[Footnote 1:  The twelfth tablet, which, as translated by BURNOUF and Professor WILSON, will be found in Mrs. SPEIR’S Life in Ancient India, book ii. ch. iv. p. 239.]

[Sidenote:  A.D. 209.]

[Sidenote:  A.D. 248.]

The obligation, to maintain the religion of Buddha was as binding as the command to abstain from assailing that of its rivals, and hence the kings who had treated the snake-worshippers with kindness, who had made a state provision for maintaining “offerings to demons,” and built dwellings at the capital to accommodate the “ministers of foreign religions,” rose in fierce indignation against the preaching of a firm believer in Buddha, who ventured to put an independent interpretation on points of faith.  They burned the books of the Wytulians, as the new sect were called, and frustrated their irreligious attempt.[1] The first effort at repression was ineffectual.  It was made by the King Wairatissa, A.D. 209; but within forty years the schismatic tendency returned, the persecution was renewed, and the apostate priests, after being branded on the back were ignominiously transported to the opposite coast of India.[2]

[Footnote 1:  The Mahawanso throws no light on the nature of the Wytulian (or Wettulyan) heresy (ch. xxvii. p. 227), but the Rajaratnacari insinuates that Wytulia was a Brahman who had “subverted by craft and intrigue the religion of Buddha” (ch. ii, p. 61).  As it is stated in a further passage that the priests who were implicated were stripped of their habits, it is evident that the innovation had been introduced under the garb of Buddha.—­Rajaratnacari, ch. ii. p. 65.]

[Footnote 2:  TURNOUR’S Epitome, p. 25, Mahawanso, ch. xxxvi. p. 232.  As the Mahawanso intimates in another passage that amongst the priests who were banished to the opposite coast of India, there was one Sangha-mitta, “who was profoundly versed in the rites of the demon faith (’bhuta’),” it is probable that out of the Wytulian heresy grew the system which prevails to the present day, by which the heterodox dewales and halls for devil dances are built in close contiguity to the temples and wiharas of the orthodox Buddhists, and the barbarous rites of demon worship are incorporated with the abstractions of the national religion.  On the restoration of Maha-Sen to the true faith, the Mahawanso represents him as destroying the dewales at Anarajapoora in order to replace them with wiharas (Mahawanso, ch. xxxvii. p. 237).  An account of the mingling of Brahmanical with Buddhist worship, as it exists at the present day, will be found in HARDY’S Oriental Monachism, ch. xix.  Professor H.H.  WILSON, in his Historical Sketch of the Kingdom of Pandya, alludes to a heresy, which, anterior to the sixth century, disturbed the sangattar or college of Madura; the leading feature of which was the admixture of Buddhist doctrines with the rite of the Brahmans, and “this heresy,” he says, “some traditions assert was introduced from Ceylon.”—­Asiat.  Journ. vol. iii. p. 218.]