The Vijaya origin myth of Sri Lanka and the strangeness of Kingship FN1

Past and Present

Volumn 203, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 3-28

  Strathern, Alan ^a  

^a CHURCHILL COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67650132827     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtp019     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Exactly how long it has been fundamental is a matter of debate. For its seventeenth-century importance, see Alan Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge, 2007), 238.
2. Mahavamsa: The Great Chronicle of Sri Lanka, trans. Ananda W. P. Guruge (Colombo, 1989), VI-VII
3. The Dipavamsa: An Ancient Buddhist Historical Record, trans. Hermann Oldenberg (1879; New Delhi, 2004), IX.
4. Steven Kemper, The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life (Ithaca, 1991)
5. John Clifford Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformation, Politics, and Culture (New York, 2004), 62-4.
6. Assuming that a false identity has not been adopted. Mithra Fernando, 'The Myth of "Lion Ancestry" and Adults-Only Tales of the Lala Land', Asian Tribune, 21 July 2007: .
7. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, 'The People of the Lion: The Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography', in Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (London, 1990).
8. However, Gunawardana does suggest that in the twelfth century the term 'Sinhala' acquired some manner of ethnic and territorial associations: see his 'People of the Lion', 64
9. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, Historiography in a Time of Ethnic Conflict: Construction of the Past in Contemporary Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1995), 51-60.
10. I do not at all mean to imply here that the Lankan vamsa tradition has in general a 'mythic' rather than 'historical' vision of time. On the contrary, the vamsas are often '"historical" in the strict sense', to quote Jonathan S. Walters, 'Mahāsena at the Mahāvihāra: On the Interpretation and Politics of History in Pre-Colonial Sri Lanka', in Daud Ali (ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (Delhi, 1999), 323.
11. John M. Seneveratna, The Story of the Sinhalese: The Mahavamsa Period Approved by the Director of Education for Use in Ceylon Schools, 2nd edn (Colombo, 1930), 7-9
12. see also Sujatha Udugama, Sri Lanka from Legend and History (Colombo, 1983), 1.
13. As emphasized by Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington, DC, and London, 1988), 54.
14. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford, 2002), 100-7, finds that a mnemonic advantage is conferred on stories and beliefs that are 'minimally counterintuitive', which means that normal categories are crossed and disturbed in ways that are non-realistic yet comprehensible, are 'compelling yet fantastic, eminently recognizable but surprising'.
15. Alan Strathern, 'Vijaya and Romulus: Interpretative Challenges to a Comparative Theory of the Stranger-Hero Origin Myths of Sri Lanka, Ancient Greece and Rome', manuscript in preparation.
16. I have already briefly touched upon the comparison in Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka.
17. Marshall Sahlins, 'The Stranger-King: Or, Dumézil among the Fijians', in his Islands of History (Chicago, 1985), 82 (emphasis original).
18. Sahlins confirmed to me that he had not drawn on Sri Lankan material: personal communication, 4 Feb. 2007.
19. Papers, with various titles, given at a conference on 'Stranger-Kings in Southeast Asia and Elsewhere', Jakarta, 5-7 June 2006, and at a seminar in Chicago, 5 Feb. 2007. Many of the papers from the Jakarta conference, including Sahlins's 'The Stranger-King: Or, Elementary Forms of the Political Life', have now been published in Ian Caldwell and David Henley (eds.), Stranger-Kings in Indonesia and Beyond, a special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World, xxxvi, 105 (2008).
20. 'all power is foreign in origin, in the sense that the spaces beyond the political community are the loci of other-than-human subjects - ranging from beasts to gods': Marshall Sahlins, 'Depending on the Kingness of Strangers: Or, Elementary Forms of the Political Life', unpubd paper from the Jakarta conference, p. 4.
21. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 'The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia', Itinerario, xxiv (2000), points out that, of course, there is a great variety of possible responses to the stranger figure, but explores the surprising tendency to accord the stranger authority in parts of island South-East Asia as a result of his ability to act as an unsullied arbitrator.
