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A New Look at the Sāsanavaṃsa

1976; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0041977x00052150

1474-0699

Victor Lieberman,

Eurasian Exchange Networks

The Sāsanavaṃsa ‘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 orthodox theras from the Buddha's immediate disciple Upāli to the heads of the saṅgha at Mandalay in the author's own lifetime. As early as 1882 Louis de Zoysa in his Catalogue of Pali, Sinhalese, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the temple libraries of Ceylon referred to the Sāsanavaṃsa as a work containing ‘very interesting information on the religious history of … Burma and Ceylon’. In 1892 the Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovitch Minaev drew upon the Sāsanavaṃsa for his Recherches sur le bouddhisme , in which he quoted fairly extensively from the Pali text. H. Kern in 1896 classed it along with the better-known Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa as ‘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.