Siam Nikaya (Siyam Nikaya)

The Siyam Nikaya is the oldest of the Sri Lankan monastic fraternities, and its founding illustrates how fragile the ordination lineage of Theravada Buddhism can be.

Re-importing valid ordination

Higher ordination in Theravada requires a quorum of validly ordained monks, and if the lineage lapses it cannot simply be restarted from books. By the eighteenth century the valid higher ordination had died out on the island. In 1753 King Kirti Sri Rajasinha and the reforming monk Welivita Sri Saranankara brought senior monks from Ayutthaya in Siam to Kandy to restore it, and the fraternity founded on that imported lineage took its name from Siam. It centres on the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy and its chapters at Malwatta and Asgiriya.

Caste, and what it produced

Historically the ordination of the Siyam Nikaya was restricted to the highest, govigama, caste. That restriction is not incidental: it is the direct cause of the founding of the later fraternities, the Amarapura and the Ramanna, by and for those excluded from it. The Sri Lankan monastic map, three fraternities rather than one, is therefore in large part a record of a caste dispute worked out through competing ordination lineages.

The ordination King Kirti Sri Rajasinha and Saranankara imported from Ayutthaya in 1753 restored a full, valid higher ordination lineage to Sri Lanka at a moment when the island's own line of properly ordained monks had lapsed, and the fraternity it founded became, and remains, the oldest and largest of the island's monastic nikayas. That founding success carried a restriction that later proved costly to the order's unity: ordination within the Siyam Nikaya became effectively limited to men of the Goyigama caste, the dominant Sinhalese landowning caste, excluding capable monks and aspirants from other backgrounds from full ordination within the fraternity that Sri Lankan Buddhism's own revival had just re-established. That exclusion did not resolve quietly. Monks shut out of the Siyam Nikaya on caste grounds travelled abroad to receive ordination through different lineages entirely, founding the Amarapura Nikaya in 1803 and the Ramanna Nikaya in 1864 specifically as alternatives open to non-Goyigama candidates, so that two of the island's three principal fraternities exist directly because of a restriction the oldest and most prestigious one imposed on itself. The Siyam Nikaya itself later organised into two chapters based at Kandy, Malwatte and Asgiriya, each under its own Mahanayaka, a structure that still governs the fraternity today.