Dangerous Friendships in Eighteenth-Century Buddhist Laṅkā and Siam

Abstract

The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected across Indian Ocean waters in the mid-eighteenth century by Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) traders, leading to the importation of valuable Siamese Buddhist monks and their ordination lineage to the island. Two series of events related to the VOC's search for and delivery of these monks demonstrate that the patronage of connected religious dynamics—not just the contingencies of trade, land, labour, and statecraft—was an essential aspect of Company business. At the same time, mediating Buddhist connection was a dangerous, sometimes perilous undertaking. Analysing VOC records alongside Laṅkān and Siamese historical chronicles and travelogues reveals that what were initially friendly connections at first necessitated, and later intensified certain forms of danger. We begin with perilous shipwrecks and diplomatic impasses across monsoon waters that eventually led to the restoration of an important but defunct Kandyan Buddhist ordination lineage, and conclude with the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt in 1760 against the royal patron of that lineage transmission. I advance the notion of “dangerous friendships” to characterise how Buddhist courts and European traders worked together to first generate, and then exploit, friendly religious connections.

Full text

ARTICLE
Dangerous Friendships in Eighteenth-Century Buddhist
Lan
ka
and Siam
Tyler A. Lehrer
University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Email: tlehrer@wisc.edu
Abstract
The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected
across Indian Ocean waters in the mid-eighteenth century by Dutch East India Company (hereafter
VOC) traders, leading to the importation of valuable Siamese Buddhist monks and their ordination
lineage to the island. Two series of events related to the VOC’s search for and delivery of these
monks demonstrate that the patronage of connected religious dynamics—not just the contingencies
of trade, land, labour, and statecraft—was an essential aspect of Company business. At the same
time, mediating Buddhist connection was a dangerous, sometimes perilous undertaking.
Analysing VOC records alongside Laṅkān and Siamese historical chronicles and travelogues reveals
that what were initially friendly connections at first necessitated, and later intensified certain forms
of danger. We begin with perilous shipwrecks and diplomatic impasses across monsoon waters that
eventually led to the restoration of an important but defunct Kandyan Buddhist ordination lineage,
and conclude with the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt in 1760 against the royal patron of
that lineage transmission. I advance the notion of “dangerous friendships”to characterise how
Buddhist courts and European traders worked together to first generate, and then exploit, friendly
religious connections.
Keywords: Kandy; Ceylon; Sri Lanka; Ayutthaya; Siam; Thailand; Dutch East India Company; VOC;
Friendship; Danger; Buddhism
Introduction
In their attempts to forge religious connections across what are now Sri Lanka and
Thailand between 1741 and 1760, Buddhist monks, together with Dutch traders, traversed
dangerous maritime frontiers to restore friendly religious relations amongst independent
kingdoms separated by the Bay of Bengal. As Sunil Amrith has observed, in this “world
shaped by the movement of names and stories,”emotion and rapport, as much as reason
and law, determined how one made a life on the move and how one managed the dangers
one encountered along the way.
1
While benefitting from decades of work following Sanjay
Subrahmanyam’s call to write “connected histories”of early modern Eurasia,
2
this article
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University.
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creative
commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article
is properly cited.
1
Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2013), 283.
2
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,”
Modern Asian Studies 31:3 (1997), 761–2.
Itinerario (2022), 1–20
doi:10.1017/S0165115322000213
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115322000213 Published online by Cambridge University Press

