The History of the Buddha's Relic Shrine.

• Author: Blackburn, Anne M.
• Position: Book review

The History of the Buddha's Relic Shrine. By STEPHEN C. BERKWITZ. American Academy of Religion Texts and Translations Series. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007. Pp. ix + 304. $75.

In The History of the Buddha's Relic Shrine, Stephen C. Berkwitz provides an annotated translation of the Sinhala Thupavamsa. The Sinhala Thupavamsa narrates the history of the relics of Sakyamuni Buddha and, especially, those said to have found their way to Laka (now Sri Lanka). It contains a rich depiction of the institutionalization of the Buddha-sasana in Lanka during the reigns of kings Asoka and Devanampiyatissa, as well as the construction of relic monuments by the later Lankan king Dutthagamani. According to Berkwitz, this Sinhala narrative likely dates to the latter half of the thirteenth century. It was composed by a lay author, Parakrama Pandita, about whom little is known. Although the text itself does not express its debt to a Pali predecessor explicitly, Berkwitz argues that the Sinhala Thupavamsa post-dates the Pali Thupavamsa composed by the monk Vacissara in the early to mid-thirteenth century. "Parakrama's work contains a surplus of material that is not found in Vacissara's Pali text, although it obviously borrowed the plot and much description from the Pali version" (p. 9). As Berkwitz notes, and readers of other Pali vamsas will quickly recognize, the Sinhala Thupavamsa elaborates greatly on the biography of Sakyamuni Buddha and the story of his relics found in the famous early-sixth-century Pali Mahavamsa. In a clear and accessible introduction, Berkwitz contextualizes the composition of the Sinhala Thupavamsa in relation to wider Lankan developments in Sinhala devotional and historical literatures, the disintegration of strong polities based in the north-central city-states of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva, and what he calls the "ethics of Buddhist historiography" (p. 22,). With respect to the latter, Berkwitz usefully distils the main arguments from his earlier monograph, Buddhist History in the Vernacular: The Power of the Past in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Berkwitz's Sinhala Thupavamsa should be a welcome addition for scholars of southern Asian Buddhist history and literature, hampered in their teaching and research by the dearth of non-tipitaka and-atthakatha materials available either in reliable published editions or translations. The translation reads fluidly for the most part. Berkwitz manages to convey in...