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Part I

Excerpts of a talk given by Prof. Gananath Obeysekera at the Gratiaen Awards presentation event held on June 1.

According to the Mahavamsa, Kasyapa I, in fear of his brother, fled to the great rock of Sigiriya. “He cleared the land round about, surrounded it with a wall and built a staircase in the form of a lion.” Hence the name of the rock: Sigiriya, Sinhagiri, Sihagiri, meaning “the lion rock” perhaps having the extended meaning of “the lion city.”

It is in the spirit of someone crossing academic disciplines that I speak here to question conventional notions of history, story-telling and myth, blurring these boundaries, so to speak, by juxtaposing the account of the reigns of Dhatusena and his descendants with information collected by me and my research assistant L. A. D. Tissa Kumara from contemporary villagers in and around Sigiriya during the year 1987.

the classic narration

Let me begin with the classic narration of Sigiriya in chapter 38 of the Mahavamsa entitled "The Ten Kings" dealing with the reign of Dhatusena followed by the next chapter on "The Two Kings" which is about Kasyapa and Mugalan (Mogallana). Chapter 40 is missing, the only one in all of the one hundred chapters that constitute the three Mahavamsa texts. The first ten couplets of chapter 38 deal with the takeover of Anuradhapura by Tamil rulers and the emergence on the scene of Dhatusena, son of an ordinary householder belonging to the Maurya (Moriya or "peacock") clan. This is followed by a very interesting story about the early life of Dhatusena (couplets 11-28). It says that a certain householder, Dathanama of the Maurya clan had two sons, Dhatusena and Silatissabodhi, by a woman of the same caste.

The next fifty couplets deal with Dhatusena vanquishing the Tamils and assuming the kingship of Sri Lanka. The greatest importance is given to his good works. He constructed eighteen irrigation reservoirs (misleadingly labelled "tanks"), built eighteen temples, had hospitals for the sick and the lame, restored the integrity of the Buddhist monkhood, and instituted a variety of religious festivals. The king's greatest achievement was the construction of the great reservoir, the well-known Kalaveva. After the good deeds of the king are scrupulously listed in some detail, the text reverts back to story in couplets 80-115, such as the following.

Dhatusena had two sons, Kassapa (Kasyapa), by a mother of unequal birth, and the mighty Mugalan, by a mother of equal caste, and also a charming daughter, who was dear to him as his life. On his sister's son he bestowed the dignity of senapati and gave him his daughter (to wife). Without blame (on her part) he struck her with his whip on the thigh. When the King saw the blood-stained garment of his daughter and heard (of the affair) he in his wrath had his nephew's mother burnt naked. From that time onward (his nephew) nursed hatred against the king), joined Kassapa, awoke in him the desire for the royal dignity, estranged him from his father, won over his subjects and took the ruler (Dhatusena) prisoner alive.

His younger brother Mugalan fled in fear to India biding his time. Meanwhile the senapati, Migara, urged Kasyapa to seek his father's treasures. The deposed king told Kasyapa's henchmen to take him to the bank of the Kalaveva reservoir. There Dhatusena disrobed, bathed in its waters, drank some and told the king's henchmen, "This here, my friends, is my whole wealth." When the king was informed of this, he was enraged and ordered Migara to kill his father. "Thereupon the brutal (senapati) stripped the king naked, bound him with chains and fetters in a niche in the wall with his face outward and closed it with clay."

According to the Mahavamsa, Kasyapa I, in fear of his brother, fled to the great rock of Sigiriya. "He cleared the land round about, surrounded it with a wall and built a staircase in the form of a lion." Hence the name of the rock: Sigiriya, Sinhagiri, Sihagiri, meaning "the lion rock" (perhaps having the extended meaning of "the lion city.") After this Kasyapa felt guilty for his parricidal acts, and built several temples in his own name and that of his two daughters and also began to practice the dhutangas, extreme ascetic practices mentioned in the great meditation manual, Visuddhimagga.

In the eighteenth year of his reign, his brother Mugalan arrived in Sri Lanka, collected an army, and marched toward Sigiriya. Kasyapa met him in the plains below. "When the two hosts fell on each other like two seas that have burst their bounds, they fought a mighty battle. Kassapa espying a great stretch of swamp in front of him turned his elephant to seek another road. When his troops seeing that, with the cry: 'Friends, our commander here flees!' broke up in disorder, the troops of Moggalana cried, 'We see their backs.' But the king with his dagger cut his throat, raised the knife on high and stuck it in the sheath."

The Mahavamsa then goes to narrate the events that followed: the reign of Mugalan (eighteen years), his son (nine years) and grandson (nine months); the usurpation of the throne by Silakala, an affinal relative, and the reigns of his descendants.

stories collected from informants

In this lecture I want to focus on the death of Dhatusena, juxtaposing the Mahavamsa account with those stories I collected from informants in 1987.

If the Mahavamsa assumes a discourse known to the public, from which source does this discourse come? In my view from exactly the kind of source that stories come from, that is, from the oral tradition of folk and from popular stories of the Buddha and other compendia of edifying tales.

Let us, listen to Battagurunnanse, a specialist of the cult of planets and demons from the drummer caste, tell us his story.