aspires, as Jeremy Adelman has recently suggested, to “reckon with disintegration as well
as integration, the costs and not just the bounty of interdependence.”
3
In early modern
Laṅkā, Zoltán Biedermann has shown that the very instruments of connection—commu-
nication, dialogue, translatability, even shared political ambition—have served as tools for
the eventual conquest of one party by another.
4
On the ground (and also in the middle of
the ocean), the coproduction of the “global”and the “local”rested on forms of connection
between parties who believed such interactions to be connectable.
5
Often times, acts of
connection gained efficacy through attestations of friendship, a rhetorical and diplomatic
discourse in a world made more dangerous, I will argue, by the demands and experience
of interconnection.
By focusing on “dangerous friendships”between the ambitious individual actors who
made up powerful institutions like company-state, trading house, indigenous court, and
religious saṅgha, I suggest that what looks like connective tissue between European tra-
ders and Buddhist Indian Ocean polities might be better understood as a range of dynam-
ics where the potential for connection and disintegration are equally present. This article
also endeavours to show that amongst the surprising dynamics that temporarily brought
the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company, hereafter VOC) and
the Kandyan and Ayutthayan courts together were the Company’s extensive efforts to bol-
ster, and then exploit, a Buddhist ordination lineage.
I analyse the importance of Buddhist monks to the interconnected but fractious polit-
ical fortunes of Laṅkāand Siam, independent kingdoms briefly joined in maritime reli-
gious diplomacy in the mid-eighteenth century by the VOC’s self-serving fealty to
Kandy, and its desire for increased trading opportunities in the gulf of Siam. I first ask
how the religious interests of Laṅkāand Siam were brought together by the maritime
and mercantilist prowess of Dutch traders, and also what characterised the experiences
of Buddhist monks and envoys on Dutch ships. Second, I ask why this short-lived and ten-
dentious relationship was forged, and especially why it fell apart in maritime “Southern
Asia,”an interconnected zone which had not, by the middle of the eighteenth century,
achieved the academic and geopolitical areal designations which nowadays distinguish
Southeast and South Asia.
6
While the commercial success of the VOC across Southern Asia declined over the eight-
eenth century, its trading operations continued to direct the flow of everyday life for sea-
faring communities in the eastern half of the Indian Ocean. In this mercantilist and
monsoon environment, the religious and diplomatic interests of the predominantly
Buddhist kingdoms of Ayutthaya (now Thailand) and Kandy (in Sri Lanka) were brought
together not only by the maritime and economic prowess of Dutch traders, but more
acutely by the shared demands of what Anne M. Blackburn has called “religious state-
craft,”which co-entailed the management of Buddhism with the affairs of the state.
7
More specifically, across what Tilman Frasch has characterised as a shared Theravāda
Buddhist “ecumene”in the early modern Bay of Bengal, for generations the importation
of fresh upasampadā(Pāli: monastic ordination) conferring monks has been an important
3
Jeremy Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?,”Aeon, 2 March 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-his-
tory-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment.
4
Zoltán Biedermann, (Dis)Connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Hapsburg
Conquest in Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 219.
5
Ibid., 17.
6
Anne M. Blackburn and R. Michael Feener, “Sufis and Saṅgha in Motion: Toward a Comparative Study of
Religious Orders and Networks in Southern Asia,”in Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative
Perspectives, ed. R. Michael Feener and Anne M. Blackburn (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018), 8–9.
7
Anne M. Blackburn, “Buddhist Technologies of Statecraft and Millennial Moments,”History & Theory 56:1
(2017), 77–9.
2 Tyler A. Lehrer
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115322000213 Published online by Cambridge University Press

