Buddhist Connections in The Indian Ocean

Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 58 (�0�5) �37-�66

brill.com/jesh
Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean:

Changes in Monastic Mobility, 1000-1500
Anne M. Blackburn
Cornell University
amb242@cornell.edu
Abstract
Since the nineteenth century, Buddhists residing in the present-day nations of

Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka have thought of themselves as participants in a
shared southern Asian Buddhist world characterized by a long and continuous history
of integration across the Bay of Bengal region, dating at least to the third century BCE
reign of the Indic King Asoka. Recently, scholars of Buddhism and historians of the
region have begun to develop a more historically variegated account of Buddhism in
South and Southeast Asia, using epigraphic, art historical, and archaeological evi-
dence, as well as new interpretations of Buddhist chronicle texts.1 This paper examines
* I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers at JESHO for their incisive and helpful comments
during the preparation of this article and to Dr. Paolo Sartori for his dedicated editorial
guidance. Early versions of some of the material discussed here were presented at the Asia
Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, the Department of History at
the National University of Singapore, the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell
University, and Stanford University’s Ho Center for Buddhist Studies. Research contribut-
ing to this article was made possible by a Senior Research Fellowship at the Asia Research
Institute of the National University of Singapore. During that period I benefited from conver-
sations with many colleagues. I offer special thanks to Prasenjit Duara, Michael Feener, Geoff
Wade, Alexey Kirichenko, and Christian Lammerts.
1 “Chronicles” is a term of art, used here to refer collectively to texts composed in Pāli or local
literary vernacular languages derived, directly or indirectly, from the Pāli-language vaṃsa
genre popularized in Laṅkā (now Sri Lanka) during the first millennium CE. In the Buddhist
world, vaṃsas are texts that celebrate the lineage of a place, person, polity, community, and/
or object, typically in relation to Buddhist monastic institutions and royal families. Shared
access, direct or indirect, to Mahāvaṃsa, an early sixth-century Pāli-language text from the
kingdom of Anurādhapura in Laṅkā, led to the popularization of a written style celebrating
monastic-cum-royal institutional developments in the Buddhist world (sāsana).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi �0.��63/�5685�09-��34�374

238 Blackburn
three historical episodes in the eleventh- to fifteenth-century history of Sri Lankan-

Southeast Asian Buddhist connections attested by epigraphic and Buddhist chronicle
accounts. These indicate changes in regional Buddhist monastic connectivity during
the period 1000-1500, which were due to new patterns of mobility related to changing
conditions of trade and to an altered political ecosystem in maritime southern Asia.
Keywords
Buddhism – Buddhist chronicles – Buddhist networks – Indian Ocean – Sri Lanka
Introduction
Writing from self-imposed exile in Laṅkā in 1897, the Siamese monk-prince

Prisdang (Jinavāravaṃsa), formerly a high-level envoy from Bangkok to many
European capitals, celebrated the forthcoming visit of the Siamese king
Chulalongkorn to the island colony as an opportunity to renew long-standing
connections of Buddhist fraternity and amity among the “nations” of Ceylon,
Burma, and Siam. Prisdang sought to make King Chulalongkorn the pro-
tector of Buddhism in the region and to subsume all Buddhist monks from
these three locations in an ecclesiastical council administered from Bangkok
(Blackburn 2010: 167-86). Prisdang’s vision of enduring connections between
Laṅkā, Burma, and Siam would have come as no surprise to most of his monas-
tic colleagues in Laṅkā and Southeast Asia, as the nineteenth century was a
period of intense communication among Buddhist monks in Laṅkā, Burma,
and Siam, as they sought to address intellectual, political, and institutional
challenges to Buddhism linked to French and British colonial projects in the
region (Reynolds 1973; Malalgoda 1976; Blackburn 2010). The Buddhists of
Prisdang’s day studied Buddhist textual reports of historical trans-regional
connection, seeking models and precedents for nineteenth-century activities.
While Prisdang and his monastic colleagues often celebrated unbroken
Buddhist connections in the Indian Ocean region in a manner that empha-
sized continuities with the era of the third-century BCE King Asoka, scholars
of Buddhism and historians of the region have lately begun to forge a more
detailed and temporally sensitive account of Buddhist mobility and religio-
cultural exchange and influence across South and Southeast Asian lands. This
article is intended as a contribution to our understanding of Buddhist mobil-
ity and trans-regional Buddhist institution-building, focusing on the period
between 1000 and 1500. It examines three episodes of trans-regional Buddhist
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

Buddhist Connections In The Indian Ocean 239
activity recounted in epigraphic and/or Buddhist chronicle sources: the

importation of Buddhist bhikkhus (fully ordained monks) from Ramañña to
Poḷonnāruva, in Laṅkā, during the late eleventh century, the pilgrimage jour-
ney of the Sukhothai Buddhist monk Si Satha to Laṅkā in the early fourteenth
century, and the embassy sent by Bago’s King Dhammazedi to Koṭṭē in Laṅkā in
the late fifteenth century to secure a new monastic higher-ordination lineage
for bhikkhus in Bago. These events are all instances of trans-regional southern2
Asian Buddhist connection, involving ties between Laṅkā and Southeast Asian
Buddhist locations. They might be said to support monk-prince Prisdang’s
invocation of a regional Buddhist history of continuous fraternity and support.
Examined more closely, however, they reveal significant differences, including
the scale of activity, the geographic locus of Buddhist authority in the transac-
tion, and the routes and technologies involved in Buddhist travel. This paper
argues that these three episodes of Buddhist mobility across oceanic space and
the borders of polity reflect changes in the trading and political ecosystem of the
Indian Ocean in the first half of the second millennium CE, as well as the gradual
crystallization of new forms of royal and monastic Buddhist institution-building
that relied on trans-regional communication and the transmission of Buddhist
texts, ideas, and persons. Attending to them closely helps us envision in a more
nuanced manner a dynamic history of Buddhist connection during this period.
1 Bhikkhus from Ramañña
According to Cūlavaṃsa chapters composed in the thirteenth century,3 King

Vijayabāhu I (r. 1058-1114), ruling from Poḷonnāruva after defeating Cōla forces
in the mid-1070s, restored Laṅkā’s Buddhist monastic community by bringing
fully ordained Buddhist monks from Ramañña to recommence a bhikkhu lin-
eage within the island.
2 In the pages that follow, I generally use the term “southern Asia” when referring to the geo-
graphic space encompassing Laṅkā, the southern Indian mainland, and locations typically
referred to as falling within ‘Southeast Asia.’ The mobile persons and communities investi-
gated here understood themselves to function within a broad trans-regional geography that
transcends the boundaries of current academic area studies. The frameworks of “South Asia”
and “Southeast Asia” are of recent vintage, established during the Cold War. Relying on those
frameworks and the anachronistic distinction between them makes it more difficult to rec-
ognize Laṅkā’s historical participation within networks and processes traversing the wider
region.
3 Cūlavaṃsa extends the earlier Mahāvaṃsa chronicle and was composed serially. The chap-
ters describing Vijayabāhu I are in the section composed during the thirteenth century.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

