10 - Sīhaḷa Saṅgha and Laṅkā in Later Premodern Southeast Asia

Summary

INTRODUCTION

It is a commonplace within much scholarly writing (including textbooks) on Buddhism in southern Asia that the second millennium CE witnessed an intensification of ties between Laṅkā (now Sri Lanka) and parts of mainland Southeast Asia now referred to as Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. Buddhist monks said to be Lankan, or participants in monastic ordination lineages and educational practices rooted in Laṅkā, are described as altering the character of the mainland Southeast Asian Buddhist world by dispersing Lankan Buddhist monastic forms of practice, as well as linguistic and textual preferences, through kingdoms like Pagan, Sukhothai, Chiang Mai, and Pegu.

Our understanding of the history of southern Asian Buddhism during the second millennium remains very limited. The careful research required in order to understand movements of people, ideas, linguistic preferences, and textual forms, as well as social relations and institutional arrangements relating to the Buddha-sāsana (the world of Buddhist texts, persons, and practices) has barely begun. The reasons for this are many. They include a preference for the study of “early Buddhism” and doctrinal texts (understood narrowly) among early generations of Buddhist studies scholars, research programmes oriented by the boundaries of contemporary nation-states and national languages that have sometimes deflected or hindered the examination of regional and transregional histories, the daunting multilingual competences required for research, and a relatively weak intellectual interface between the disciplines of Buddhist studies, Asian history, art history, and epigraphy. This chapter draws on a new research project examining texts related to Lān Nā's Buddhist history during the late second millennium. Reading these texts raises valuable questions for historians of Buddhism, questions that carry us beyond the particular context of Lān Nā's Buddhist history. These texts invite us to consider how we can — creatively but with empirical rigour — use Buddhist textual sources from the later history of southern Asia as evidence to reconstruct histories of monastic mobility, including the sorts of travel that are understood to have linked Laṅkā and other parts of southern Asia more closely as the second millennium wore on.