IN03187 Tiriyāy Rock Inscription

Paranavitana (1934–41: 151–160) read the names of the groups of merchants who are stated in the inscription to have built the Girikaṇḍi-caitya as Trapussaka and Vallika, which he took to be corruptions of Trapuṣa (Tapussa in Pāli) and Bhallika (Bhalluka in the Nidānakathā), two merchants who offered food to the Buddha immediately after his enlightenment and were the recipients of some his hair. The hair-relics received by these merchants have been associated with a number of different sites across South Asia. The Mahāvagga, the Nidānakathā and the Lalitavistara state that two merchants came from a country called Ukkala in North India and built a stupa to enshrine the hair-relics in their native country. Meanwhile, the Chinese pilgrim Hieun Tsang noticed the remains of two stupas at Gandhāra, which he said had been built over the relics. Another tradition holds that the merchants deposited the relics at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. However, as Senarath Paranavitana argues, the present inscription appears to claim that the caitya at Tiriyāy was founded by these merchants to enshrine the hair-relics. This claim can be linked with a later statement in the Pūjāvalī, a Sinhalese religious work written in the thirteenth century. According to the Pūjāvalī, Tapassu and Bhalluka enshrined the relics at the summit of a rock in a place called Girihaṇ̆ḍu in Sri Lanka. The temple at Tiriyāy is known by the Sinhalese name Girihaṇ̆ḍu, the Sanskrit form of which is Girikaṇḍika, as the site is called in the present inscription. There is another stupa known by this name elsewhere in Sri Lanka – the Girihaṇ̆ḍu (Girikanda) stupa at Ambalantoṭa – but the geography described in the Pūjāvalī most closely matches the location of the stupa at Tiriyāy.

Ch. Chhabra (1934–41: 313–314) challenged this interpretation of the present inscription. He made out the names to be Trapūssaka and Vallikaka and argued against the identification of these individuals with Trapuṣa and Bhallika, regarding as “simply incredible” the idea that the Girikaṇḍi-caitya could have been built during the very lifetime of the Buddha. It is, he suggests, more natural to suppose that the inscription was caused to be incised by the very merchants who are said to have established the shrine and that, in their devotional ardour, they adopted names that were deliberately similar to those of Trapuṣa and Bhallika, the two merchants famed in the Buddhist scriptures. Thus Chhabra dated the foundation of the shrine to the same period as the inscription, namely the late seventh or early eighth century.

In a note appended to Chhabra’s article, Paranavitana defended his interpretation, arguing that his reading need not imply that the Girikaṇḍi-caitya was, as a matter of historical fact, built during the time of the Buddha but only that certain Sinhalese Buddhists believed so in the seventh century. As the Pūjāvalī indicates, there were certainly Sinhalese Buddhists in the thirteenth century who believed that Trapuṣa and Bhallika enshrined the hair-relics in at a place called Girihaṇ̆ḍu on the island of Sri Lanka. This tradition, Paranavitana insisted, cannot be completely ignored in the interpretation of the record. He also noted the existence of pre-Christian Brāhmī inscriptions at Tiriyāy, which show that there was a Buddhist vihara on the site long before the date of the present inscription, undermining Chhabra’s contention that the record is contemporary with the foundation of the Girikaṇḍi-caitya.