Mahavihara

The Mahavihara was one monastic fraternity among several in Sri Lanka, and it is the one whose reading of the discipline became Theravada. Richard Gombrich's social history follows the sequence. The monastery was established at Anuradhapura for Mahinda's mission in the third century before the Common Era; it preserved the Pali canon and is credited with the decision to commit it to writing during a period of famine and war, when oral transmission was at risk; and in the fifth century Buddhaghosa produced under its authority the commentaries and the Visuddhimagga that have defined Theravada doctrine ever since. Its rivals, the Abhayagiri and Jetavana fraternities, held different positions on the discipline and were open to Mahayana texts and teachers, and for long periods they were larger and better endowed. The contest was settled politically.

In the twelfth century Parakramabahu the First reunified the monastic order under Mahavihara discipline and the rival fraternities ceased to exist as separate ordination lineages. Every Theravada ordination lineage in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand descends from that settlement, which means a monastic argument in one Sri Lankan city determined the shape of a religion across a subcontinent.

Most of what is known about the Mahavihara comes from the Mahavamsa, and the Mahavamsa was composed in the Mahavihara tradition. It gives the monastery its foundation by King Devanampiya Tissa for Mahinda in the Mahamegha park, records the planting of the cutting of the Bodhi tree brought from India by Sanghamitta, and narrates the long rivalry with the Abhayagiri from the Mahavihara's point of view.

Wilhelm Geiger's translation made it available to modern scholarship, and it remains an indispensable source for the political and religious history of the island because there is nothing else of comparable range. It is also an interested witness, and the atlas records it as one. The Abhayagiri produced its own literature and that literature does not survive, so the account of a centuries long dispute exists only in the words of the side that won.

Modern scholarship reads the chronicle accordingly, using it as evidence while discounting its evaluations, and the same caution applies to its treatment of kings, who are praised or condemned largely according to their generosity to the Mahavihara. The atlas notes the asymmetry wherever it relies on the chronicle. It is worth adding that the Mahavamsa has had a substantial modern political afterlife in Sri Lanka, where its narrative has been drawn on in arguments about the relationship between Buddhism, the island and its populations, and the atlas records the text as a historical source and those later uses of it as a separate matter.