Description

In the 15th century, the Buddhist king Dhammacetī sponsored a sīmā (ordination hall) reform that was to become the most famous of its kind in mainland Southeast Asia. Having wrangled with the hairs of monastic law concerning sīmās, Dhammacetī sent monks from his kingdom centered in what is now lower Myanmar to Sri Lanka in order to return with a pure ordination line. In a most significant historical decision, Dhammacetī had an account of these reforms inscribed on ten large stone slabs, which became known as the Kalyāṇī Inscriptions. While addressing matters of law, history, and political order, the inscriptions are also at their heart a sīmā text, that is, a text about the regulation of ritual boundaries and religious land. Drawing especially on these inscriptions, this paper explores elements of the ideational and border-making and border-crossing world Dhammacetī and others participated in and helped cultivate, even as they established innovations that would dramatically shape future memory, religio-political culture, and transregional identity.

Jason A. Carbine is the C. Milo Connick Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Whittier College. His research and teaching about religion and society combines historical and ethnographic approaches, and draws from an interdisciplinary body of research pertaining to the history and sociology of religions, textual studies, anthropology, and comparative religious ethics. His publications include Sons of the Buddha: Continuities and Ruptures in a Burmese Monastic Tradition (2011) and the co-edited volume How Theravāda is Theravāda? Exploring Buddhist Identities (2012). Carbine is currently preparing a new text and translation of the famous Kalyāṇī Inscriptions.

For information please contact Christoph Emmrich at christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca.