Oral transmission
For several centuries after the Buddha, his teachings and the monastic rules were transmitted orally. Groups of monks specialised in memorising particular collections and recited them together at regular intervals, and the councils of the early tradition were in essence great communal recitations. Buddhism reached Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, by tradition through Mahinda, son of Ashoka, and the island's monks preserved the canon in Pali together with commentaries in Sinhala.
The crisis
The chronicles say that during the reign of Vattagamani Abhaya the island suffered invasion from south India and a terrible famine, the Brahmanatissa famine, during which many monks died or fled and the survival of the teaching was in doubt. Vattagamani himself was driven from Anuradhapura and spent years in hiding before regaining the throne. Afterwards, the Mahavamsa records, the monks, seeing the decline of beings, came together and wrote down the texts of the three baskets and their commentaries in books so that the true doctrine might endure.
Aluvihare
Tradition places the writing at Aluvihare, a monastery among boulders near Matale in central Sri Lanka, though the chronicle itself says only that it took place in a region of the island. The texts were written on palm leaves. Aluvihare remains a monastery, with caves and shrines among the rocks; its library was destroyed in 1848, when British troops attacked it during the Matale rebellion, and the monks have since been engaged in recopying the canon on palm leaves.
Dating and significance
The date of Vattagamani's reign depends on the chronology adopted for the chronicles: many works give 89–77 BCE, while the chronology of Wilhelm Geiger puts it at 29–17 BCE. Either way, the event belongs to the first century BCE. It made the Pali canon, as far as is known, the first Buddhist canon to be committed to writing.
Historians caution that what was written down then cannot be identified exactly with the canon as it exists today, which was edited and commented on by later scholars, above all Buddhaghosa in the fifth century CE. The same reign saw the foundation of the Abhayagiri monastery, whose rivalry with the older Mahavihara shaped the history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka for a thousand years.
Further reading
- Gombrich, Richard F. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History. Routledge, 2006
- Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 2013
- Bodhi, Bhikkhu. In the Buddha's Words. Wisdom Publications, 2005
See also
- Pali Canon — The Pali Canon is the scriptural collection of Theravada Buddhism, the only early Buddhist canon surviving complete in an Indian language.
- Theravada — Theravada is the Buddhist school dominant in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia, the only surviving school of the early Indian tradition, following the Pali Canon.
- Anuradhapura — Anuradhapura was the capital and namesake of Sri Lanka's first major kingdom, a Buddhist state that endured from the 4th century BCE until its conquest by the Chola Empire in 1017 CE.
- Buddhist councils — The Buddhist councils were assemblies of the monastic community held to recite and settle the teaching and discipline, and the occasions on which the order divided.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.