240 Blackburn
Ava
Bagan
Kengtung
A Bay
G
LIN of Chiang Mai
KA Bengal Bago
BURMA Sukhothai
DELTA
Phitsanulok
T Pathein Mottama
AS
D EL CO
Ayutthaya
Dawai
MA
Kovalam
N
Tennassarim
COROMA
CHAMPA
LAB
A
Nagore
RC
Gulf
Nāgapattanam of
OA
Mantai Siam
ST
Trincomalee
Nakhon Si Thammarat
Anurādhapura Poḷonnāruva
Koṭṭē
LANKA
St
ra
it
of
M Melaka
el
ak
a
0 500 mi
0 500 km
Map of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, 1000-1500. We gratefully acknowledge the
assistance of Michael Hradesky, Staff Cartographer, Ball State University.
As there not enough bhikkhus to fulfill the quorum for higher ordination
and other monastic rituals, focused on the stability of the sāsana [Buddhist
tradition], the Ruler of Men had messengers with presents sent to the
realm of Ramañña, into the presence of his friend King Anuruddha. From
there he had brought bhikkhus characterized by moral discipline and
other virtues, with a complete knowledge of the Three Piṭakas [Buddhist
“scriptures”], who were acknowledged as senior monks [theras]. Having
had them reverenced with costly gifts, the Ruler of Men had many acts of
first and final monastic ordination performed (Cūlavaṃsa 60: 4-7).4
4 I have revised the translation in Geiger (1992). This is also reported in Pūjavaliya, Rājāvaliya,
and Nikāya Saṅgrahaya. See also EZ 2.40.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

Seen from the perspective of Laṅkā’s later Kandyan and colonial periods
(seventeenth-twentieth centuries), characterized by a large volume of ordination
traffic between Kandy, Arakan, Bago, Ayutthaya, Bangkok, Amarapura, and
Mandalay (Malalgoda 1976; Blackburn 2001, 2010), Vijayabāhu I’s overtures to
Ramañña appear unremarkable.
Vijayabāhu I’s importation of bhikkhus from Ramañña is, however, the first
introduction of non-Lankan monks into the island for ordination purposes
reported in Mahāvaṃsa-Cūlavaṃsa chronicles after the establishment of the
Lankan monastic order at Anurādhapura, in the time of the third-century
BCE King Asoka. Although many other instances of monastic reorganization
or renewal of royal favor to monastics are reported in these chronicles before
the eleventh-century era of Vijayabāhu I, there is no reference to ordination
through or with foreign monks after the foundational acts of Asoka’s son and
emissary Mahinda. Given the extant evidence, we cannot know with certainty
whether foreign monks were used for this purpose earlier but not celebrated as
such in royal-monastic narratives, but there is no reference to such activities in
extant inscriptions or in the Nikāya Saṅgrahaya, a Sinhala-language monastic
history composed in the late fourteenth century. At the least, the thirteenth-
century Cūlavaṃsa treatment of Vijayabāhu I’s activities marks an important
shift in Lankan literary imaginings of the Buddhist world and trans-regional
possibilities for the creation and re-creation of Buddhist institutions.
It is possible that Vijayabāhu I’s move to import bhikkhus from Ramañña
marks the start of such ordination traffic on the island. The timing supports
such a hypothesis, inasmuch as the period of Cōla rule in Laṅkā (1017-69/70)
appears to have been the first occasion in which local rulers of the island’s
Anurādhapura-based polity were displaced by foreign powers for a sustained
period. Cōla rule on the island was long enough to affect at least two genera-
tions of Buddhist monastics. Perhaps Cōla attacks on Buddhist properties—
narrated but probably sensationalized in Cūlavaṃsa (55: 20-22)—and/or the
transfer of the capital eastward from Anurādhapura to Poḷonnāruva inter-
rupted the patronage and ritual systems of Anurādhapura on a scale large
enough to render Buddhist monastic institutional and ritual life dysfunctional.
This would have required the reintroduction of Buddhist monastic ordination
lineages and practices after the end of Cōla rule. Or, perhaps Buddhist monastic
institutional and ritual life did continue on the island during the Cōla era from
the new capital at Poḷonnāruva. In that case, the move by Vijayabāhu I’s court
to introduce a bhikkhu lineage from Ramañña would have provided a means
to replace a Cōla-supported monastic administration with one loyal to the
new court. Vijayabāhu I’s choice of monks from Ramañña followed his earlier
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

242 Blackburn
overture to the ruler of Ramañña (Cūlavaṃsa 58: 8-10).5 This is the first reference
in the Mahāvaṃsa-Cūlavaṃsa chronicles to such a diplomatic overture to a
location in what we now call Southeast Asia. The name Ramañña refers to
the southern maritime region of what is now Burma, as the same Cūlavaṃsa
author, when describing a twelfth-century Lankan raid on Kusumi (Pathein),
refers to Kusumi (Pathein) and Ukkama (Mottama) as in Ramañña (Cūlavaṃsa
76: 59-67; Epigraphia Zeylanica 3.34).6 It is possible that the Aniruddha men-
tioned in the context of imported Buddhist monks is King Anawrahta of Bagan
(r. 1044-77), given Bagan’s growing interest in southern maritime commercial
centers (Aung-Thwin 2005, 111-3; Hall 2011, 218). Bagan’s efforts to control the
delta may have been recognized at Poḷonnāruva. On the other hand, the name
may have been used to refer to a local ruler in Ramañña at that time or applied
retrospectively by the thirteenth-century author of Cūlavaṃsa on the basis
of reports of Burmese kingship circulating in the Buddhist world by the thir-
teenth century.7
The orientation of Vijayabāhu I towards Ramañña for projects Buddhist
and otherwise is more intelligible when seen in a wider Indian Ocean context.
Laṅkā’s place in the Indian Ocean trading sphere changed during the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. These changes had implications for Lankan military and
diplomatic activities and for how Buddhist persons, ideas, and practices moved
to and from the island. The eleventh century saw a sharp rise in international
trade through the Indian Ocean region, due to the coincidence of three strong,
trade-oriented polities: the Cōlas, the Song, and the Fāṭimids (e.g., Kulke 1999:
5 The Pāli passage is ambiguous, however, as to whether the “ships filled with goods including
diverse items such as camphor and sandalwood” were those carrying gifts from Vijayabāhu I
to Ramañña or received from the latter.
6 Cf. Aung-Thwin (2005: 49). Nikāya Saṅgrahaya, composed in the thirteenth century and
indebted to the Mahāvaṃsa-Cūlavaṃsa chronicle, also refers to Ramañña (in Sinhala,
Aramaṇa) when discussing Vijayabāhu I’s importation of monks (cf. Aung-Thwin (2005: 51).
Note “Kusima” in Cūlavaṃsa’s thirteenth-century Pāli usage (cf. Aung-Thwin 2005: 60).
7 It is unclear what Lankan Buddhists knew about Bagan and other Burmese and Mon sites by
this time and whether any textual accounts of Anawrahta circulated in Laṅkā. The Burmese
and Pāli chronicles from Burma that mention Anawrahta were compiled later. On the tex-
tualization of Anawrahta and the possibility that Buddhists in Bagan, northern Thailand,
and Laṅkā understood themselves as participants in a Buddhist oikoumene starting in the
eleventh century, see Goh (2007: esp. 18). There is, however, no extant textual or epigraphic
record of that understanding so early, as Goh recognizes (59). Goh’s study is a salutary
reminder that we have much to learn about pre-modern southern Asian Buddhists’ concep-
tion of the geographic and political space of Buddha sāsana (the world of Buddhism).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

