Sri Lanka: An Independent Centre of Buddhist Scholarship
For most people, the story of Buddhism begins and ends in India — and understandably so. The Buddha taught there for forty-five years of his life, and the subcontinent remains the tradition’s undisputed homeland. Yet the history of how Buddhism actually spread, survived, and diversified across Asia cannot be told without placing Sri Lanka at its centre. Far from being a passive recipient of teachings passed down from the north, the island shaped Buddhist thought, preserved its plurality, and transmitted distinct traditions to civilisations as far apart as Burma, Sumatra and China.
Recognised by the Greatest Scholars of Their Age
The evidence for Sri Lanka’s intellectual standing is not merely circumstantial. Vasubandhu, one of the most celebrated philosophers in the entire Mahayana tradition, and Bhaviveka, a formidable thinker of the 7th century, both praised Sri Lankan Abhidharma scholars by name. As Chuan Cheng observes in his paper Designations of Ancient Sri Lankan Buddhism in the Chinese Tripitaka, these figures acknowledged “significant contributions and advanced developments” from the island’s monastic centres. That two such towering Indian intellects should look to Sri Lanka for scholarly distinction is no small thing.
The Testimony of Eyewitnesses
Chronicles and philosophical treatises can be dismissed as partisan. The accounts of independent travellers cannot be so easily set aside.
Faxian, the Chinese Buddhist monk who undertook a remarkable pilgrimage between 399 and 412 CE, chose to spend two full years in Sri Lanka — not in India, despite having traversed it extensively in search of authentic scripture. A Mahayana practitioner, he almost certainly resided at Abhayagiri Vihara, where he recorded a community of 3,000 monks, outnumbering the 2,000 at the rival Mahavihara. He documented relic worship, the veneration of the Sri Maha Bodhi, and the Vinaya texts he studied there. His decision to linger on the island speaks more plainly than any proclamation of its importance.
Xuanzang, writing in the 7th century, never visited Sri Lanka at all — yet he devoted considerable space to it in his Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. His source material came from some 300 Sri Lankan monks he encountered at Kanchipuram, who had fled their homeland amid political turmoil and possible famine. That a scholar of Xuanzang’s rigour would write at length about a country he had not seen, on the basis of refugee testimony, tells us precisely how central Sri Lanka was to the Buddhist world’s understanding of itself.
Two Traditions, Two Directions
Sri Lanka did not merely receive Buddhism; it transmitted it, in more than one form.
The Pali Canon, preserved and elaborated at the Mahavihara, travelled eastward to Burma, Thailand and Cambodia, where it became the foundation of what we now call Theravada Buddhism across mainland Southeast Asia.
Simultaneously, a quite different stream flowed from the Abhayagiri Vihara. This tradition, which engaged openly with Mahayana and later Vajrayana thought, found its way to Java and Sumatra — where it shaped the remarkable civilisation of the Shailendra Dynasty. In a striking reversal, Shailendra influence then fed back into the Indian subcontinent itself, including the monastic complex at Nagarjunakonda, where an Abhayagiri-named vihara bears witness to Sri Lanka’s reach. The island was not simply a node in a network; it was, at times, the network’s engine.
The Vajrayana Connection
Vajrayana traditions hold that Sri Lanka is the location of the Buddha’s first tantric teachings, given on Mount Malaya — the peak known today as Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak. Whatever one makes of that claim, the historical record confirms a sustained engagement between Sri Lanka and the esoteric traditions.
Vajrabodhi, the Indian tantric master, spent the years between 701 and 708 CE on the island, receiving initiations and gathering texts before sailing to Srivijaya and eventually making his way to China, where his influence as a teacher and translator proved considerable. After his death in 741, his disciple Amoghavajra — possibly himself Sri Lankan — undertook a pilgrimage to Sri Lanka and India, returning to China in 746 with several hundred volumes of newly acquired texts. Forty years before Padmasambhava carried the dharma to Tibet, the currents of esoteric Buddhism were already running through the island.
A Plurality Unique in the Buddhist World
What distinguishes Sri Lanka above all is something more elusive than geography or scholarly renown: it appears to be the only Buddhist country that genuinely welcomed a plurality of traditions at once.
