IN03167 Anurādhapura Slab Inscription of Khudda-Pārinda

This inscription is engraved across the front, one side and the back of a stone slab now preserved in the Archaeological Museum at Anurādhapura. Senarath Paranavitana recorded that the slab was said to have been discovered in the area of the Abhayagiri Vihāra in Anurādhapura. He also noted that it had been included in the list of lithic inscriptions from Nuvara-kalāviya exhibited at Anurādhapura in the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon Annual Report for 1911–12 (p. 73, no. 16). He was unable to find any other references to the slab giving further details about its provenance.  The inscription registers some donations made to a Buddhist monastery by the queen of a king called Badadasa Ḷa-Parideva. Neither the name of the monastery nor that of the queen is preserved. However, it seems that the final part of the monastery’s name may have been la, suggesting that it was not the Abhayagiri Vihara, in which case we may perhaps assume that the slab was originally situated elsewhere and brought to this vihara at a later date, possibly for some architectural purpose. As for the king’s name, Paranavitana argues that Parideva may be taken as a clerical error for or variant of Paridadeva – a combination of the personal name Pārinda and the suffix deva, which could be applied to the appellation of any royal personage. According to the chronicle, Pārinda was one of the six Tamil rulers who occupied the throne of Anurādhapura in the fifth century A.D., prior to the accession of Dhātusena. Since Ḷa in Sinhalese means ‘tender’ or ‘young’, Ḷa-Pari(da)deva can be understood as ‘Pārindadeva the Younger’, which equates to Khudda Pārinda (the lesser Pārinda), the name given in the chronicle to king Pārinda’s younger brother and successor. Hence Paranavitana attributes this inscription to Khudda Pārinda, the Tamil king who reigned from 437 to 452 (or from 498 to 513, according to Wickremasinghe’s chronology).