20; Ray 1999: 37).8 Smaller ports supplied local and subregional commodities
to larger outlets. Relationships between smaller and larger ports, and the char-
acter and volume of commodity flows, were dynamic, being reconstituted in
response to changing political and military conditions and market demands.
Hall has aptly characterized this trading world as a “poly-centric networked
realm” (2010: 113).9
Competition for control of ports and goods in the region stretching from
India and Laṅkā to insular Southeast Asia resulted in rapidly shifting politico-
military arrangements (including expansion of Cōla power in the region)
and the extension of trade guilds and material forms associated with south-
ern India.10 Archaeological and inscriptional evidence from Laṅkā points to
the eleventh century as a transformative period for the island’s trans-regional
engagements, including a greater impact of the China trade. Bopearachchi
notes that Chinese coins appear in the island’s archaeological record begin-
ning in the eleventh century, including finds at the new political centers that
developed southwest of Anurādhapura and Poḷonnāruva (1996: 72-3). Evidence
from ceramics is also striking. In the late first millennium, Near Eastern and
Chinese ceramics made their way to Lankan ports (including Mantai). By the
eleventh century, however, “the former balance between Chinese and Near
Eastern ceramic goods . . . tipped sharply towards the Chinese” (Prickett-
Fernando 1990: 71).11 Cōla threats to the island from southern India and Laṅkan
courtly engagement with Ramañña are signs of the island’s changing place in
Indian Ocean circuits oriented to the expanding trans-oceanic trade between
Egypt and China. The location of the kingdom of Poḷonnāruva made it read-
ily accessible to such wider oceanic processes. It was connected by riverine
routes to the eastern port of Trincomalee, which came to dominate Lankan
trade during the eleventh century, outstripping the earlier centrality of Mantai
in the northwest (Kirabamune 1985: 101; Kirabamune 2013: 51-2; Bopearachchi
1996: 72).
8 Wade (2009) provides a valuable summary of relevant changes in Song China, includ-
ing new financial systems, internal trade regions, and demographic changes in Fujian.
See Christie (1998a: 253; 1998b: 369) for arguments that the Southeast Asian trade boom
began in the tenth century.
9 See further Abraham (1988), Karashima (2009b), Kulke (1999), Hall (2011), Jacq-
Hergoualc’h (2002), McKinnon (2011), and Wade (2009).
10 See also Sen (2003, 159, 220-4). According to Karashima (2009a), the twelfth century was
the high point of Tamil-language trade guild inscriptions extant in Sri Lanka. See also
Velupillai (1971: 46, 48; 1972: 13, 19-21).
11 See also Kanazawa (2004) and Karashima (2004).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

244 Blackburn
This context illuminates connections between the Poḷonnāruva court

of Vijayabāhu I and Ramañña, as well as the unprecedented reference to
trans-regional Buddhist monastic reordination in Cūlavaṃsa’s chapters on
Vijayabāhu I. The shift of the northern Lankan royal center from Anurādhapura
to Poḷonnāruva—thus providing better access to eastern trading sectors
through Trincomalee, contemporary with the expanding speed and volume
of Indian Ocean trade—greatly altered conditions in which Lankan Buddhist
institution-building and reorganization occurred. The introduction of
bhikkhus from Ramañña to Poḷonnāruva to establish a new lineage of fully
ordained Buddhist monks in Vijayabāhu I’s realm signals an early phase of
intensifying high-level Buddhist connections between the island and main-
land Southeast Asia.12
2 A Sukhothai Pilgrim to Laṅkā
The undated Sukhothai inscription no. 2 records the Buddhist devotional activ-
ities of a high-placed monk, Venerable Si Satha, born into the leading family of
the neighboring Rat kingdom, which had helped to secure Sukhothai’s inde-
pendence from Khmer control during the eleventh century. The inscription
celebrating Si Satha’s activities is remarkable; it is the only extant Sukhothai
inscription that rivals royal epigraphs in its detailed account of religious
patronage and the patron’s person. Vickery has suggested that the inscription
was intended to glorify Si Satha’s family line, in a context of regional familial
rivalry (1978, 212); the inscription readily supports this reading.13 It is also strik-
ing for reporting Si Satha’s activities in a narrative style indebted to biographies
of Buddha Gautama and to Gautama’s previous life as Bodhisattva Vessantara
(Griswold and Prasert 1992: 387-9). In inscription no. 2, Si Satha’s construction
and reconstruction of Buddhist devotional sites includes travels in the area of
Sukhothai and Si Sajjanalai, as well as Sīhala (Laṅkā).
Si Satha’s journey to Laṅkā probably occurred in the mid-fourteenth cen-
tury. Sukhothai inscription no. 2 portrays him as of the generation of King
Mahā Dhammarāja I, enthroned in 1347. According to Jinakālamālī, a monk
12 I do not discuss here the possible travels to Laṅkā from Bagan by the monk Uttarajīva
and novice Chapada during the late twelfth century. This account appears only in later
Burmese and Pāli sources and, as Win remarks (2002, esp. 88-9), there is no epigraphic
reference to a Chapada until 1240 (which may or may not refer to Uttarajīva’s co-traveler)
and the name Uttarajīva does not appear in Bagan inscriptions. Cf. Goh (2007, 42).
13 See also Griswold and Prasert (1992: 342-96) and Blackburn (2007).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

