lowed during the politically volatile thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries only increased the presence and
influence of Hindu cults in the Sinhala Buddhist reli-
gious culture of the era. During the fourteenth cen-
tury, when a retreating Buddhist kingship established
its capital in the Kandyan highlands at Gampola,
Hindu deities such as Visnu, Skanda, the goddess Pat-
tin, and Ganesha, as well as a host of other local deities
associated with specific regions and natural phenom-
ena, were incorporated into an evolving pantheon of
Sinhala deities. They were recast as gods whose war-
rants for acting in the world on behalf of Buddhist
devotees were subject to the sanctioning of the Bud-
dha’s dharma. The highest of these deities, worshipped
within the same halls where the Buddha was wor-
shipped or in adjacent shrines (devalayas) , came to be
styled as BODHISATTVAS, or “buddhas in-the-making,”
and a vast literature of ballads, poems, and sagas in
Sinhala, some inspired by the Sanskrit puranas (mythic
stories), was created to edify devotees over the ensu-
ing several centuries.
By the fifteenth century, the island had been again re-
unified politically by Parakramabahu VI, whose capi-
tal at Kotte on the southwest coast became the hub of
an eclectic renaissance of religious culture epitomized by
the gamavasi (village-oriented monk) S ́r Rahula,
whose linguistic dexterity (he was known as “master of
six languages”) and concomitant affinities for popular
religious and magical practices, refracted the syncretic
character of religion at the time. S ́rRahula is perhaps
best remembered for writing two classical Sinhala san-
des ́ayapoems styled after the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa’s
Meghadhuta(Cloud Messenger) that, while glorifying the
Buddha as the “god beyond the gods,” appealed directly
to the gods for divine assistance in sustaining the well-
being of the Buddhist KINGSHIPand its administration.
Vdagama Maitreya, a WILDERNESS MONK(arañavasi)
and one of Parakramabahu’s childhood mentors, wrote
the Budugunalamkaraya(In Praise of the Buddha’s
Qualities) as a scathing critique of the increasing Hin-
duization of Buddhist culture. These two great monks,
both of whom were deeply involved in competing tra-
jectories of court and monastic cultures, represent an
ancient and continuing tension regarding the nature of
the monastic vocation: as a matter of caring for the “wel-
fare of the many” (the village monk) or engaging in the
“rhinoceros-like solitary life” of a forest meditator.
Colonial and postcolonial eras
By the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had begun to
interfere with the court at Kotte and eventually con-
verted King Dharmapala to Christianity, exacerbating
an increasingly fractious political context that led in
the 1590s to the establishment of a new line of Sinhala
Buddhist kings in highland Kandy, a new capital city
replete with a supportive cast: a bhikkhusan ̇ghawhose
lineage was imported from Burma, a new DaladaMa-
ligava (Palace of the Tooth-Relic), and devalayas for
the gods who had emerged as the four protective
guardian deities of the island. The Kandyans colluded
with the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century to oust
the Portuguese. Despite one war in the 1760s during
the reign of Krti S ́rRajasimha, the Kandyans and the
Dutch managed to coexist for a century and a half pro-
ducing, in effect, distinctive highland and lowland Sin-
hala cultures. The former styled itself as more purely
Sinhala Buddhist, despite the fact that by this time the
Kandyan kings were ethnically Tamil, owing to the
continuing practice of securing queens from Madurai.
But it is remarkable how “Buddhacized” this last line
of Lankan kings became. Krti S ́rand his brother
Rajadi who succeeded him, were responsible for the
last great renaissance of Theravada: first, by reconsti-
tuting what had become a decadent san ̇gha by intro-
ducing a fresh lineage from Thailand that became
known as the dominant Siyam Nikaya; second, by ap-
pointing a monastic head (san ̇gharaja) in the person of
the learned monk Saranamkara, who reemphasized the
importance of monastic literary education and moral
virtue; third, by providing the means to hold a calen-
dar of Buddhist public rites, including the still annu-
ally held äsala perahäraprocession of the Daladaand
the insignia of the guardian deities in Kandy; and
fourth, by refurbishing virtually every Buddhist mon-
astery in the kingdom, a commitment that resulted in
the artistic birth of the Kandyan school of Buddhist
monastery painting.After the British established their colonial hege-
mony in the early nineteenth century, Buddhist cul-
ture atrophied for several decades. Its revival toward
the end of the century was catalyzed in part by the es-
tablishment of two new low-country monastic nikayas,
the Amarapura and the Ramañña. Both, in contrast to
the Siyam Nikaya, established new lineages from
Burma, claimed to be more doctrinally orthodox, em-
phasized the practice of meditation, and recruited
novices without regard to caste. A series of public re-
ligious debates between Buddhist monks and Anglican
clergy in the low country also fueled the revitalization.
Moreover, the revival gained momentum with the
arrival of Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), an Ameri-
can theosophist who organized and established manySRILANKA