A New Look at theSāsanavaṃsa

Abstract

TheSāsanavaṃsa‘History of the religion’, a Pali work written in Burma in 1861, has long been recognized as an important source for the study of Theravāda Buddhism. It is essentially a chronicle of famous monks which seeks to trace the lineal succession of orthodoxtherasfrom the Buddha's immediate disciple Upāli to the heads of thesaṅghaat Mandalay in the author's own lifetime. As early as 1882 Louis de Zoysa in hisCatalogue of Pali, Sinhalese, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the temple libraries of Ceylonreferred to theSāsanavaṃsaas a work containing ‘very interesting information on the religious history of … Burma and Ceylon’. In 1892 the Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovitch Minaev drew upon theSāsanavaṃsafor hisRecherches sur le bouddhisme, in which he quoted fairly extensively from the Pali text. H. Kern in 1896 classed it along with the better-knownDīpavaṃsaandMahāvaṃsaas ‘highly important for the ecclesiastical history of Ceylon’, and the treatise also gained mention in the researches of such leading Buddhist scholars as E. Hardy, Wilhelm Geiger, and G. P. Malalasekera.

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