Sinhalese

Sinhalese Buddhism is Theravada, and its claim to importance is documentary as much as devotional. The Pali canon was committed to writing on the island in the first century BCE, and the commentarial tradition that Buddhaghosa organised in the fifth century of the common era was compiled there too. Richard Gombrich's study of village practice in the highlands describes the working religion that sits on top of that inheritance, in which monks are supported and merit is made, and in which doctrine and practice are related without being identical.

The relic of the tooth, held at Kandy, has been a political object for as long as it has been a religious one, since possession of it was understood to legitimate rule. John Strong's study traces both its cult and the Western accounts of it. The annual procession at Kandy, in which the casket is carried out with elephants, dancers and drummers, is the largest Buddhist festival on the island.

Beside the monastic religion runs a body of practice concerned with immediate trouble: deity shrines within Buddhist temples, vows made at Kataragama, and the healing rites Bruce Kapferer studied, in which demons are addressed, made to appear, and then dismissed by ridicule. Rita Langer's work on death and rebirth rites shows the same double structure at a funeral. Both belong to one religious world.

The Mahavamsa, the great chronicle compiled in Pali from the fifth century onward and continued for a thousand years afterwards, is the tradition's own history, and it does two things at once. It records the arrival of Buddhism with Mahinda in the third century BCE, the planting of the bodhi tree cutting at Anuradhapura, and the succession of kings and monastic lineages, and it presents the island as the appointed home of the teaching. Wilhelm Geiger's translation made it available to European scholarship.

Colonial rule under the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British disadvantaged Buddhism for three centuries, and the response, from the later nineteenth century, was a revival that reorganised it. Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist Theosophical Society founded schools, printed texts and argued in public debates against missionaries, and the movement gave Buddhism institutions modelled on those of its opponents.

That revival was also nationalist, and the connection has had consequences. Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, drawing on the chronicle's framing of the island, has been a factor in the country's modern conflicts, including the civil war that ran from 1983 to 2009. The atlas records this because the relation between a scripture, a chronicle and a modern politics is part of the religion's history rather than a departure from it.