trained in Ramañña by a Lankan monk reached Sukhothai in the late 1330s or

early 1340s (Buddhadatta 1962: 84-5). If this is correct, it would probably have
encouraged the interest of Mahā Dhammarāja I (r. 1347-?) in Lankan Buddhist
sites, which is evident in Sukhothai inscription no. 3 (dated 1357) (Griswold
and Prasert 1992: 448-65).14 Reports of Lankan Buddhist sites and institu-
tions circulating at this time informed Si Satha’s journey to Laṅkā. Moreover,
if Si Satha was a rival to the line of King Mahā Dhammarāja I, as inscription
no. 2 suggests, a merit-making journey to Laṅkā was a natural response to the
Sukhothai politics of his time. It provided high status through a competitive
merit-making that trumped King Mahā Dhammarāja I’s indirect contact with
Lankan Buddhism, while providing an excellent reason for Si Satha’s departure
from Sukhothai.15 According to face 2 of insciption no. 11, he spent ten years
in Laṅkā.
Si Satha’s journey is a sign of changes underway in the relationship of Tai
and Lankan Buddhist institutions, as Tai Buddhists began to make direct con-
tact with Laṇkā and Lankan Buddhist institutions, rather than mediating their
contact with desirable Lankan Buddhism through southern maritime realms
such as Nakhon Si Thammarat and Mottama. Inscriptions no. 2 and 11 are our
first extant evidence in chronicles or inscriptions of direct monastic contact
between Tai regions and Laṅkā. These possibilities for direct contact continued
to develop, as we see from monastic-lineage texts composed in Chiang Mai and
Kengtung in the northern Thai and Pāli languages and celebrating the travel
of monks from Chiang Mai and Kengtung to Laṅkā in the 1420s (Buddhadatta
1962; Swearer and Premchit 1977; Sao Saimong 1971). This journey resulted in
the creation of the new monastic higher-ordination lineage associated with
Wat Pa Däng, in what is now northern Thailand and the Burmese Shan States.
The possibility of direct contact between monks from Tai territories and their
counterparts in Laṅkā created a new flexibility in the constitution and recon-
stitution of Buddhist monastic lineages and Buddhist institutions in Tai lands.
Obtaining new ordinations from the island—described as more pure and
authoritative than those existing previously on local soil—was an effective
ritual-cum-political tactic. As discussed below, during the fifteenth century Tai
monastic leaders and royal courts resorted to Lankan Buddhist monastic lin-
eages and Buddhist institutions to reorganize monastic administration in Tai
territories and to neutralize monks and temples associated with political rivals.
14 See also Coedès (1924: 84-90) and Blackburn 2007.

15 The inscriptions of Sukhothai King Mahā Dhammarāja I reveal his fascination with pro-
ducing copies of Lankan Buddhist relic sites in his realm. See Blackburn (2007).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

246 Blackburn
The emerging possibilities of Buddhist trans-regional connection indicated

by Si Satha’s voyage to Laṅkā should be understood in relation to changes in
the Indian Ocean trading environment during this time, as well as to shifts
in regional political formations. Trading practices and political relationships
shifted significantly during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the
area encompassing the Bay of Bengal, Laṅkā, and the Malay Peninsula. As to
Buddhist transactions between Tai territories and Laṅkā, the most important
development during this period was the gradual rise of Ayutthaya in the lower
Menam River Basin, with access to the Gulf of Siam. The early years of the four-
teenth century—the era of Si Satha and Mahā Dhammarāja I at Sukhothai—
saw the rise of the kingdom that Charnvit calls Ayodhya, a pre-Ayutthayan polity
able to control Menam River Basin traffic and access to the Gulf of Siam that
gained strength in the river basin region over several decades through trade and
effective marriage alliances with other nearby polities (Charnvit 1976: 83-6).16
Despite tensions with Sukhothai and Chiang Mai, Ayutthaya came to func-
tion as a key entrepôt for maritime Southeast Asia, linked to China, Champa,
a vast riverine network stretching north and northwest from the mouth of
the Chao Phraya River, and the Malay Peninsula. This coincided with growing
Chinese participation in trade within Southeast Asia (Heng 2009: 129), which
helped reshape port polities in the wider Malay region (213). This extension of
Ayutthaya’s power involved attacks on locations in insular and lower penin-
sular Southeast Asia during much of the fourteenth and part of the fifteenth
centuries (Baker 2003: 46-8). By the 1460s Ayutthaya “dominated the affairs of
the upper Malay Peninsula,” annexing the Tenassarim (1460s) and Dawai (1488)
regions (Hall 2011: 235; see also Heng 2009: 138). Ayutthaya’s rise altered the
routes available for Tai Buddhist traffic to Laṅkā, as the inscriptions celebrat-
ing Si Satha themselves suggest. According to face 2 of Sukhothai inscription
no. 11, Si Satha traveled to Laṅkā by way Kalinga (Orissa), Cōla lands, and the
kingdom of Malala (Griswold and Prasert 1992: 410-11); we have no information
about his first port of departure.17 He is explicitly reported to have returned via
Tennasarim (Tanāvsrī) and Ayutthaya (Ayodyā Sri Rāmadebanagara) (412-13).18
The possibility of generating wealth by dominating sectors of the Indian
Ocean trade catalyzed the reorganization of political relations also in what
16 On the maritime trading roots of Ayutthaya’s rise see also Vickery (2010: 293; 2004: 23) and
Baker (2003). On tributary missions to China from Sukhothai and Xian-guo (eventually,
Ayutthaya), see Fukami (2004: 63).
17 Griswold and Prasert locate the Malala kingdom on the Malabar coast.
18 See also Coèdes (1924: 149).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

is now Burma.19 Despite warfare with the southern polity of Bago through
the fourteenth and into the early fifteenth century, Bagan’s successor king-
dom, Innwa, was unable to maintain control of the delta port of Pathein at
the mouth of the Irrawaddy River on the Indian Ocean, providing access to
and from northern Burma (Fernquist 2008). Contemporary with the rise of
Ayutthaya in the fourteenth century was the emergence of Bago as a major pol-
ity in maritime Burma, which extended its reach in the south throughout the
century (Lieberman 1.126: 130-1; Fernquist 2006: esp. 50-1; Fernquist 2008: esp.
85-93, Aung-Thwin 2005: 310-11).20 The fourteenth century was thus a transfor-
mative century with respect to regional Buddhist mobility, a century charac-
terized by the final decline of Cōla power in the region and the consolidation
of two larger Buddhist-inclined polities—Ayutthaya and Bago—active in the
Burma delta, the Malay Peninsula, and the Gulf of Siam. Both were invested
in Buddhist institutions and participated substantially in Indian Ocean trade.
3 King Dhammazedi’s Embassy to Koṭṭē
According to manuscript texts of the Kalyāṇi Inscriptions21 (KI) in 1475, Bago’s

King Dhammazedi sent an embassy of twenty-two senior bhikkhus, with
younger monks and attendants, to the court of Koṭṭē, in Laṅkā, to make devo-
tional offerings at the island’s most celebrated pilgrimage locations and to
obtain a pure monastic higher ordination suitable for Dhammazedi’s realm.
In these KI texts, the decision to send the embassy is framed in terms of the
19 See Hall (2010: esp. 113) on the rise of “more port-centered regional states” and Hall (2006:
esp. 455).
20 Note, however, Hall’s distinction between Ayutthaya and Bago with respect to the degree
of upstream control achieved by the former (2011: 234).
21 The manuscripts used to prepare the existing print edition of the KI are later and of
uncertain date, bearing an unclear relationship to the extant epigraphs containing nar-
ratives of King Dhammazedi’s embassy. The epigraphs themselves are in poor condition
and have not yet been systematically compared to KI manuscripts; see the comments
by Temple (1893) regarding a comparison of the stones and manuscripts. No mention of
Dhammazedi’s embassy has yet been found in the literary and inscriptional records of
Laṅkā. Nonetheless, the details about Lankan geography, monastic leadership, and the
Lankan court at Koṭṭē are accurate and consistent with other, Lankan, literary sources
from the period. See Sannasgala (1964) and Ilangasinha (1992). The KI’s treatment of
Buddhist history, monastic discipline, and the technical details of Buddhist ritual life sug-
gest that it draws on a variety of Buddhist genres, including vinaya commentary. This
composite character of the KI deserves further attention.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

