The influence of Atula, who must have been an astute if not learned man, continued after the king’s death and no measures were taken against the Ekamsikas, although King Hsin-byu-shin (1763-1776) persecuted an heretical sect called Paramats.[165] His youthful successor, Sing-gu-sa, was induced to hold a public disputation.  The Ekamsikas were defeated in this contest and a royal decree was issued making the Parupana discipline obligatory.  But the vexed question was not settled for it came up again in the long reign (1781-1819) of Bodopaya.  This king has won an evil reputation for cruelty and insensate conceit,[166] but he was a man of vigour and kept together his great empire.  His megalomania naturally detracted from the esteem won by his piety.  His benefactions to religion were lavish, the shrines and monasteries which he built innumerable.  But he desired to build a pagoda larger than any in the world and during some twenty years wasted an incalculable amount of labour and money on this project, still commemorated by a gigantic but unfinished mass of brickwork now in ruins.  In order to supervise its erection he left his palace and lived at Mingun, where he conceived the idea that he was a Buddha, an idea which had not been entirely absent from the minds of Alompra and Hsin-byu-shin.  It is to the credit of the Theras that, despite the danger of opposing an autocrat as cruel as he was crazy, they refused to countenance these pretensions and the king returned to his palace as an ordinary monarch.

If he could not make himself a Buddha, he at least disposed of the Ekamsika dispute, and was probably influenced in his views by Nanabhivamsa, a monk of the Parupana school whom he made his chaplain, although Atula was still alive.  At first he named a commission of enquiry, the result of which was that the Ekamsikas admitted that their practice could not be justified from the scriptures but only by tradition.  A royal decree was issued enjoining the observance of the Parupana discipline, but two years later Atula addressed a letter to the king in which he maintained that the Ekamsika costume was approved in a work called Culaganthipada, composed by Moggalana, the immediate disciple of the Buddha.  The king ordered representatives of both parties to examine this contention and the debate between them is dramatically described in the Sasanavamsa.  It was demonstrated that the text on which Atula relied was composed in Ceylon by a thera named Moggalana who lived in the twelfth century and that it quoted mediaeval Sinhalese commentaries.  After this exposure the Ekamsika party collapsed.  The king commanded (1784) the Parupana discipline to be observed and at last the royal order received obedience.