This is the first part — prathama bhagaya — of a modern Sinhala edition of the Saddharmaratnavaliya, the thirteenth-century work of the monk Dharmasena Thera and one of the best known and best loved books in the Sinhala literary canon. The text is in Sinhala throughout, with no English translation, so it will suit readers of Sinhala and those studying the language and its classical literature.
Dharmasena Thera's book is a Sinhala rendering of the Dhammapadatthakatha, the fifth-century Pali commentary on the Dhammapada. It is not a close translation. He retold the Pali stories and greatly expanded them, and the full Sinhala original runs to some three hundred and sixty of them. For centuries afterwards the Saddharmaratnavaliya served as a principal medium through which Buddhist teaching reached Sinhala readers — the stories carried the doctrine, and the doctrine came wrapped in narrative.
That combination is why the work has stayed in circulation for so long. The tales attached to the verses of the Dhammapada concern monks and laypeople, kings and merchants, wives and thieves, and the consequences that follow from how they act. Dharmasena Thera's handling of them is what readers of Sinhala prose return to; the book is studied as literature as much as it is read for its religious content, and passages from it are familiar to generations of Sinhala schooling.
Readers who work in English may know the text through Ranjini Obeyesekere, who has translated selections from it as Jewels of the Doctrine and Portraits of Buddhist Women. This volume is not that. It is the Sinhala text itself, issued in parts, published by Godage International Publishers of Colombo, who publish in Sinhala and in English across Sri Lankan literature, history and religion.
Buy this if you read Sinhala and want the classical text on your shelf rather than an English selection from it — for private reading, for temple or dhamma-school use, or for study of medieval Sinhala prose. As the first part of a multi-volume set, it stands at the beginning of the work; readers wanting the whole of Dharmasena Thera's text will want the succeeding parts alongside it.
- Author: Pujyaacharya Dharmasena Mahaasthawirapaadayan
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 437
- ISBN: 9789553064394
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