He was conducted back to the capital; and Kasyapa, suspecting that the king was concealing his riches for his second son, Mogallana, gave the order for his execution.  Arrayed in royal insignia, he repaired to the prison of the raja, and continued to walk to and fro in his presence:  till the king, perceiving his intention to wound his feelings, said mildly, “Lord of statesmen, I bear the same affection towards you as to Mogallana.”  The usurper smiled and shook his head; then stripping the king naked and casting him into chains, he built up a wall, embedding him in it with his face towards the east, and enclosed it with clay:  “thus the monarch Dhatu-Sena, who was murdered by his son, united himself with Sakko the ruler of Devos."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Mahawanso, ch. xxxviii.  To this hideous incident Mahanamo adds the following curious moral:  “This Raja Dhatu Sena, at the time he was improving the Kalawapi tank, observed a certain priest absorbed in meditation, and not being able to rouse him from abstraction, had him buried under the embankment by heaping earth over him.  His own living entombment was the retribution manifested in this life for that impious act.”]

[Sidenote:  A.D. 477.]

The parricide next directed his groom and his cook to assassinate his brother, who, however, escaped to the coast of India.[1] Failing in the attempt, he repaired to Sihagiri, a place difficult of access to men, and having cleared it on all sides, he surrounded it with a rampart.  He built three habitations, accessible only by flights of steps, and ornamented with figures of lions (siho), whence the fortress takes its name, Siha-giri, “the Lion Rock.”  Hither he carried the treasures of his father, and here he built a palace, “equal in beauty to the celestial mansion.”  He erected temples to Buddha, and monasteries for his priests, but conscious of the enormity of his crimes, these endowments were conferred in the names of his minister and his children.  Failing to “derive merit” from such acts, stung with remorse, and anxious to test public feeling, he enlarged his deeds of charity; he formed gardens at the capital, and planted groves of mangoes throughout the island.  Desirous to enrich a wihara at Anarajapoora, he proposed to endow it with a village, but “the ministers of religion, regardful of the reproaches of the world, declined accepting gifts at the hands of a parricide.  Kasyapa, bent on befriending them, dedicated the village to Buddha, after which they consented, on the ground that it was then the property of the divine teacher.”  Impelled, says the Mahawanso, by the irrepressible dread of a future existence, he strictly performed his “aposaka"[2] vows, practised the virtue of non-procrastination, acquired the “dathanga,"[3] and caused books to be written, and image and alms-edifices to be formed.

[Footnote 1:  I am indebted to the family of the late Mr. Turnour for access to a manuscript translation of a further portion of the Mahawanso, from which this continuation of the narrative is extracted.]