248 Blackburn
heterogeneity and impurity of existing monastic lineages in the kingdom

(Taw Sein Ko 1893: 33-4, 155-6), and the king’s desire to secure the future of the
Buddha sāsana (39, 207).
Having appropriately invited experienced and competent bhikkhus, hav-

ing had them properly bring the extremely pure Lankan upasampadā
and establish it in this Ramaññadesa . . . I would make the sāsana, having
become clean and pure, able to extend to the limit of its 5000-year extent
(40, 207).22
King Dhammazedi is explicitly compared to the Indic King Asoka and the
Lankan King Parakramabāhu I) (r. 1153-1186) (38-9, 159, 207). This compari-
son sets the scene for King Dhammazedi’s intentions, as both Asoka and
Parakramabāhu I are portrayed in Mahāvaṃsa-Cūlavaṃsa chronicle-traditions
as rulers strong enough to control all Buddhist monks in their polity through a
royally sponsored act of monastic “purification.”
The KI describes Dhammazedi’s realm specifically as including the
Haṃsavati maṇdala, the Kusima maṇdala, and the Muttima maṇdala (34, 155-6),
thus encompassing the entire Burma delta region, from Pathein to Mottama.
The monks sent from Bago received higher ordination at the hands of Lankan
bhikkhus in Koṭṭē (210). This replaced their earlier monastic ordination status,
creating a new company of bhikkhus ordained at the Lankan Kalyāṅī ritual
boundary and ritually prepared to ordain other Bago monks in their Kalyāṇī
lineage. Upon returning to Bago the following year, the new ordinands partici-
pated in Dhammazedi’s elaborate reorganization of monastic life in his realm.
According to the KI report, monastic ritual sites were replaced, authority for
monastic ordination put in the hands of the king and the new Kalyāṇī com-
pany of monks, and local conferral of monastic higher ordination outside the
Kalyāṇī lineage expressly forbidden (52, 241-2).
The embassy to Koṭṭē and subsequent reordination of Buddhist monks in
the sphere of King Dhammazedi’s control was closely related to the recent
political history of Bago. The incorporation of Burma delta areas in Bago’s
control was a gradual process. The broadest control by the court at Bago was
attained during Dhammazedi’s reign (Aung-Thwin 2005, 311). From at least
the late first millennium onwards in the southern Asian region—as shown
by examples from Anurādhapura (Gunawardena 1979), Bagan (Aung-Thwin
1985), Chiang Mai (Swearer and Premchit 1978), and Kandy (Blackburn
2001)—achieving and retaining political and economic control in Buddhist-
22 I have modified the translation given by Taw Sein Ko.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

oriented kingdoms characterized by substantial monastic institutional pres-

ence required the state to control monastic administration and property. King
Dhammazedi sought to use the new Kalyāṅī ordination lineage brought from
Koṭṭē to assert control over Buddhist monks in his realm. Bhikkhus ordained in
earlier ordination lines lost monastic seniority and control over Buddhist insti-
tutions and property; monastic assignments could be made according to new
hierarchies introduced through the imported ordination line. This is explicitly
remarked in the KI. The Kalyāṇī bhikkhus fresh from their Lankan ordination
refuse to ordain any monks who do not first resume lay status. Within the new
monastic hierarchy, this protected the seniority of the monks associated with
the new Kalyāṇī lineage (52, 241).23
The embassy from Bago to Koṭṭē is an important indication of the matura-
tion of Buddhist connections and institutional ties linking mainland Southeast
Asia and Laṅkā during the first half of the second millennium. The scale of
Dhammazedi’s activities—the size of the embassy, the ability of his court to
command transportation technologies, and the extent to which a new monas-
tic order was institutionalized within the kingdom to further court control of
the monastic community—was remarkable. While the paucity of evidence
demands cautious comparison, it appears that both the size and local institu-
tional impact of the late-fifteenth-century Bago embassy were unprecedented.
It also required a command of wealth and maritime transportation sufficient
to support the grand overture to Koṭṭē. The scale of Indian Ocean trade by
the late fifteenth century, and the place of Bago in it, helped make possible
Dhammazedi’s Lankan adventure.24
The account of Tomé Pires, composed largely in the 1510s in Melaka, por-
trays a trading world in which Bago and Ayutthaya control the Burma delta
and northern Malay Peninsula, while Melaka serves as the key port of insu-
lar Southeast Asia and the main entrepôt between western India and China
(Cortesão 1944: esp. 97-105).25 At that time, well after the wars between Innwa
and Bago, Bago controlled three ports within the Burma delta region: Pathein
23 See also Aung-Thwin (2005: 115-6).

24 Hall suggests (2010: 134-7), drawing partly on Holt (1991) and Ilangasinha (1991), that
Dhammazedi was drawn to Koṭṭē in part by the fame of Koṭṭē’s court and Buddhist insti-
tutions, developed during the reign of King Parakramabāhu VI (r. 1412-68). This is possi-
ble, but we have as yet no evidence of whether or how reports of Parakramabāhu VI or the
still more famous Buddhist royal patron and centralizing force, King Parakramabāhu I
(r. 1153-86) circulated in the Buddhist world beyond Laṅkā. Chronicles thus far available
from Tai, Mon, and Burmese areas do not highlight the activities of these rulers.
25 See also the account of Barbosa from the early sixteenth century (Stanley 1866, 188).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

250 Blackburn
(Cosmin), Yangon (Dagon), and Mottama (Martaban). Other evidence sug-

gests that the division of power between Bago and Ayutthaya portrayed by
Pires existed already in the last third of the fifteenth century. Inscriptions
from Tenassarim dated from 1462 to 1466 strongly suggest the influence of the
Ayutthayan court there by this time (Vickery 1973: esp. 51-7),26 while Bago had
gradually consolidated control of the delta region (Fernquist 2006: esp. 50-1;
2008: esp. 85-93).
It is possible to distinguish more sharply between two scales of trade in the
Indian Ocean region after the rise of Melaka,27 and this helps us identify more
clearly the arena for Buddhist movements involving Bago and Laṅkā. Long-haul
trade between Cambay and Melaka circumnavigated Laṅkā before entering
the Straits of Melaka. At the same time, there were various shorter trade routes
that involved Lankan kingdoms and Buddhist-oriented polities in Southeast
Asia possessing maritime access. These shorter routes functioned partly to
provide goods from various Indian Ocean subregions to Cambay and Melaka,
via strong intermediary ports such as those on the Malabar and Coromandel
coasts, at Bengal, in Bago, and further south, on the Malay Peninsula. The
shorter trade routes could also serve more local needs, transporting goods not
destined for the larger east-west trade. It is possible that the voyages of Zheng
He and his activities along the Lankan coast also encouraged increased trade
after 1411 by securing sea lanes (Hall 2010: 113-4 n.12).28
Koṭṭē and Bago appear to have been bound together in the late fourteenth
and early fifteenth centuries partly through a rice-based trading relationship
routed via the Coromandel Coast. The reliance of parts of Laṅkā on imported
rice dated at least to the twelfth century (Nainar 1942: 17-8, 41; Strathern 2009,
52, citing de Silva 1995). Judging from Pires’s slightly later account, areca nuts
were among the prized Lankan commodities, traded on the Coromandel
Coast in return for rice and other commodities (Cortesão 1944: 84-6). Rice was
Bago’s major export. Bago’s port at Pathein traded with Bengal and ports on
India’s eastern coast, while her port at Mottama sent rice to Melaka (97-8).
Pires’s depiction of the intersection of Bago’s and Laṅkā’s interests at
Coromandel Coast ports is supported by the detailed account of maritime trans-
portation found in the KI, according to which travel to Bago was possible via the
seaport of Nāgapattanam and other outlets on the southeastern Indian coast.29
26 Cf. Coedès (1965).

