The Dipavamsa and Sri Lankan catastrophe traditions
- Date of account
- Nineteenth-century Pali scholarship; underlying chronicle earlier
- Location
- Sri Lanka
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
The Dipavamsa, an early Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka, became part of nineteenth-century European and South Asian Buddhist textual scholarship. Its origin narratives, sacred geography, and accounts of Buddhist ordering of the island offer a comparison point for catastrophe traditions, even where the text does not present a single ark-style deluge. The research lead concerns how later interpreters connected island transformation, water imagery, and Buddhist salvation history. Its usefulness depends on reading it alongside the Mahavamsa and avoiding assumptions that every origin episode records a natural disaster.
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