Place · Sinhala monastic capital · Sri Lanka

Anurādhapura

Also known as Bodhi tree, Chola conquest of Anuradhapura, Sri Maha Bodhi, Sri Maha Bodhi, Anurādhapura

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Mahavamsa; Sri Lankan monastic chronicles

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

8.335, 80.389

Worth knowing

Its Śrī Mahā Bodhi, grown from a cutting of the Bodh Gayā tree brought in the 3rd century BCE, is among the oldest historically documented trees on earth; the Cholas sacked and briefly ruled the city in the 11th century.

Connections (12)

• Trade routePamban & the Sethu crossing

  The Pamban shoals between Rameswaram and Mannar are the crossing the Ramayana calls Rama's bridge, and they are also the shortest sea route from the subcontinent to Anuradhapura — the road along which Ashoka's mission, the Bodhi cutting and centuries of monastic and merchant traffic actually moved. A rail bridge has crossed the Indian half since 1914; the Sri Lankan ferry link ran until 1984 and is only now being restored.

• Traveller routeKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram

  Kanchipuram had a substantial Theravada presence through the first millennium, linked to Anuradhapura by monastic travel, doctrinal correspondence and the shared use of Pali — Dhammapala is the best-known figure of that axis, and Xuanzang reports monasteries and thousands of monks in the city. Almost nothing of it survives above ground, which is a useful caution: a city can be a major centre of a religion for centuries and leave no visible trace of it.

• Sacred transplantMahinda

  Mahinda's sister Sanghamittā is said to have brought a cutting of the Bodh Gayā tree to Anurādhapura, where it still stands. When the Indian tree later died, a cutting was taken back from Anurādhapura to replant it — so the tree at Bodh Gayā today descends from the Sri Lankan one.

• TransmissionNāgārjunakonda

  Nāgārjunakonda's inscriptions record monasteries built specifically for monks from Sri Lanka, and donors from the island — the earliest documentary evidence of a two-way monastic traffic across the Bay of Bengal. The Cholas later crossed the same water with a fleet rather than a delegation. The inscriptions also name donors from as far as the Mediterranean, which makes this Ikshvāku valley the best-documented case of an Indian monastery funded from outside India.

• CampaignThanjavur Brihadishvara

  Rājarāja Chola annexed northern Sri Lanka about 1017 and his son Rājendra sacked Anurādhapura; the island was run as a Chola province from Polonnaruwa for some seventy years. Thanjavur's Brihadīshvara was built out of the same decades of conquest, and the two events are recorded in the same inscriptions. Anurādhapura was never reoccupied as a capital afterwards; the Sinhala centre moved south-east to Polonnaruwa and stayed there, so one campaign ended a thousand years of continuous settlement.

• Sacred transplantTamralipta / Tamluk

  Tamralipta at the head of the Bay of Bengal was the port for Sri Lanka, and Sri Lankan chronicle tradition has Ashoka's daughter Sanghamitta sail from here carrying a cutting of the Bodhi tree to Anuradhapura, where it was planted and still grows. Her brother Mahinda had gone before her with the teaching. It is the founding act of Sri Lankan Buddhism, and the tree at Anuradhapura has outlived the one at Bodh Gaya, which has been replaced more than once from its descendants.

• CampaignTambralinga / Nakhon Si Thammarat

  Tambralinga on the peninsula is named in the Tanjore inscription as one of Rajendra's targets in 1025, and two centuries later its king Chandrabhanu invaded Sri Lanka twice, in 1247 and again in the 1260s, and held part of the north for a time. The Bay of Bengal was not a one-way street from India: a Malay peninsular polity mounted seaborne invasions of Anuradhapura's successor kingdoms.

• Teaching lineageŚrī Kṣetra

  The twenty gold leaves from Sri Ksetra inscribed with extracts from the Pali canon are the oldest Pali texts found anywhere in Southeast Asia, and the doctrinal line they belong to runs back through Sri Lanka, where the canon had been written down in the first century BCE. Anuradhapura preserved the Theravada when it was disappearing in India, and the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya took it from there rather than from the mainland.

• Teaching lineageSukhothai

  Sukhothai's kings imported Theravada monks from Sri Lanka — the Sinhalese ordination lineage brought by way of Martaban — and the walking Buddha image they developed is a Sri Lankan-influenced type with no Indian precedent. Ramkhamhaeng's inscription describes a forest-dwelling Sinhalese abbot brought to the capital. The Thai sangha's ordination line still runs back to Anuradhapura, which is why Sri Lanka later re-imported ordination from Siam when its own line failed.

• Successor capital ofPolonnaruwa

  Anuradhapura had been continuously occupied for more than a thousand years when the Cholas sacked it about 993 and moved the administration south-east to Polonnaruwa, which was easier to hold and closer to the ports. It never recovered, and when Vijayabahu drove the Cholas out in 1070 he kept their capital rather than returning to his own — so Sri Lanka's medieval centre was placed by an invader and left there by the man who expelled him.

• Sacred transplantBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple

  The Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura was grown from a cutting of the Bodh Gaya tree brought by Sanghamitta in the third century BCE, and the Bodh Gaya tree now standing is itself descended from a cutting returned from Anuradhapura after the original died. The transplant has run in both directions, which makes the two trees one continuous object with a two-thousand-year record.

• Canonised by textMahāvaṃsa

  Almost everything known about Sri Lanka before the colonial period comes from this chronicle, and Anuradhapura is the capital it was compiled at, in the Mahavihara. It records Mahinda's mission, Sanghamitta bringing the Bodhi cutting, the reign lists and the tank-building, and it is the only South Asian historical record that runs unbroken for two thousand years.

On these journeys

• Shared & layered sites
• Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
• Sri Lanka — the Buddhist island

Sources

Anuradhapura — UNESCO; Mahavamsa

• Wikipedia