27 I am grateful to Engseng Ho for his comment on this point.
28 See also Wade (2012). One man’s pirate is, of course, another’s entrepreneur.
29 Two ships left Laṅkā for Bago. The ship sent by the Lankan king with royal gifts for
his counterpart at Bago was shipwrecked in what KI calls the Silla (Sīhaḷa?) Strait,
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

The KI mentions specifically two port administrators (paṭṭanādhikarinō [sic])

at Nāvutapattanam—Mālimparakāya and Pacchaḷiya—who were already con-
nected to Dhammazedi’s court at Bago via two ships sent annually for trade.30
These port administrators housed and cared for the shipwrecked party return-
ing from Laṅkā and arranged their onward journey to Bago.
Conclusion
Hall suggests that the period from 1300 to 1500 was characterized by “expansive
human networking” in the Bay of Bengal maritime region and that “sojourn-
ing merchants” and “religious clerics” played a central role in the integrity of
Indian Ocean port-polity networks during this period (2010: 138). According
to Hall, various types of “community interests,” beyond the “exclusively com-
mercial,” characterized this maritime space (139), one marked by Buddhist as
well Chinese, Persian and Yemeni-linked networks, and South Indian Muslim
and Hindu sojourners.
Hall’s discussion of merchant sojourners and religious clerics is suggestive
for the three episodes of Buddhist movement within southern Asia discussed
above, helping us to imagine better the interlocking interests, agencies, and
flow of ideas that were involved in the movement of Buddhist monks—as well
as their ritual forms and institutionally transformative lineages—in the Indian
between Laṅkā and the southeast coast of the Indian peninsula. This, in turn, triggered
a relay between ports on the eastern Indian coast and Bago, stopping at Nāgapattanaṃ
(Nagapattinaṃ), site of a long-famous coastal Buddhist temple-monastery, and
Nāvutapattanaṃ. From there, one party continued to Bago from Pathein, while another
went to Kōmālapattanaṃ and thence to Bago. According to Subbarayalu (personal
communication via O. Bopearachchi, June 2013), Nāvutapattanaṃ may be Nagur
(Nagore), a little north of Nagapattinam, mentioned as Tiru-Naavuur (see “Leyden
Plates.” Epigraphia Indica 22 (1933-34). Kōmālapattanam is probably Kovalam, north of
Mamallapuram. Kovalam is mentioned as a paṭṭanam (emporium), along with some
other paṭṭanams in a Vijayanagara inscription at Pennesvaramadam, Krishnagiri Taluk,
Krishnagri District, dated 21 July 1367 (see Krishnagiri District Inscriptions, Chennai 2007,
no. 77b/1973). I am grateful to Professors K. Subbarayalu, K. Rajan, S. Rajagopal, and
O. Bopearachchi for their assistance in this matter, and to Prof. B. Wentworth for discus-
sions of these references.
30 “[T]wo officers of the port had sent people for trade annually through two ships; sending
a gift to King Rāmādhipati [Dhammazedi] and experiencing his royal favor, they were
devoted to King Rāmādhipati. Thus, having given the senior monks robes and meals and
a place to reside, they served them” (45, 211-12). I have modified Taw Sein Ko’s translation.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

252 Blackburn
Ocean subregion encompassing the Bay of Bengal, the Burma delta, the Malay
Peninsula, and the Gulf of Siam. Although we do not yet possess adequate evi-
dence to link firmly the episodes of Buddhist mobility discussed above with
specific sojourning communities and mercantile interests, the instances of
Buddhist monastic movement addressed in this article do suggest a growth in
royally-supported Buddhist monastic movement in the region from the elev-
enth century, with larger and more elaborate Buddhist embassies to Laṅkā
developing during the fifteenth century. It is possible that the increasing scale
and ambition evident in the Buddhist embassies of the fifteenth century,
including that from Bago to Koṭṭē and the Chiang Mai/Kengtung monastic
cohort that traveled a half-century earlier, was due partly to the expansion and
consolidation of trading communities in the maritime space and its connected
riverine and overland routes, traveled by Buddhist monks. These communities
would have been in a position to support—financially, technologically, and
sometimes devotionally—large-scale, high-status Buddhist missions in the
region, supplementing whatever resources were provided by royal and monas-
tic patrons.
It is worth considering (in addition to the role of merchant communities)
as one of the conditions favoring the emergence of more substantial missions
in the fifteenth century, the ways in which the Buddhist-oriented royal courts
of Tai, Mon, and Burmese areas were linked through relations of competitive
imitation within the arena of Buddhist kingship. As noted earlier, Bago and
Ayutthaya had, by the fifteenth century, developed as flourishing maritime
kingdoms supportive of Buddhist ritual sites and monastic establishments.
These polities were rivals for trade, labor, and land. They were, along with
Chiang Mai, also rivals for recognition as the leading Buddhist righteous mon-
arch in the region.31 This is evident from the Buddhist titles adopted by the
kings of Bago, Ayutthaya, and Chiang Mai and the ways in which Buddhist
texts associated with Bago and Chiang Mai narrated the activities of their
rulers as continuous with the example of Buddhist kingship set by the Indic
King Asoka.32
31 On links and rivalries among these polities see, for instance, Aung-Thwin (2005: 125-30),
Wyatt (2004), Wyatt and Aroonrut (1995), Hall (2011), Charnvit (1976), Griswold (1965), and
Dhida (1982). Economic and other links between Chiang Mai and Bago offer promising
avenues for further investigation. I am grateful to professors U Hto La and Sarasawadee
Ongsakul for conversations about the overland-riverine economic ties between Bago and
Chiang Mai.
32 See, for instance, the translations in Cushman (2000), Jayawickrema (1968), and Taw Sein
Ko (1893). See also Aung-Thwin (2005: 115).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

