Bruno M. Shirley

This project is an intellectual and social history of Buddhist sovereignties constructed and contested in the landscape of Polonnaruva (1157-1215), providing a rich case study with implications for comparative sovereignty across the Buddhist world and in the “global medieval.” Despite the significance given to Parakramabahu I's monastic reforms in later Buddhist histories of Southern Asia, we have an inadequate understanding of his vision of Buddhist sovereignty, and less still of how that vision was subverted or even contested by monks, later monarchs, and noblewomen in his Polonnaruva kingdom. Reading the landscape as a site of discourse offers more nuanced insights into the contingency of “Buddhist sovereignty” belied by textual sources which emphasise cohesion and continuity.

This project constitutes a translation and study of the “Vesaturu-da-kavi,” a late second millennium Sinhala-language poem based on the canonical “Vessantara-jataka.” While this poem, and others like it, have occasionally been dismissed as derivative of more authoritative works in Pali and Sanskrit, the project treats it instead as a work of serious Buddhological significance. The poem presents Vessantara as a high-poetic hero modelled on South Asian literary theory; yet its verses speak to such universal emotions that they have been used in both funerary and marriage rituals. The project offers the first English-language translation of this poem, and draws on literary and performance theory to interrogate the emotional and ethical implications of his sacrifices.