![]() ![]() The Buddha of the Sihala atthakatha tradition is a holy-warrior who uses natural cunning and supernatural force to defeat enemies of faith. With that change, her key argument reads “The Buddha of the Sihala atthakatha tradition is a totally different being from Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha we meet in the Tripitaka and other Buddhist texts. In place of her “Mahawansa” and “ Bikku Mahanama”, I will use “ Sihala atthakatha tradition”. I’ll use her own lines with a slight change. ‘Come, come Watson don’t look so mystified. In typical misogynist fashion Holmes was using the article to dissect the female psyche. ‘Holmes, if we were to introduce this lady to the sources of Mahavamsa through carefully selected paragraphs like the above, do you think it would make any difference?’Īs the reader can probably guess Holmes and I were still on the subject of “ Which Buddha? Whose Buddhism?” an article in the popular press ( Colombo Telegraph) by Tisaranee Gunasekara. ![]() This similarity does not presuppose the fact that the chronologically later work was based on the earlier work, but that they go back to a common tradition.” – ( p XXIV, N.A. However, the word-for-word similarity between wholesale passages of the Bahiranidana and the Chronicles (see Geiger, the Dipavarnsa and Mahavamsa, 106 ff.) shows that there were no wide divergences between them. Issaranimmana, Kalingakula, Pakundaka, Tavakka, etc. It is partly on this basis that minor discrepancies in some proper names between the Bahiranidana and the Chronicles are to be explained, e.g. ![]() In the case of the Bahiranidana there were no such restrictions, and undoubtedly one may suppose that it is even more faithful to the original Sinhalese source than the more elegant literary product, the Mahavamsa. ![]() The fact that it was a metrical rendering could have placed certain restrictions and limitations on the author as regards presenting a faithful rendering of the original material. Compared with the previous clumsy attempt at versification in the Dipavarnsa, Mahavamsa stands out as a work of considerable poetic achievement though it falls short of the elegant poetry of the Canonical metrical literature. As the Tika states, the Mahavamsa was a faithful rendering of the original Sinhalese source-material with the only change that it was put into Pali verse. “Buddhaghosa’s role, as well as that of Mahanama, the author of the Mahavamsa, was to translate the available material into Pali (see Mhv. ![]()
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