It was the year 489 of the Buddha’s Parinibbana (traditionally c. 100 BCE). Famine had thinned the ranks of the monks, but a different kind of hunger gnawed at Ananda: the hunger to preserve a memory.
Dhammakitti obeyed. He wrote the Mahavamsa .
The story ends with a final irony.
“I have read the Dipavamsa ,” Dhammakitti said. “It is… a skeleton.”
“No king will believe this,” Ananda muttered, dipping his pen. “It reads like a monk’s dream.” dipavamsa and mahavamsa pdf
“Venerable,” he asked Mahanama, “were the yakkhas truly evil, or just the old gods of this land?”
In the end, the island kept both: the rough truth in a stone casket, and the golden poem in a royal court. And history, as always, was simply the argument between them. It was the year 489 of the Buddha’s
His novice, Sumana, looked up. “But Venerable, it is the truth.”