The Arrival of Buddhism

Long before it was a nation, Sri Lanka became a Buddhist island, and it has remained one for well over two thousand years. The faith arrived not by conquest but by a single mission from India in the 3rd century BC, and it took root so deeply that it came to define almost everything about the Sinhalese people. This is the story of how a religion crossed the strait, converted a king on a wooded hill, and grew into the oldest continuous Buddhist tradition on earth.

A timeline of the arrival

Mahinda and the king

The mission came from the greatest power of the age. The Indian emperor Ashoka, who ruled much of the subcontinent in the 3rd century BC, had turned to Buddhism in remorse after a devastating war and set about spreading the teaching far beyond his borders. According to Sri Lankan tradition, he sent his own son, the monk Mahinda, to carry it across the water to the island.

The chronicles tell the meeting as a scene of quiet drama. On the full-moon day of Poson, King Devanampiya Tissa was hunting deer in the hills at Mihintale, a few kilometres east of his capital at Anuradhapura, when Mahinda appeared and called him by name. The monk tested the king’s wit with a riddle about a mango tree, judged him ready, and preached the doctrine. Devanampiya Tissa was converted on the spot, and with him the court and, in time, the kingdom. That the king already bore the title Devanampiya, “beloved of the gods”, the same honorific Ashoka used, hints at the close ties between the two courts that made the mission possible.

The sacred Bo tree

The new faith needed roots, and it was given the deepest possible ones. Not long after the conversion, Mahinda’s sister, the nun Sanghamitta, sailed from India carrying a sapling cut from the very tree at Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment. It was planted with great ceremony in the royal park at Anuradhapura, where it still grows as the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi.

Tended without a single break for more than twenty-two centuries, it is often described as the oldest historically documented planted tree in the world. Sanghamitta also brought with her the order of nuns, or bhikkhunis, establishing the female monastic community that would flourish on the island for centuries. From that living sapling, cuttings were later carried to temples all over Sri Lanka, so that a piece of the enlightenment tree grows in countless village compounds to this day.

Preserving the word at Aluvihara

For its first two hundred years the teaching was carried in memory alone, recited and passed down by generations of monks. In the 1st century BC that oral chain nearly snapped. During the reign of King Valagamba, war and a long famine scattered and starved the monastic community, and the elders feared that if the few monks who held the scriptures by heart were to die, the teaching would be lost forever.

So a council of some five hundred monks gathered at the cave temple of Aluvihara, near Matale, and for the first time wrote the entire canon down on prepared palm leaves. This body of scripture, the Tipitaka or “three baskets”, is the foundation of Theravada Buddhism, the older and more conservative of the faith’s two great schools. Sri Lanka’s decision to fix it in writing preserved it not only for the island but for the wider Buddhist world, and the monks of Aluvihara still inscribe ola-leaf manuscripts in the old way.

The Sacred Tooth Relic and the crown

If the Bo tree gave Buddhism its roots, the Sacred Tooth Relic gave it a bond with the throne. A tooth said to have been saved from the Buddha’s funeral pyre was brought to Anuradhapura in about the 4th century AD, hidden, so the tradition holds, in the hair of a princess fleeing unrest in India.

The relic swiftly became more than an object of devotion. A belief took hold that whoever held the tooth held the right to rule the island, and so it travelled with the court from one capital to the next as power shifted over the centuries. When the kingdom’s last stronghold settled at Kandy, the relic was enshrined there in the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, the Sri Dalada Maligawa, where it remains the spiritual heart of the country. Every summer it is honoured in the Esala Perahera, one of Asia’s grandest processions, when caparisoned elephants, dancers and drummers fill the streets of Kandy by torchlight.

How Buddhism shaped the island

The consequences of that hillside meeting reached into every corner of Sinhalese life. Kingship itself was recast: the ideal ruler was now the defender and patron of the faith, building the great dagobas and irrigation works of the ancient capitals as acts of merit, and the alliance of throne and monastery, of king and sangha, became the organising principle of the state.

The religion drove the island’s art and architecture too, from the colossal stupas and serene rock-cut Buddhas of the ancient kingdoms to the cave paintings of Dambulla and the murals of Kelaniya. It shaped the Sinhala language and its literature, gave the calendar its rhythm of full-moon Poya holidays, and wove itself so tightly into identity that, for many, to be Sinhalese came to mean to be Buddhist. That fusion has been a source of great cultural richness and, at times, of division, a thread that runs through the island’s later colonial and modern history.

Where to trace the arrival of Buddhism today

A living inheritance

More than two millennia on, Buddhism is not a relic in Sri Lanka but a daily presence. Saffron-robed monks are a common sight in every town, roadside shrines glow with oil lamps and lotus offerings, and the year turns on the full-moon Poya days when the sale of alcohol pauses and temples fill with the faithful in white. Around seven in ten Sri Lankans are Buddhist, and the tradition the island preserved so carefully at Aluvihara later helped carry Theravada to Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.

To follow the story, climb the steps at Mihintale where it began, stand beneath the sacred tree at Anuradhapura, and end at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, where the faith and the crown of the island were bound together for the last time. To see how that world was finally overtaken, read on into the age of the Kandyan kingdom.