22. See all the valuable contributions to Caldwell and Henley (eds.), Stranger-Kings in Indonesia and Beyond, which unfortunately came to me too late to be used here to full advantage. In Caldwell and Henley's 'Introduction: The Stranger Who Would Be King. Magic, Logic and Polemic', and their 'Kings and Covenants: Stranger-Kings and Social Contract in Sulawesi', they add further 'practical' or even 'rational-choice' motivations for societies to accept actual stranger-kings. The argument is that these may be compelling regardless of whether such societies are informed by a mythical and cosmological logic that works to estrange political authority and priority.
23. From South Asian scholarship, see J. C. Heesterman, 'The Conundrum of the King's Authority', in J. F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Delhi, 1998)
24. Alfred Gell, 'Exalting the King and Obstructing the State: A Political Interpretation of Royal Ritual in Bastar District, Central India', Jl Roy. Anthropol. Inst., iii (1997).
25. Here, outsidership and Frazerian substitute sacrifice are also both discerned: 'the prosperity of the ruler and the kingdom depends on the capacity of the Raja, as sacrificer, to mediate with "the outside" (beyond, above, outside the compass of the Raja's ordinary subjects). The Raja is a "stranger King", as indeed is made explicit in the legendary foreign origins of the royal house': Gell, 'Exalting the King and Obstructing the State', 442.
26. Mary W. Helms, Ulysses' Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton, 1988), 4. This is not held up as a universal configuration; the image of concentricity is not helpful for all societies or all aspects of any one society. Helms furnishes diverse empirical evidence of stranger-kingship, but is particularly interested in the way in which those who grapple with the beyond are accorded extraordinary forms of knowledge.
27. Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (2008), 194-5, refers to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 'Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism', Jl Roy. Anthropol. Inst., iv (1998), 8, on Amazonian Amerindians for whom 'guests, friends, foreigners, enemies, allied or client communities, trade partners, animals and spirits are categorized as so many affines... In the event, the outsider or stranger is rather a qualitative relation of difference than a quantitative one of distance'.
28. Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (2008), 196.
29. Declan Quigley, 'Introduction: The Character of Kingship', in Declan Quigley (ed.), The Character of Kingship (Oxford, 2005).
30. Luc de Heusch, 'Forms of Sacralized Power in Africa', in Quigley (ed.), Character of Kingship, 33.
31. Luc de Heusch, 'The Symbolic Mechanisms of Sacred Kingship: Rediscovering Frazer', trans. D. Quigley, Jl Roy. Anthropol. Inst. iii (1997), 219.
32. Ibid., 217
33. Quigley, 'Introduction', 8,
34. and Declan Quigley, 'Kingship and Untouchability', in Quigley (ed.), Character of Kingship, 126.
35. Lucien Scubla, 'Sacred King, Sacrificial Victim, Surrogate Victim or Frazer, Hocart, Girard', in Quigley (ed.), Character of Kingship
36. 'In most Melanesian chiefdoms and African kingdoms, the king, whether put to death or not, is often a foreigner, like the sacrificial victim. On the one hand he is from outside the group; on the other, he is the revitalising centre of the group': ibid., 55-6.
37. Thanks to Joya Chatterji for raising in discussion the relevance of succession crises.
38. This is why Gananath Obeyesekere, 'Myth Models of the Parricide: Oedipus in Sri Lanka', in his The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (Chicago, 1990), can suggest that the Oedipus myth, of which he presents Simhabāhu as the chief Lankan exemplar, is so resonant in Sri Lanka.
39. Burkhard Schnepel, Twinned Beings: Kings and Effigies in Southern Sudan, East India and Renaissance France (Göteborg, 1995), 29, reports that during the structural interregna of the Shilluk, it may be said that 'there is no land'.
40. Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago, 1985), 166
41. Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, 'The Transgressive Nature of Kingship in Caste Organization: Monstrous Royal Doubles in Nepal', in Quigley (ed.), Character of Kingship, 114 (here matrilateral cross-cousins are classificatory sisters)
42. also T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c.1000-264 BC) (London, 1995), 121.
