Jetavanaramaya

This inscription is engraved on a fragment of an irregularly shaped octagonal stone slab, which appears from its shape to have originally formed a cross-bar of a railing. The fragment is now in the collection of the National Museum at Colombo. It was unearthed in 1893 by H. C. P. Bell in one of the buildings of the group called monastery L in the extensive monastic complex at Jetavanārāma in Anurādhapura. One end of the slab has broken off and is missing. As a result, the inscription is incomplete. The record can be dated on palaeographic grounds to the third or fourth century A.D. The first line tells us that it is an edict issued in the first year of a king’s reign but, unfortunately, the monarch’s name was inscribed on the lost portion of the slab. The fragmentary nature of the record prevents us from gaining a complete idea of the edict’s purpose but it seems to have been designed to regulate the ecclesiastical affairs of the ancient Sinhalese Buddhist Church. It addresses certain monks whose doctrines are described as needing regulation. These monks were apparently the inmates of some establishments known as the ‘Five Great Residences’. It appears that the king who issued this edict did so under outside influence, the inscription being engraved on a type of stone and using a form of script which were native to the Āndhra country and which are not typically found Sri Lanka. Senarath Paranavitana conjectured that the inscription may relate to the struggle between the monks of the Mahāvihāra and king Mahāsena (r. ca. 334–361), which is described in the chronicles. Paranavitana cited numerous pieces of evidence to support this theory (see Misc. Notes below) but, owing to the fragmentary nature of the edict, no decisive conclusion is possible.

The inscription is engraved on a stone slab, which is now broken, only the upper part surviving. This fragment features nineteen complete lines of writing, plus a few letters from the end of a twentieth line. It is not possible to say how many lines were lost with the lower part of the slab. The surviving fragment was found at the building called ‘the Buddhist Railing’ near the Eastern (Jetavana) dāgäba at Anurādhapura and recorded in the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon for 1892 (p. 9, no. 4). It was removed to the premises of the Archaeological Survey and was still there in the early 1930s when Senarath Paranavitana published his edition and translation of the inscription in the third volume of Epigraphia Zeylanica. The inscription is dated in the seventh year of Sirisaṅgbo Mahind (Mahinda IV) and proclaims certain rules concerning a ‘Water Pavilion’ (pän maḍiya) at the Ratnamāpirivena in the Jetavana monastery. If ‘Ratnamāpirivena’ refers to the building near which the inscription was found, it must have been the ancient name of ‘the Buddhist Railing’.