Most nations that adopted Buddhism chose one form and made it their own, adapting its expressions to local culture whilst letting other streams fall away. Sri Lanka held Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana in simultaneous tension — not without conflict, but without elimination. The great monasteries of Anuradhapura were not a succession of orthodoxies but a contested, living argument about what the dharma required.
This plurality endured for well over a millennium. By the 12th century, Buddhism had effectively disappeared from India — the land of its birth — undone by invasion, the revival of Hinduism, and the destruction of institutions such as Nalanda. In Sri Lanka, it survived periods of Tamil rule, political turmoil, famine and dynastic disruption. The tradition ebbed and flowed, as it always had. It did not vanish.
What the Chronicles Cannot Explain
The Mahavamsa and the Dipavamsa, Sri Lanka’s principal Buddhist chronicles, have long been treated as the definitive account of the island’s religious history. They deserve more scepticism than they usually receive.
The Mahavamsa, composed in the 5th and 6th centuries by what appears to have been a single author, Mahanama, presents an ordered narrative of royal patronage, orthodox transmission and dynastic legitimacy. Yet the archaeological record does not cooperate. Professor Robin Coningham, examining more than a thousand Buddhist cave-dwellings whose dedicatory inscriptions bear titles from kingdoms that subsequently disappeared, argues that Buddhism may have been present in Sri Lanka before the official mission of Arahant Mahinda — before, that is, the Mahavamsa’s founding episode. The caves predate the chronicle’s tidy chronology. They suggest an organic, decentralised arrival, not a royal gift from Emperor Ashoka.
The Mahavamsa’s account of Abhayagiri’s founding is similarly strained. It claims that King Abhaya built the monastery as a gift to a rogue monk who was subsequently defrocked for an unspecified offence — yet construction apparently continued for years after the intended recipient had gone. A more plausible reading is that Abhaya was dissatisfied with the Mahavihara’s support during his years in exile, and chose to establish an institutional alternative. This would explain not only why he built a rival monastery but where he expected to find monks to fill it.
The account of King Mahasena compounds the difficulty. He is accused successively of destroying the Mahavihara, defending it, supporting Abhayagiri, and then building Jetavana for the Sagalika sect — a group that had broken away from Abhayagiri itself. These contradictions do not read as honest history. They read as a text working hard to discredit rivals whilst claiming the moral high ground.
What Ashoka’s Own Words Reveal
Perhaps the most telling evidence concerns the Pali Canon itself and the claim that Ashoka standardised and transmitted it to Sri Lanka as the definitive version of the Buddha’s teachings.
Ashoka’s Minor Rock Edict 3 lists several Dhamma texts he wished monks, nuns and lay followers to study. When scholars attempt to align these titles with texts in the Pali Canon, they find not correspondence but uncertainty. Venerable S. Dhammika, translating the edict, is reduced to offering probable matches, hedged with alternatives. The titles Ashoka uses do not match the Canon’s titles. Scholars must speculate. As multiple independent analyses have concluded, if the Canon had already been fixed and transmitted under Ashoka’s authority, his own inscriptions would not require this retrospective guesswork.
The implication is clear: during Ashoka’s lifetime, Buddhist teachings circulated in multiple recensions, under varying titles, in different Prakrits. The Pali Canon as we have it was not a finished edifice that Ashoka handed to Sri Lanka. It was the outcome of a long, continuing process of compilation, standardisation and — inevitably — selection. This does not diminish its authority as a record of the dharma. It does, however, challenge the claim that it arrived in Sri Lanka complete, orthodox and beyond revision.
A Shared Foundation
Across all the traditions that passed through Sri Lanka — Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, and the forest-dwelling lineages that sit uneasily within any of these categories — certain teachings have remained constant. Non-self. Impermanence. The unsatisfactory nature of conditioned existence. Liberation from samsara.
The apparent gulf between the Theravada arhat who enters parinirvana and the Mahayana bodhisattva who remains in the world to serve all beings is, on examination, less absolute than sectarian polemic suggests. Both have eradicated the afflictions that bind beings to rebirth. Both may continue to act in the world — one out of residual momentum, the other by vow — without being bound by it. The Buddha himself, after all, taught in samsara for forty-five years after his enlightenment. If liberation precluded compassionate engagement, he would have remained silent beneath the Bodhi tree.
Sri Lanka, uniquely, held all of this together — imperfectly, contentiously, and for longer than any other Buddhist nation managed to sustain such breadth. That achievement deserves to be better known.