Mahāvaṃsa, a lengthy Pāli-language poem composed in the fifth or early sixth century CE, is a text familiar to scholars of Sri Lankan history, Theravāda Buddhism, and the longer history of Pāli-oriented Buddhism in Southern Asia. (By Southern Asia I mean the geographical space now referred to as South Asia and Southeast Asia. Buddhists did not imagine these spaces as distinct spheres until the middle of the twentieth century, if then.) Indeed, Mahāvaṃsa is too familiar to many readers, since it figures so strongly in Sri Lankan nationalist (sometimes Buddhist nationalist) claims for the island's past and future, as well as in studies of the island's past. Scholars of Sri Lanka sometimes suffer “Mahāvaṃsa fatigue.” That fatigue lifts when reading Kristin Scheible's important book, Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History.

Scheible seeks to generate a new vision of the text by developing a literary reading of this work, a reading that assumes that Mahāvaṃsa was composed by someone of literary skill for a “model reader” (p. 16, drawing on Umberto Eco).Footnote ¹ She places this model reader within the wider context of South Asian poetics and aesthetics, proposing that the author of Mahāvaṃsa and his model reader would have been conversant with forms of aesthetic theory and poetic conventions articulated in Sanskrit during the early first millennium CE. Although scholars are now beginning to read second-millennium Buddhist Pāli- and Sinhala-language texts from Laṅkā with awareness of their participation in a wider Indic literary and intellectual milieu, it is still rare to find such treatments of earlier Pāli compositions. Scheible's engagement with these questions is thus extremely welcome.

Scheible is correct that the literary dimensions of Mahāvaṃsa have typically been neglected; certainly there is no prior published substantial engagement with the work on these terms. The work has most often been read as a source from which event history data may be mined, as a text shedding light on patterns of royal-monastic interaction including through processes of “Buddhist legitimation,” and as a “historical charter” supporting claims to a deep history of Sinhala Buddhist nationhood in the island of Laṅkā. Powerfully, but less often, Mahāvaṃsa has been read for what it may tell us about intra-monastic disputes on the island and the changing character of royal aspirations in the royal houses of Laṅkā.

Scheible recognizes these prior engagements with the text and does considerable justice to them in her study. Reading the Mahāvaṃsa also allows for the possibility that Mahāvaṃsa functioned in several ways simultaneously, as a literary work with soteriological aims for its readers and listeners, as a history of sāsana (Buddha's dispensation), and as a text participating in institutional struggles among monastics within Anurādhapura. Indeed, reading Mahāvaṃsa through Scheible it is even clearer how the work served as the textual model for the tamnān texts of northern Thailand. These later texts, composed in Tai Yüan from the fifteenth century onward, are exemplary in their ability to conjure the presence of Buddha in text and on land, thus inspiring soteriological confidence and making merit for authors, scribes, readers, and listeners, while also functioning polemically in the service of some monks against others.

However, Scheible strongly warns against treating Mahāvaṃsa as a “chronicle,” on account of the historiographic biases that such a comparative framework is likely to introduce (p. 128), and states that the text's agenda is “not historical or political but ethical” (p. 156). Thus, her interpretation of the text runs strongly counter to the ways in which Mahāvaṃsa is most often read by Buddhist nationalists: as an empirical history of the island's past life as a Buddhist polity, and as a model for how such a polity should develop in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Significantly, Scheible writes not as an insider-participant in Sri Lankan battles over the implications of the island's historical archive for its political present and future; rather, Reading the Mahāvaṃsa is a sensitive consideration of Mahāvaṃsa by a scholar operating outside this zone of conflict, a scholar alert to the ways in which anachronistic analytical frameworks inhibit our ability to understand the vitality and efficacy of texts within the times of their composition and early reception.

In addition to locating Mahāvaṃsa within a larger Indic sphere of literary and aesthetic practice, Scheible's study makes a powerful contribution through its attention to the structure of Mahāvaṃsa, its close examination of themes and patterns within the text, and her decision to take seriously the text's own claim that it is intended to arouse specific devotionally transformative emotions in its readers and hearers. These emotions, pasāda and saṃvega, nicely translated by Scheible as “serene satisfaction” and “anxious thrill” (p. 3), are often referenced in earlier Pāli works, including within materials we might call “scriptural,” belonging to the authoritative texts of the Pāli-language tipiṭaka. When Mahāvaṃsa expresses the aim to evoke these emotions in its audience, it draws on an already long history of reflection within the Buddhist tradition about how engagement with Buddha (or reminders of a Buddha) and dhamma catalyze transformative emotional experiences that are linked to the changes in cognition and consciousness essential to a Buddhist's movement along the path to enlightenment (nibbāna).

How did Mahāvaṃsa’s author hope to achieve such transformations for and in his readers? The first-millennium Pāli-oriented Buddhist world, like much of wider premodern South Asia, followed literary conventions according little detailed biographical attention to authors. And, owing to combinations of climate, violence, and highly varied bureaucratic protocols, we lack a rich archive that would allow for the reconstruction of intellectuals’ social milieu and literary intentions. In the face of such obstacles to the reconstruction of authorial biography and intentions, Scheible looks closely at the interior of the text for indications of the text's “literary maneuvers” (p. 127). Since, as Eco has suggested (p. 16), not all interpretations are equally plausible, one's interpretations may be refined by considering texts and their authors as participating in particular “textual communities.”Footnote ² Scheible's intertextual readings illuminate the literary and devotional associations that would have been possible for readers and hearers of Mahāvaṃsa. This approach leads, for instance, to a fascinating chapter that interprets Mahāvaṃsa’s emphasis on the role of nāgas (liminal divine serpents) by looking at influential accounts of the soteriological potential of such creatures found in the popular Bhuridatta Jātaka (a story of Gotama Buddha's previous life as a nāga). Scheible's intertextual sophistication also allows her to read Mahāvaṃsa’s repeated and central references to the transmission of Buddha relics to Laṅkā in relation to other Buddhist textual accounts of Buddha relics and how they acquire authority. This strengthens her proposal that Mahāvaṃsa is primarily “a history of the coming of the relics and sāsana to the island …” and a “vehicle for the cultivation of heightened emotional states in the reader-hearer…” (p. 98). Ultimately, Scheible proposes a reading of Mahāvaṃsa as a text that manifests the presence of a Buddha, suggesting that it and other vaṃsas function in a manner similar to relics by creating occasions for remembrance and veneration of past Buddhas (pp. 136, 159–60).