veneration of the sacred tooth, the representations of Gotama’s previous lives, and the images of Maitreya, he does not allude to the worship of Avalokita and Manjusri or to anything that can be called definitely Mahayanist.  He describes a florid and somewhat superstitious worship which may have tended to regard the Buddha as superhuman, but the relics of Gotama’s body were its chief visible symbols and we have no ground for assuming that such teaching as is found in the Lotus sutra was its theological basis.  Yet we may legitimately suspect that the traditions of the Abhayagiri remount to early prototypes of that teaching.

In the second and third centuries the Court seems to have favoured the Mahavihara and King Gothabhaya banished monks belonging to the Vetulya sect,[48] but in spite of this a monk of the Abhayagiri named Sanghamitta obtained his confidence and that of his son, Mahasena, who occupied the throne from 275 to 302 A.D.  The Mahavihara was destroyed and its occupants persecuted at Sanghamitta’s instigation but he was murdered and after his death the great Monastery was rebuilt.  The triumph however was not complete for Mahasena built a new monastery called Jetavana on ground belonging to the Mahavihara and asked the monks to abandon this portion of their territory.  They refused and according to the Mahavamsa ultimately succeeded in proving their rights before a court of law.  But the Jetavana remained as the headquarters of a sect known as Sagaliyas.  They appear to have been moderately orthodox, but to have had their own text of the Vinaya for according to the Commentary[49] on the Mahavamsa they “separated the two Vibhangas of the Bhagava[50] from the Vinaya ... altering their meaning and misquoting their contents.”  In the opinion of the Mahavihara both the Abhayagiri and Jetavana were schismatical, but the laity appear to have given their respect and offerings to all three impartially and the Mahavamsa several times records how the same individual honoured the three Confraternities.

With the death of Mahasena ends the first and oldest part of the Mahavamsa, and also in native opinion the grand period of Sinhalese history, the subsequent kings being known as the Culavamsa or minor dynasty.  A continuation[51] of the chronicle takes up the story and tells of the doings of Mahasena’s son Sirimeghavanna.[52] Judged by the standard of the Mahavihara, he was fairly satisfactory.  He rebuilt the Lohapasada and caused a golden image of Mahinda to be made and carried in procession.  This veneration of the founder of a local church reminds one of the respect shown to the images of half-deified abbots in Tibet, China and Japan.  But the king did not neglect the Abhayagiri or assign it a lower position than the Mahavihara for he gave it partial custody of the celebrated relic known as the Buddha’s tooth which was brought to Ceylon from Kalinga in the ninth year of his reign and has ever since been considered the palladium of the island.