Mahayana Sri Lanka

Mahāyāna in Sri Lanka — a tradition that shrank to a footnote

A minority reported by a pilgrim

Sri Lankan Buddhism is Theravāda, and it is one of the great simplifications of popular accounts to present Theravāda as having displaced Mahāyāna there. The available evidence suggests the opposite sequence. Fa-Hien (Fǎxiǎn), the Chinese pilgrim who travelled in India and Sri Lanka around 399–414 CE, reported that Mahāyāna was flourishing in Sri Lanka in his day while Hinayana was on the wane. He names a Mahāyāna monastery at Pācīmāla in the Arala district of the Ratnāpura region and notes that Mahāyāna monks from beyond the borders shared the monastery with the resident monks, who lived in the same establishment. The temple he describes was a Mahāyāna monastery in an essentially Theravāda kingdom.

If Mahāyāna was flourishing in the fifth century, it was not flourishing in any equivalent sense afterwards. The reasons are a matter of history and of political economy: royal and institutional patronage shifted, Sinhala court Buddhism was configured around the relic cult and the Mahāvihāra's authority, and the networks connecting South and Southeast Asia came to run through other channels. Mahāyāna Buddhism survived in Sri Lanka as a small presence — some monasteries and a few learned monks in the monasteries — rather than as a living mass tradition comparable to the one Fa-Hien described.

The corpus entry is filed under "Buddhist, Sinhala" and gender "male", which are machine defaults rather than descriptions of anything. Mahāyāna is a vehicle, not a deity, and the entry should be reclassified as a tradition or movement. The historical point is worth preserving precisely because it is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in the corpus for why a traveler's report should be read against a tradition rather than believed whole.

Sources and what is still unverified

Fa-Hien's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, read in translation with the passage identified, is the primary source. Warder's Indian Buddhism supplies the comparative framework for where Mahāyāna monasticism sat vis-à-vis Theravāda in the early centuries.

For a named guardian, ideally a Pali and Chinese specialist: Fa-Hien's exact text and the identification of Pācīmāla; the state of Mahāyāna study in Sri Lanka after the fifth century and the question of whether it was ever a lay as well as a monastic movement; and whether any trace of the fifth-century monasteries survives in the archaeological record.