When Kasyapa was a young prince, King Dhatusena built the Kalaveva. He inaugurated the building of the bund by saying "namo" and putting on the first (shovel of) earth. But he refused to offer a human sacrifice (to Bhairava, the god of the underworld). He was, thus, fearlessly building the reservoir bund when he came across an arahant meditating there. The king was getting special machines to put earth on the bund, pata, pata, pata-like. And he thus buried the arahant under the earth. He had in effect offered a human sacrifice, and he could now proceed with the building of the bund. The core of this story is the monk meditating on the bund and Dhatusena burying him as a human sacrifice necessary for the inauguration of a project. The latter idea is widespread even today, and people will say that the inauguration of an irrigation project, or even the construction of a major bridge, or the finding of a treasure - anything that involved the earth - requires a human sacrifice to Bhairava.

Though it is impossible to date Battagurunnanse's story, I think his and others I have collected come from a tradition of myth that has circulated in this isolated forest region for a long historical time.

Now let us get back to the myth of the human sacrifice and consider this interesting variation by Appuhami of Talkote.

There is also a story in "history books" - it is not a lie - that when the Kalavava was being built there was a hermit meditating on the bund. He was a good hermit (arahant) true to the precepts. He was asked to move but he did not. He had achieved the state of meditative trance. The king told his followers to bury him with earth. But no one can kill such a person. So he left by the powers of dhyana he had acquired (that is, he flew through the air invisibly). There is no way that anything could happen to him even though he was covered with earth. It is also said that the king got the earth under which the hermit was buried to be trampled by elephants.

Storyteller Appuhami, a good Buddhist, is telling us that though the king thought he offered the hermit as a sacrifice, this was an illusion since you cannot really kill someone with such vast supernormal powers. Even so, King Dhatusena, by Buddhist karmic logic, had it coming. Appuhami continued:

It is said that the king had done two grievous wrongs. What are these? He burnt the old lady alive, the mother of his nephew (that is, his own sister). Again another act not second to the former, he got the hermit covered up with earth and the earth pounded over by the feet of work-elephants. These are true events I mention. It's karma. It is a karma that can never be removed (by expiation or merit making).

hidden discourse

If indeed the hermit did not die, the sacrifice given to Bhairava was quite useless! The debate on karma - Dhatusena will be punished for his horrendously sinful acts - and the debate on the necessity for a human sacrifice go together in popular versions.

My argument that the Mahavamsa version contains a hidden discourse on a popular debate about a sacrificial victim must contend with the fact that the word used in the Mahavamsa is bhitti which everyone nowadays translates as "walls." Yet Soratha's authoritative Sinhala dictionary has a second meaning of bhitti as ivura or bank or embankment, or kandiya, a raised earth structure.

It should be noted that the wider meanings of bhitti resolves the simple pragmatic problem of physical dimensions, that is, the impossibility of immuring a person in an ordinary house wall. This debate in turn forces modern histories to substitute "palace wall," since palaces ought to have walls large enough to incorporate a corpse! But the historian's version fails to recognize a major Sinhala prejudice: who would think of burying a king in a palace wall given the terrible fear of the ghosts of the dead and, one would think, of the father's ghost?

An important question remains unanswered: why does not the Mahavamsa plainly say that the king was immured in the Kalavava bund? To do this, however, is to give recognition to the un-Buddhist act of a human sacrifice.

A blunt statement that Dhatusena was simultaneously the sacrificial victim and at the same time was the one who reaped his bad karma was made by another informant, Kiri Banda (50 years), a school teacher of Kumbukkandanvala, near Sigiriya.

While Mugalan was repairing the Kalavava, it started to break several times. I am telling you this as best I know. When it broke thus, it was considered necessary to offer a human sacrifice. Now Kasyapa wasn't the son of a royal princess; that was Mugalan. Kasyapa decided to complete the bund by burying his father underneath.

This account does not make sense outside the context of the previous story by Appuhami: the bund had to be constantly repaired because the sacrifice to Bhairava was not really made. Hence Kasyapa offers a substitute human sacrifice - his own father! The karmic misdeed has come full circle, for Dhatusena is buried in the bund in the same way that the meditating monk was buried. The story emphasizes the utter symmetry between the two acts, both held together by karmic retribution. Incidentally, this is one of the very few stories that break the strong hold on the Sinhala imagination regarding the traitorous and cruel cross-cousin, Migara.

The immediate provocation for the murder was the demand for the king's treasures by Migara and Kasyapa. Now we are faced with another neat irony: Dhatusena goes up to the Kalavava reservoir and tells his son's henchmen: "This here, my friends, is my whole wealth."

double irony

Note that Dhatusena himself says that his real treasure is the Kalavava reservoir; since it is necessary to have a sacrificial victim for its proper operation, and the first victim was an illusory one, Dhatusena now in effect offers himself as (or makes himself) the sacrificial victim in the double irony that my reading of the text exposes. Moreover, once Dhatusena's statement is given a literal interpretation by his killer, the text reveals a further irony.

A ritual sacrifice to Bhairava (or any sacrifice for that matter) requires a ritual purification of the victim. This Dhatusena inadvertently does himself when he decides to "bathe in the Kalavapi (Kalavava) and then die." Needless to say, my argument here and in the next section, does not deal with what occurred in history but rather what occurred in the construction of history.

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