The Mahavamsa, the "Great Chronicle", is the central narrative record of early Sri Lanka. Composed in Pali verse and attributed to the monk Mahanama of the Mahavihara at Anuradhapura, it traces the island's story from the arrival of Prince Vijaya through to the reign of King Mahasena, setting the rise and fall of kings alongside the establishment of the Buddhist order on the island. Its continuation, the Culavamsa, carries the record forward through the later Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Kandyan periods.
This volume is a Sinhala version of that chronicle, associated with Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thera and Batuwantudawe Devarakshita. The two scholars worked together on a Sinhala rendering of the Mahavamsa, and they also jointly edited the Pali text that was published in Colombo under orders of the Ceylon Government. Their names belong to a period when Sri Lankan monastic scholarship and colonial-era printing came together to put the island's classical texts into circulation in a form ordinary readers could hold.
The text is in Sinhala. There is no English translation or parallel text here, so this edition will suit readers who are comfortable reading Sinhala prose — students of Sri Lankan history and Buddhist studies, Sinhala-speaking households abroad who want the chronicle in the national language, and collectors assembling a shelf of Sri Lankan classics. Readers who need the Mahavamsa in English should look to an English edition instead.
For anyone approaching the chronicle for the first time, it is worth saying what sort of document it is. The Mahavamsa is not a neutral annal. It was written by a monk of the Mahavihara, and it tells the island's past as the story of a Buddhist kingdom, with the fortunes of the sangha and the merits of kings bound together. That perspective is precisely what has made it so important: it is both a source for the events it describes and a record of how a monastic community in Anuradhapura understood its own history. Episodes from it — Vijaya's landing, Devanampiya Tissa and Mahinda at Mihintale, Dutugemunu's campaign, the building of the great stupas — remain the frame through which much of Sri Lanka's early history is still told.
Published by Godage International Publishers of Colombo, who issue titles in Sinhala and English.
- Author: Ven. Sri Sumangala Nayaka Mahimi/Batuwanthudawe Dawarakshith
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 214
Browse the rest of our book collection.