43. See Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (2008), 177,
44. and also Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, The Khmers (London, 1995), 216-17.
45. Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (2008), 183.
46. This point emerged most clearly through correspondence with Sahlins (personal communication, Aug. 2007); and see Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (1985), 78: 'By his own nature outside the homebred culture of the society, the king appears within it as a force of nature'.
47. Mahāvam: Sa, trans. Guruge, VI. 42; see the editorial note there, p. 21.
48. Gananath Obeyesekere, 'Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon', Modern Ceylon Studies, i (1970), 45.
49. Comparing myth with ritual, we recall those enthronement rites in which the king must undergo a long probationary period (seven years for Mossi, king of the Yatenga kingdom: De Heusch, 'Symbolic Mechanisms of Sacred Kingship', 221) during which he risks death.
50. Mahāvamsa, trans. Guruge, IX-X.
51. The companion article discusses Pandukābhaya's story in depth.
52. I should say that in his recent work Sahlins has come to his own account of how certain polities ('cosmocratic kingships')may upend (but also preserve) the Helmsian cosmography. Instead of following his line of thought there, I shall present a different account of the variety of kingship.
53. I have briefly discussed this in Alan Strathern, 'Transcendentalist Intransigence: Why Rulers Rejected Monotheism in Early Modern Southeast Asia and Beyond', Comparative Studies in Society and History, xlix (2007),
54. and Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka 149, but there I used the vaguer and less satisfactory term 'sacred kingship' for what is here rendered 'magical kingship'.
55. There is a debate about whether early Buddhist philosophy can properly be described as 'transcendentalist'. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of the sociology of religion, Buddhism obviously functions as part of the transcendentalist family, offering salvation from an inherently unsatisfactory reality into a state of ineffable release. See also Alan Strathern, 'Karen Armstrong's Axial Age: Origins and Ethics', Heythrop Jl, 1 (2009)
56. Steven Collins, Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge, 1998), 280.
57. 'Supernatural' is used here as an etic term. Such societies may not themselves make any equivalent distinction between varieties of non-human agency. Further, in some societies, conceptual mapping may entirely confound simple dichotomies of social/wild, animal/human (Viveiros de Castro, 'Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism') - but these are typically not monarchical and so are not of concern here.
58. Collins, Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities, 449.
59. This is one of the major themes of the companion article.
60. S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge, 1976), 10-13.
61. The Mahāvamsa, trans. Guruge, II. 1, does not relate the story of Mahāsammata itself. Further, I should say that Sinhala monarchs were not construed as divine in the period when the Mahāvamsa was written.
62. Rājāvaliya: A Comprehensive Account of the Kings of Sri Lanka ed. and trans. A. Suraweera (Ratmalana, 2000), 4.
63. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London, 1973).
64. For example, Odysseus was adopted as a founder of royal houses, of cities or of entire peoples: Irad Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1998), 4, 19.
65. Indeed, a structuralist would surely see it as inevitable that a story about the origin of society works by beginning with its conceptual opposite. Thus we might say that the phase of youthful transgression in the lives of these heroes reflects a very basic mode of thought whereby order can only be 'seen' by watching it emerge from a backdrop of chaos.
66. Schnepel, Twinned Beings, 25, 59.
67. But note: Other aspects of them remained and remain deeply incongruous.
68. Mahāvamsa, trans. Guruge, V. 20
69. Dīpavamsa, trans. Oldenberg, VI. 22.
70. Notice that I have not attempted to isolate any one of the particular explanations of the outsider/transgression logic as the root of the Lankan material.
71. It is likely that the Dīpavamsa was the primary source of the Mahāvamsa but equally that both drew upon a common stock of records. See Guruge's 'Prolegomena' to Mahāvamsa, pp. 175-91.
