The corpus records this entry under the title "Maha Sthan" and files it among deities, while its description names **Anurādhapura**, Sri Lanka's first capital.
No primary scriptures are catalogued for this entry yet. If you know of scriptural references we have missed, please contribute them.
The corpus records this entry under the title "Maha Sthan" and files it among deities, while its description names Anurādhapura, Sri Lanka's first capital. That mismatch should be stated rather than smoothed: maha sthan is not a deity, it is a category of place — "great sacred site" — and it is used in Sinhala Buddhist writing for the ancient monastic centres. The corpus entry is therefore a place-and-institution record, and the category field should be corrected by a named guardian rather than inherited.
Anurādhapura was the capital of Sri Lanka for roughly seven centuries, from its foundation in the fourth century BCE until the royal capital moved south. Its importance is a single building and the argument that followed it: the Mahāvihāra, the Great Monastery, housed the tooth relic of the Buddha, and the long dispute over where the relic belonged — between the Mahāvihāra and the Abhayagiri on one side and, centuries later, the king's custodianship in the up-country — is a defining episode of Sri Lankan religious and political history. The Jetavanāma, the Ruwanweli stupa said to have been built over the Buddha's visit, the monasteries and the bodhi trees are the other components of the archaeological park.
The Mahāvihāra was also the institutional centre from which the Suttantanta tradition, and with it Theravāda as a distinct movement, took shape — a development that made Anurādhapura the origin point of the form of Buddhism that is now dominant in Sri Lanka and in Southeast Asia. The Abhayagiri monastery on the same hill pursued a different path, associated in the chronicles with Mahayana and Vajrayana practices and with the forest hermits of the region; that history is real and should not be elided, though the chronicles' own framing of it is polemical.
The chronicles for the Mahāvihāra's institutional claims; the archaeological reports for the site; and the standard histories of Sri Lanka for the political frame.
For a named guardian, ideally a Sinhala speaker and an archaeologist: the precise dating of the Mahāvihāra's establishment and of the relic's arrival, on which the chronicles and the epigraphy do not fully agree; the current Sinhala designation of the site; and whether the corpus should rename or split this file into a place entry for Anurādhapura and an institution entry for the Mahāvihāra.
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