For 200 years, that is from about 1060 A.D. until the later decades of the thirteenth century, Pagan was a great centre of Buddhist culture not only for Burma but for the whole east, renowned alike for its architecture and its scholarship.  The former can still be studied in the magnificent pagodas which mark its site.  Towards the end of his reign Anawrata made not very successful attempts to obtain relics from China and Ceylon and commenced the construction of the Shwe Zigon pagoda.  He died before it was completed but his successors, who enjoyed fairly peaceful reigns, finished the work and constructed about a thousand other buildings among which the most celebrated is the Ananda temple erected by King Kyansitha.[152]

Pali literature in Burma begins with a little grammatical treatise known as Karika and composed in 1064 A.D. by the monk Dhammasenapati who lived in the monastery attached to this temple.  A number of other works followed.  Of these the most celebrated was the Saddaniti of Aggavamsa (1154), a treatise on the language of the Tipitaka which became a classic not only in Burma but in Ceylon.  A singular enthusiasm for linguistic studies prevailed especially in the reign of Kyocva (c. 1230), when even women are said to have been distinguished for the skill and ardour which they displayed in conquering the difficulties of Pali grammar.  Some treatises on the Abhidhamma were also produced.

Like Mohammedanism, Hinayanist Buddhism is too simple and definite to admit much variation in doctrine, but its clergy are prone to violent disputes about apparently trivial questions.  In the thirteenth century such disputes assumed grave proportions in Burma.  About 1175 A.D. a celebrated elder named Uttarajiva accompanied by his pupil Chapata left for Ceylon.  They spent some years in study at the Mahavihara and Chapata received ordination there.  He returned to Pagan with four other monks and maintained that valid ordination could be conferred only through the monks of the Mahavihara, who alone had kept the succession unbroken.  He with his four companions, having received this ordination, claimed power to transmit it, but he declined to recognize Burmese orders.  This pretension aroused a storm of opposition, especially from the Talaing monks.  They maintained that Arahanta who had reformed Buddhism under Anawrata was spiritually descended from the missionaries sent by Asoka, who were as well qualified to administer ordination as Mahinda.  But Chapata was not only a man of learning and an author[153] but also a vigorous personality and in favour at Court.  He had the best of the contest and succeeded in making the Talaing school appear as seceders from orthodoxy.  There thus arose a distinction between the Sinhalese or later school and the old Burmese school, who regarded one another as schismatics.  A scandal was caused in the Sinhalese community by Rahula, the ablest of Chapata’s disciples, who fell in love with an