon the Buddha’s ideas This book is the first intellectual history of what was the most culturally productive period in Sri Lanka’s premodern era.10 It is less concerned with cataloguing the doctrinal positions of the reform-era Saṅgha than with describing broader changes in the monastic community’s religious orientation as expressed primarily in the Pali literature composed during the reforms and in the role played by these works in facilitating the reform process. As a transregional medium, Pali was the choice language for conveying the Saṅgha’s new, unified monastic identity to the increasingly cosmopolitan monastic community at home; to non-Sinhala speaking communities abroad, in particular those in the Tamil South; as well as to the royal court, which from the eleventh century onwards was dominated by foreign rulers and factions such as the Kāliṅgas and the Pāṇḍyas from Northeast and Southeast India respectively.
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