144 CHAPTER SEVENCambodian and Thai politics. Modeling himself on the bodhisattva of
compassion, he stated in his inscriptions that he was as sensitive to the suf-
ferings of his people as if they were his own. His greatest architectural
project, the Bayon, is a maze of towers covered on all sides with enor-
mous masks of the bodhisattva-or perhaps the king himself-watching
out over the populace. The bas-reliefs on the walls of the Bayon are
unique in Angkorian art in that they depict the daily life of the common
people and were perhaps intended as a sign of the king's compassion for
his subjects. His building program, however, seems to have overextended
the empire's resources, for it was left unfinished, and no new temples were
added to Angkor after his reign.
B. Sri Lanka. Prior to Asoka's missions to Sri Lanka in the third century
B.C.E., Indo-Aryan clansmen had come to the island from the Gangetic
Plain, bringing with them Brahmanical customs along with a north In-
dian language and political institutions. The Sinhala clan founded a royal
dynasty and maintained ties with northern India. According to tradition,
King Asoka sent a group of missionaries, headed by his own son, Ma-
hinda, from the Theravadin center at Sanchi to convert the Sinhala king,
Tissa, in approximately 247 B.C.E. The king accepted the faith quickly
(Strong EB, sec. 6.1.1), built a large monastery-the Mahavihara-for the
monks in his capital at Anuradhapura, and provided patronage for them to
spread their teachings throughout the island. Within a few years, Ma-
lunda's sister, Sanghamitta, brought a shoot of the Bodhi Tree from Bodh-
gaya and founded the Sri Lankan branch of the Bhikkhul).i: Sangha.
Thus, from the beginning, the Sangha maintained close relations with
the royal court, and :)3uddhism became the state religion. Even in the
court, however, Buddhist practices were combined with Brahmanical rit-
uals. When the general populace converted to Buddhism, they simply
mixed it with their previous Brahmanical and animist beliefs and practices.
Nevertheless, a strain of purism developed, as events during the early
centuries of Buddhism on the island gave the monks of the Mahavihara
a strong sense that their tradition was both precious and very fragile. Al-
though they maintained contact with the Buddhist homeland via Indian
ports on the western coast and continually added to a body of commen-
tarialliterature brought over from India, they came to see themselves as
the sole custodians of a static tradition threatened not only by non-Bud-
dhist elements on the island but also by foreign invaders and heterodox
Buddhist traditions developing in India. In the first century B.C.E., an in-
vasion by south Indian Cola forces, followed by a famine, was so devastat-
ing that the canon, which was being preserved solely through oral
transmission, was nearly lost. Soon after Sri Lankan forces regained con-
trol of the island, the Mahavihara underwent a split over a point of disci-
pline, with the less conservative group breaking off and establishing a new
monastery, the Abhayagiri Vihara, with the support of the new king. The
Mahaviharans, feeling threatened on several fronts, sent their best scholars
to a cave in central Sri Lanka to commit the canon and its commentaries
to writing. Not long afterward, they regained royal patronage.