[Sidenote:  B.C. 119.]

[Sidenote:  B.C. 104.]

A signal effect of this regal policy, and of the growing diffusion of Buddhism, is to be traced in the impulse which it communicated to the reclamation of lands and the extension of cultivation.  For more than three hundred years no mention is made in the Singhalese annals of any mode of maintaining the priesthood other than the royal distribution of clothing and voluntary offerings of food.  They resorted for the “royal alms” either to the residence of the authorities or to halls specially built for their accommodation [1], to which they were summoned by “the shout of refection;” [2] the ordinary priests receiving rice, “those endowed with the gift of preaching, clarified butter, sugar, and honey."[3] Hospitals and medicines for their use, and rest houses on their journeys, were also provided at the public charge.[4] These expedients were available so long as the numbers of the priesthood were limited; but such were the multitudes who were tempted to withdraw from the world and its pursuits, in order to devote themselves to meditation and the diffusion of Buddhism, that the difficulty became practical of maintaining them by personal gifts, and the alternative suggested itself of setting apart lands for their support.  This innovation was first resorted to during an interregnum.  The Singhalese king Walagam Bahu, being expelled from his capital by a Malabar usurpation B.C. 104, was unable to continue the accustomed regal bounty to the priesthood; dedicated certain lands while in exile in Rohuna, for the support of a fraternity “who had sheltered him there."[5] The precedent thus established, was speedily seized upon and extended; lands were everywhere set apart for the repair of the sacred edifices[6], and eventually, about the beginning of the Christian era, the priesthood acquired such an increase of influence as sufficed to convert their precarious eleemosynary dependency into a permanent territorial endowment; and the practice became universal of conveying estates in mortmain on the construction of a wihara or the dedication of a temple.[7]

[Footnote 1:  Mahawanso, ch. xx. p. 123; xxii. p. 132,135.]

[Footnote 2:  Mahawanso, ch. xxviii. p. 167.]

[Footnote 3:  Mahawanso, ch. xxxii. p. 196-7.]

[Footnote 4:  Mahawanso, ch. xxxii. p. 196 xxxvii. p. 244; Rajaratnacari, p. 39, 41.]

[Footnote 5:  Mahawanso, ch, xxxiii. p. 203.  Previous to this date a king of Rohuna, during the usurpation of Elala, B.C. 205, had appropriated lands near Kalany, for the repairs of the dagoba.—­Rajaratnacari, p. 37.]

[Footnote 6:  In the reign of Batiya Tissa, B.C. 20. Mahawanso,, ch. xxxiv. p. 212; Rajaratnacari, p. 51.]

[Footnote 7:  Mahawanso, ch. xxxiv. p. 214.]

[Sidenote:  B.C. 104.]