72. Dīpavamsa, trans. Oldenberg, I. 46-7.
73. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, 'The Kinsmen of the Buddha: Myth as Political Charter in the Ancient and Early Medieval Kingdom of Sri Lanka', in Bardwell L. Smith (ed.), Religion and the Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (Chambersburg, 1978), 100, compares Buddha's expanding rug with the stratagem of the oxhide used in the Aeneid's story of the foundation of Carthage.
74. On Aeneas, see Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (1985), 82. In the Mahāvamsa, the Yakkhas offer the Buddha the whole island if he will relieve them from the cold (I. 27), and then once he has converted the Nāgas, they bestow upon him the throne they have been squabbling over (I. 60). The motif of the expanding rug would later be used by the Cūlavamsa to describe the establishment of the Portuguese in the island, who would come to impose a particularly hostile and often resisted form of foreign kingship there.
75. Dīpavamsa, trans. Oldenberg, I. 54.
76. Sirima Kiribamune, 'The Dipavamsa in Ancient Sri Lankan Historiography', Sri Lanka Jl Humanities, v (1979), 92-3, has a more uncompromising translation: The Buddha is 'a mighty Yakkha subduing the Yakkhas'.
77. Gunawardana, 'Kinsmen of the Buddha', 97
78. Merlin Peris, Mahavamsa Studies: Greek Myth in the Ancient Tradition (Colombo, 2004), 80.
79. Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (2008), 179.
80. Mahv̄amsa, trans. Guruge, VII. 38-9.
81. See Gananath Obeyesekere, 'Buddhism, Nationhood and Cultural Identity: A Question of Fundamentals', in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalisms Comprehended (Chicago, 1995), 236.
82. Gunawardana, 'People of the Lion', 52.
83. Ibid., 55.
84. Scubla, 'Sacred King, Sacrificial Victim, Surrogate Victim', 40. Sahlins, 'Stranger-King' (1985), 81, objects to the 'mystification of power' hypothesis on the grounds that 'the rationalization of power is not at issue so much as the representation of a general scheme of social life'.
85. It explores how the 'mythemes' that make up the early Mahāvamsa narrative have a long and complex history of itinerancy, acquiring different functions as they circulated and recombined through a vast chronological and geographical arena.
86. Dāipavamsa, trans. Oldenberg, IX. 29-41.
87. The companion article will deal with Pandukābhaya and colonization. On the peopling of the island as a 'major existential issue' for the Sinhalese, see Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago, 1992), 149.
88. Mahāvamsa, trans. Guruge, VIII. 2. On 'colonized', Guruge's n. 2 has 'Vasitam, caus. From bas - to inhabit'.
89. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), 73.
90. Gunawardana, 'People of the Lion', 54
91. Gunawardana, Historiography in a Time of Ethnic Conflict, 29-32.
92. See also Obeyesekere, 'Buddhism, Nationhood and Cultural Identity', 240.
93. Twelfth century: Gunawardana, Historiography in a Time of Ethnic Conflict, 54.
94. Comparison with ancient Rome shows how kingship (or 'tyranny', as the patrician class styled it) can be about uniting rulers with the plebeian masses against the entrenched interests of the aristocracy.
95. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?, 133-4.
96. Holt, Buddhist Visnu, 93-4, agrees.
97. And, indeed, there seems to be a conflation of people, religion, territory and society: See Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?, 130.
98. One source which Gunawardana emphasizes heavily is the Vamsatthappakāsinī, which says that the seven hundred followers and all their descendants 'up to the present day' are called Sinhala because of their association with the prince called Sinhala, apparently excluding the service castes by implication. However, even if we grant this reading, I have not used the Vamsatthappakāsinī at all in this essay, because it is a later text, perhaps tenth-century: Jonathan Walters, 'Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pāli Vamsas and their Community', in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters and Daud Ali (eds.), Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (NewYork, 2000), 125-6. This could well represent a much later piece of 'caste consciousness' transferred back to the fifth century.
99. Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, Translated from the Chinese of Hiuen Tsiang (AD 629), trans. Samuel Beal (Delhi, 1994), 240.