Conquered: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 7

Good advice is often nearer to hand than even the most foolish leader can imagine.  Or be minded to seek. One hundred and fifty years earlier, and six thousand six hundred and one kilometres away, Thucydides, whose work, The Peloponnesian War, set such standards for history as to anticipate every conceivable future military and political ploy, had the perfect solution in mind to fend off the catastrophe that befall Sri Lanka on the death of their visionary king, Devanampiya Tissa in 267 BCE – or 207 BCE, depending on whether you accept the tempered chronology of such scholars as the impossibly talented Wilhelm Geiger. That such advice could have been given or received is not as far-fetched as it first seems. The Mahavamsa refers to visits by what they call ‘yona’ to Sri Lanka in the fourth to third centuries BCE, ‘yona’ being the word the Persians used for their archenemy, the Greeks.   Other chroniclers note how Pandu Kabhaya established a special quarter of his dazzling new city, Anuradhapura, for foreign merchants, including, it is suspected, the Yona Greeks, sometime after 437 BCE. Just across the Palk Straits, in India’s current Bihar province, Megasthenes, the Greek Ambassador to the Maurya court around 290 BCE, was busy mixing with, amongst others, those very same Anuradhapuran Greeks who came to badger and barter with the Mauryas.  Historian as he was himself, he was also the sort of bookish man who may have had a few spare scrolls of Thucydides’ main works to lend to the governing literati of the time, including the Sri Lankan kings and their associates. But if there ever had been a loaning of scrolls, it seems that Devanampiya Tissa’s successors failed to read them. Indeed, they missed Thucydides’ most famous thoughts about the three “gravest failings,” namely “want of sense, of courage, or of vigilance”. For it was the want of all three, especially the last of these attributes, which was to tip the Vijayan kingdom not once but twice into such long and shocking periods of surrender that for well over half the intervening century it was a kingdom under occupation; its great city of Anuradhapura recast with a Tamil polish; and its plaintiff kings killed or exiled. Back in 267 BCE, as Devanampiya Tissa moved into what all would have hoped to have been Pari-Nirvana (the post-nirvana state of total release), this was far from what anyone would have thought even remotely possible. The great kingdom was utterly solid, surely? Unbreakable. Resilient. Or was it? For glum historians inclined to search for the deepest runes and trumpet them loudly, Devanampiya Tissa’s death was actually the start of a bleak three-hundred-year promenade that would lead to the dynasty’s inevitable collapse, a journey that would also fatally embed the country with an ongoing appetite for incipient disaster, regardless as to which dynasty, president, or occupying invader was calling the shots. Over this sorrowful period, through the reigns of almost 30 kings, Sri Lanka was to enjoy just three short periods of peace; interspersed with three Tamil invasions and occupations; several decades of continuous regicide; and a concluding civil war in which the Vijayans turned their spears dhunnas (bows), muguras (clubs), adayatiyas (javelins), kaduwas (swords) and kunthas (spears) upon one another until there was no credible heir left standing, merely an preposterous and fleeting lookalike monarch, until he too was murdered by a group of nobles for whom enough was quite enough. No one saw the turmoil that lay ahead.   That such chaos should await did not seem even wildly probable as Devanampiya Tissa’s brother, Uththiya, succeeded to the throne.  He was to be followed by two more brothers, Mahasiwa and Surathissa, all three of them, according to The Mahavamsa, ever on the side of neatness, to rule for respectably lengthy periods of ten years apiece.  Whether they died in their beds or were murdered by their successors over these thirty years is a guessing game for clowns.  The Mahavamsa maintains a prim muzzle on the matter. Indeed, the period was suspiciously uneventful; unnervingly calm even. All seemed fine with the state – and yet something, somewhere, was going fatally wrong. “What goes up,” said Isaac Newton, “must come down.” At best, it is probable that nothing happened, merely a governing indolence that spread like rising damp or unseen termites.   Perhaps all three brothers were so distracted by the promise of enlightenment as they got to grips with the new religion their brother had introduced, that they forgot about all other aspects of good governance.  Of vigilance, there was none; and over time, the kingdom’s defences and its ability to dominate and control its own destiny became fatally compromised as events were to show later. For Uttiya, his role must at times have seemed more chief mourner than king as first one and then another all-consuming state funerals took place, the like of which the country had never seen. First to go was Mahinda, prince, monk, missionary, and saint, “the light of Lanka,” who had first brought Buddhism to the island from India.   Dying aged eighty in 205 BCE, he was considered to have become an Arhat, one who, having gained insight into the true nature of existence, had been most happily liberated from the troublesome cycle of rebirth.  Uttiya assiduously collected the evangelist’s relics and busied himself constructing stupas over them, laying him to rest with a single hair of Lord Buddha in Mihintale’s stunning Ambasthala Stupa, surrounded by two tall rows of slender stone pillars carved with lions, birds and dwarfs.  Hardly had he or the country recovered from this devastating, step-changing bereavement than a second struck just two years later when Sangamitta, Mahinda’s sister, bearer of the bo-tree, princess, nun, and saint, died just a year short of eighty.   Once again, King Uttiya busied himself with stupa-building, erecting the Sangamiththa Stupa over her ashes in Anuradhapura, his own reign drawing to a shattered end just a few years later. He was succeeded by his brother, Mahasiwa, whose own ten-year rule, from 257 BCE – 247 BCE, goes almost as unremembered - apart from the fact that he built the Nagarangana Monastery, whose location is now the subject of modest arguments.  The king, noted The Mahavamsa approvingly, was especially careful to protect “the pious”. He was said to have been very close to one of Mahinda’s principal followers, Thera Bhaddasara, a relationship that may further indicate how preoccupied the crown was with matters spiritual rather than temporal.  By the time Mahasiwa’s brother (or possibly uncle) Surathissa took the throne in 247 BCE, things were clearly going most seriously wrong, and the young country would have been wise to take to heart the words of the Egyptian writer, Suzy Kassem: “Never follow a follower. It's why the whole world is falling apart.”   For by now the kingdom itself was falling apart. It had become so ineptly run and poorly defended as to lay itself wide open to invasion – the first recorded invasion of the country from South India.  Three kings, and three decades on from the...