There are striking temporal conjunctions between royally sponsored con-

struction of Buddhist buildings in these kingdoms, royally sponsored Buddhist
monastic reordination rituals, and Buddhist-related diplomatic contact
among these kingdoms. According to the Jinakālamālī and Tamnān Wat Jet Yòt,
Chiang Mai’s King Tilokarāja (r. 1441/2-87) in 1455 began construction of Wat
Bodhārama, a monastery and devotional site constructed over twenty years,
which—in name, ground plan, and architectural style—evoked Buddha’s
enlightenment site at Bodh Gaya, on the Indian mainland (Griswold 1965:
182-6; Jayawickrama 1968: 139-40; Buddhadatta 1962: 98; Hutchinson 1951: 43;
Blackburn 2007). During the same period, closely following Tilokarāja’s inau-
gural work at Wat Bodhārama in Chiang Mai,33 the Bago King Dhammazedi
sent a mission to Bodh Gaya via Laṅkā, with the assistance of a Sīhala (Lankan)
merchant residing at Bago, to obtain exact descriptions of the Buddhist sites
and monuments at Bodh Gaya, resulting in the construction of the Mahā Bodhi
Temple at Bago (Griswold 1965: 186-7).34
A growing mutual interest in foundational Indian Buddhist sites at Chiang
Mai and Bago during this period was matched by a striking conjunction
of large-scale royally sponsored Buddhist monastic reordinations held in
Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, and Bago. Monks from Chiang Mai, Kengtung, and
“Kambojja” (perhaps the Lopburi area) traveled to Koṭṭē in Laṅkā, with the sup-
port of the monastic leaders of Chiang Mai and Ayutthaya. Upon their return
to Chiang Mai in 1424, the Chiang Mai monks were drawn into a royally spon-
sored reordination of Chiang Mai bhikkhus during the reign of King Sām Fang
Kän (r. 1401-41) and into the reorganization of local monastic administration
and hierarchy (Buddhadatta 1962: 93-5; see also Blackburn 2007). Throughout
the northern region, the newly imported Lankan higher ordinations enabled
the reorganization of local monastic ritual practice and hierarchy (Swearer
and Premchit 1977; Saimong 1981). Forty years later, towards the middle of
the reign of the Ayutthaya King Trailokarāja (r. 1448?-88), during a period of
increasing military threat from Chiang Mai and the relocation of Ayutthaya’s
capital to the north, near Sukhothai, Trailokarāja engaged in grand Buddhist
merit-making schemes to assure the protection of his realm (Charnvit 1976:
137-8; Cushman 2000: 17). According to Prachum Chotmaihet Samai Ayudhya
(Collected Ayudhyan Records) cited by Charnvit, King Trailokarāja in 1465
33 This occurred sometime between 1458 and 1472, according to the Burmese and Mon
sources Dhammacetimaṅ-atthuppatti and Nidāna Ārambhakathā (cited in Griswold 1965:
186-7).
34 For descriptions and images of the Bodh Gaya replicas at Chiang Mai and Bago, as well as
other locations, see Griswold (1965).
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

254 Blackburn
organized a monastic ordination35 of more than two thousand men, including

his own temporary ordination (Charnvit 1976: 138-9; see also Cushman 2000: 17).36
The ordination ceremony was led by a Lankan monk, said to have been brought
from the island to the northern Ayutthayan capital of Phitsanulok. As Charnvit
notes, this bypassed the leaderships of the Sukhothai monastic community,
previously dominant in the north of the Ayutthayan realm. King Trailokarāja
was thus able to establish, near the military border with Chiang Mai, a new
monastic community at Phitsanulok, loyal to his administration. In addition
to its strategic value in the Ayutthayan realm, the ordination ceremony was
obviously intended as a larger diplomatic gesture to neighboring polities. The
rulers of Chiang Mai, Bago, and Luang Prabang reportedly sent gifts on the
occasion of King Trailokarāja’s temporary monastic ordination (Charnvit 1976:
138-9). Given Trailokarāja’s proximity to Chiang Mai and Sukhothai monastic
institutions at this time, his choice to ordain a new company of Buddhist monks
in the northern area of his kingdom with the support of a Lankan Buddhist
ritual officiant was probably informed by the earlier history of royal Buddhist
overtures to Laṅkā at Sukhothai and Chiang Mai, including the 1423-4 Chiang
Mai mission. King Trailokarāja’s monastic undertaking occurred just a decade
before King Dhammazedi’s massive reordination of bhikkhus under his control
at Bago in the new Kalyāṇī lineage from Koṭṭē (see previous section).
The episodes of Buddhist mobility discussed in this article, running from
the eleventh-century importation of Buddhist monks by the Poḷonnāruva King
Vijayabāhu I, through the fourteenth-century pilgrimage of the Sukhothai
monk Si Satha, to King Dhammazedi’s fifteenth-century embassy to Koṭṭē, sug-
gest that the first half of the second millennium was a transformative period
that saw the creation of new Buddhist institutional linkages in the Indian
Ocean Buddhist world, as new regimes of trade drew Laṅkā into faster and
closer connection with Burmese, Mon, peninsular Malay, and Tai locations.
Although we do not yet have adequate evidence from Buddhist sources to
support the view that “fifteenth-century Sri Lanka under Parakramabāhu VI
assumed significance as the acknowledged center of a conceptual Bay of
Bengal Theravada Buddhist cultural cosmopolis network” (Hall 2010: 139),37 it
35 This probably included the reordination of existing bhikkhus, but this is not clear in
Charnvit (1976); I do not have direct access to the Thai source.
36 Temporary royal ordination, especially in times of military or political duress, was not
uncommon in Tai areas, as shown in the inscriptions of Sukhothai and in Chiang Mai’s
Jinakālamālī. See also Blackburn (2007).
37 On the anachronism of “Theravāda Buddhist” applied outside narrow technical monastic
contexts before the nineteenth century, see Skilling 2012.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

is clear that the island played a significant role in the religious and maritime
trade networks of the period, including those of Hindus and Muslims as well
as Buddhists.
The changing patterns of trade referred to in this article help clarify how
such religious networks were constituted during the early second millennium.
Tilman Frasch argues that a long-standing Buddhist network in the Bay of
Bengal, active since the third century CE, fell into decline towards the end of the
thirteenth century, due in part to the disintegration of the Burman kingdom of
Bagan (1998, 92).38 Further investigation of inscriptions and monastic-lineage
texts from Burman territories is necessary in order to develop a clearer picture
of trans-regional Buddhist mobility involving Buddhist institutions at Bagan
and Innwa from the late thirteenth century on.39 The material presented in this
essay, however, indicates that, even if the northern inland Burman area became
less active in the trans-regional Buddhist mobility of the Bay of Bengal and the
Indian Ocean regions, Buddhist networks across this seascape remained viable
and were, in fact, strengthened by the conjunction of new trading patterns and
new political centers that grew up along the southern coastal areas of what
is now Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. Further research is needed to clarify
whether Lankan Kandyan monastic overtures to Bago, Arakan, and Ayutthaya
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be understood as another
new chapter in trans-regional Buddhist mobility (Frasch 1998: 90), or whether
they may be understood as an extension, during the Dutch-English colonial
period, of the new patterns of southern Asian Buddhist traffic that developed
between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries.
With respect to the new patterns of trans-regional Buddhist mobility that
developed during the first half of the second millennium, Buddhist sources clar-
ify the logic of overtures to Laṅkā at this time. According to the political theory
implied by Buddhist-royal histories like the chronicle texts referred to above,
the consolidation of royal power by a Buddhist-oriented monarch (whether or
not freshly consecrated) required several interventions in Buddhist arenas:
public merit-making activities that signaled the right to rule and protected the
ruler and the realm; the reorganization of monastic administration in order to
ensure that high-ranking monks (sometimes also functioning in court admin-
istration and/or as landholders) were loyal to the throne; and “purification” of
the monastic community as a sign of the ruler’s devoted wish to extend the
vitality and longevity of the Buddhist tradition. “Purification” of the monas-
tic community and the reorganization of monastic administration typically
38 See also Goh (2007: 53).

39 I am grateful to Alexey Kirichenko for preliminary conversations on this matter.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

256 Blackburn
occurred together. One effective means of accomplishing both was to intro-

duce a new monastic higher-ordination lineage from another Buddhist loca-
tion held in esteem. Such goals evidently shaped King Dhammazedi’s approach
to Koṭṭē in the 1470s and King Sām Fang Kän’s response to the monks returning
from Koṭṭē in the 1420s. They may have influenced King Vijayabāhu I’s over-
tures to Ramañña in the late eleventh century.
It is striking that, in a period of approximately fifty years during the fifteenth
century, Bago, Chiang Mai, and Ayutthaya all took steps to consolidate their
authority according to the Buddhist political theory outlined above. In doing
so, all resorted to Laṅkā as the source for a new monastic higher-ordination
lineage capable of “purifying” and reorganizing monastic administration in the
realm. Why did they focus on Laṅkā in this way? Laṅkā’s authoritative posi-
tion was due partly to the island’s long-standing and positive image within
Buddhist contexts. Laṅkā had a long and impeccable pedigree as a center
of Buddhist life. It was celebrated by early Buddhist chronicles (in Sanskrit
as well as Pāli) as a site honored by Gautama Buddha himself, said to have
predicted Lankan guardianship of Buddhist teachings. Laṅkā’s lineages of
Buddhist monks and nuns descended from the famous Indian Mauryas. The
island had played host to the most famous commentator on authoritative
Pāli Buddhist texts, Buddhaghosa, whose fifth-century Lankan compositions
traveled gradually outwards through Southern Asia. At least in Pāli-language
works, Laṅkā was the location most frequently and thoroughly described after
northeastern India/Nepal, the site of Gautama Buddha’s first activities, and
reports of Laṅkā were carried around Asia by pilgrims such as the seventh-
century traveler Yijing.
Another factor was the regional decline of Buddhist intellectual and ritual
centers concomitant with the rise of Islam in northeastern India and insular
Southeast Asia from the thirteenth century onward. Although it is now clear
that earlier arguments for the wholesale displacement of Buddhism by Islam
in northeastern India during this period were overstated, massive monastic
centers such as that at Nālanda no longer received large-scale royal patronage.
On the islands of Java and Sumatra, earlier Buddhist centers gave way to sul-
tanates oriented towards Islam. Therefore, when royal courts of Tai, Mon, and
Burmese lands sought to import new monastic higher ordination lineages that
could be used to “purify” and reorganize Buddhist monasticism in their king-
doms, they faced a shrinking Buddhist world.40 If they wished to use monastic
higher ordination lineages that shared their existing use of Pāli as a scriptural/
liturgical language and that could argue for historical connections to the third-
40 I am grateful to Geoff Wade and Alexey Kirichenko for conversations on this point.
jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

century BCE monastic community of the Indian King Asoka, they could look
only among their mainland neighbors or to Laṅkā.
Laṅkā was a strategic choice. In addition to the positive historical associa-
tions that had long existed around Lankan Buddhist monks and institutions,
the island was generally distant from political and military conflicts on the
Southeast Asian mainland. There is no evidence of aggression from Laṅkā
against Tai, Mon, or Burmese polities, apart from Poḷonnāruva’s raid on the
Burma delta.41 Long described as a center of Buddhist education and monas-
tic practice, with deep historical links to early Indian Buddhist lineages and
institutions, Laṅkā was ideologically close. Lankan kingdoms were, however,
usually politically distant from mainland competition and aggression, without
the military might to intervene in the region of the Burma delta and the Gulf
of Siam.42 Thus, Laṅkā’s desirability in Buddhist ideological terms was further
enhanced by the island’s relative weakness in politico-military terms. It stood
outside the fraught history of mainland diplomatic and military adventuring
that characterized kingdoms in what is now Burma and Thailand, including
the dominant Buddhist-oriented polities of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies: Chiang Mai, Ayutthaya, and Bago.
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Buddhist Connections in The Indian Ocean

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Journal of the Economic and

Social History of the Orient 58 (�0�5) �37-�66

Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean:

Since the nineteenth century, Buddhists residing in the present-day nations of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�5685�09-��34�374

three historical episodes in the eleventh- to fifteenth-century history of Sri Lankan-

Buddhism – Buddhist chronicles – Buddhist networks – Indian Ocean – Sri Lanka

Writing from self-imposed exile in Laṅkā in 1897, the Siamese monk-prince

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

activity recounted in epigraphic and/or Buddhist chronicle sources: the

1 Bhikkhus from Ramañña

According to Cūlavaṃsa chapters composed in the thirteenth century,3 King

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

This context illuminates connections between the Poḷonnāruva court

2 A Sukhothai Pilgrim to Laṅkā

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trained in Ramañña by a Lankan monk reached Sukhothai in the late 1330s or

14 See also Coedès (1924: 84-90) and Blackburn 2007.

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

The emerging possibilities of Buddhist trans-regional connection indicated

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3 King Dhammazedi’s Embassy to Koṭṭē

According to manuscript texts of the Kalyāṇi Inscriptions21 (KI) in 1475, Bago’s

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

heterogeneity and impurity of existing monastic lineages in the kingdom

Having appropriately invited experienced and competent bhikkhus, hav-

22 I have modified the translation given by Taw Sein Ko.

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oriented kingdoms characterized by substantial monastic institutional pres-

23 See also Aung-Thwin (2005: 115-6).

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

(Cosmin), Yangon (Dagon), and Mottama (Martaban). Other evidence sug-

26 Cf. Coedès (1965).

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

The KI mentions specifically two port administrators (paṭṭanādhikarinō [sic])

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

There are striking temporal conjunctions between royally sponsored con-

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

organized a monastic ordination35 of more than two thousand men, including

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

38 See also Goh (2007: 53).

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

occurred together. One effective means of accomplishing both was to intro-

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

Lieberman, Victor B. 2003-9. Strange Parallels. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

———. 1999. “Persianization” and “Mercantilism”: Two Themes in Bay of Bengal

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jesho 58 (2015) 237-266

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