duty for Buddhist kings whenever their local lineages go into periodic decline.
8
This ten-
dentious and brief period of connection between Buddhist centres mediated by European
traders in the eighteenth century was not, I will argue, indicative of a sustained network.
Instead, between the 1740s and 1760s, the search for and delivery of Siamese Buddhist
monks to Kandy by the VOC, and especially what came after, was a perilously undertaken
and politically dangerous one-off triangular diplomatic endeavour carried out by indivi-
duals who called each another friends, but whose interactions left each more vulnerable
than before.
Social and economic histories of VOC trading operations in Southern Asia tend to
undervalue the role of connected indigenous religious dynamics. Similarly, accounts of
Buddhist connectivity between Laṅkāand Siam often deemphasise the role of the VOC.
Both historiographic vantages tend to favour broad institutional dynamics over the ambi-
tious individual actors and relationships these eminently more powerful institutions com-
prised. Philip Stern has argued that as commercial, political, and diplomatic
intermediaries between Asian and European courts, British and Dutch “company-states”
were marked by flexible forms of political power that drew from adopting alternating
stances of “deference and defiance”as interactions with local polities dictated.
9
In
Madurai and in Laṅkā, Markus Vink has argued that parties on each side of the encounter
were drawn together by a shared interest in trade, leading towards unstable and complex
relationships fraught with conflict and coexistence alike. Vink’s characterisation draws
from multiple historiographic articulations of this uneasy dynamic: an “Age of
Contained Conflict”(Sanjay Subramanyam), a “Balance of Blackmail”(Ashin Das Gupta),
“Perceived Mutual Advantage”(Om Prakash), “Conflict-Ridden Symbiosis”(Chris Bayly),
“Co-operation or Acquiescence and Accommodations”(Peter Marshall), and “Two-Way
Dependency”(David Ludden).
10
While this article does not dispute these characterisations, it endeavours to demon-
strate that in eighteenth-century Laṅkāand Siam, Buddhism was crucial to this balance
of conflict and coexistence. As Biedermann has argued, at least as important as trade
and statecraft were the social and geographic spaces in which early modern communica-
tion was carried out, and especially where and why it broke down.
11
Chris Nierstrasz has
suggested that although in the second half of the eighteenth century the VOC was still in a
powerful enough position to strong-arm Kandy to bow to its economic interests, it assidu-
ously avoided doing so whenever possible for fear of driving up costs, or worse, causing
the valuable labour force of cinnamon peelers (over whom Kandy still exerted political
influence) to escape into the reclusive kingdom.
12
Foremost in the Kandyan monarch’s
arsenal of political control over this force was his power to inspire Buddhist fervour
amongst local populations of VOC-employed labourers. Thus, a careful status quo was
tenuously and inconsistently maintained. For the VOC, the mediation of local religious
demands became an increasingly important, as well as complex and expensive business.
Into this mix of commerce and politics this article foregrounds a consideration of reli-
gious diplomacy and its dangers in the hands of Buddhist monks and VOC traders,
8
Tilman Frasch, “The Theravāda Buddhist Ecumene in the Fifteenth Century: Intellectual Foundations and
Material Representations,”in Buddhism across Asia: Networks of Material, Intellectual and Cultural Exchange, ed.
Tansen Sen (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2014), 347–68.
9
Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in
India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13.
10
Marcus P. M. Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of
Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 4.
11
Biedermann, (Dis)Connected Empires,16–7.
12
Chris Nierstrasz, In the Shadow of the Company: The Dutch East India Company and Its Servants in the Period of Its
Decline (1740–1796) (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 51.
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focusing centrally on both the VOC’s as well as Laṅkān and Ayutthayan archives’articu-
lations of “friendship.”In my argument, friendship is a rhetorical tool used to manage
fractious diplomatic relationships between Kandyan, Siamese, and Dutch parties in envir-
onmentally and politically dangerous climates. My conceptualisation of friendship draws
on Evgeny Roshchin’s observation that over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, diplomatic communication grew beyond the contingencies of treaty making,
and increasingly comprised dynamic moral relationships expressed in the language of
friendship. These friendships in turn constituted the very grounds upon which tenuous
and unequal political alliances were constructed and maintained.
13
Roshchin argues
that the efficacy of social bonds like religion and kinship for enforcing rulemaking or adju-
dicating disputes began to erode, and as a result, alternative instruments became neces-
sary to manage new political arrangements in bi- and multi-lateral global engagements
without a singular central authority.
14
To focus on the role of early modern friendships,
argues Roshchin, is also to uncover linkages and fractures underneath the façade of the
eminently more powerful institutional forms of which they are constructed and
maintained.
15
By focusing on friendship in service of religious connections forged over dangerous
waters and foreign lands, this article draws methodologically on what Remco Raben
has recently characterised as an “eccentric reading”of VOC colonial documentation
alongside Buddhist historical chronicles, letters, and travelogues. Raben calls on historians
to resist the “gravitational force”of the colonial archive’s epistemologies by reading
“beyond the archival grain.”
16
I endeavour to heed this call by contrasting VOC corres-
pondence and the reports of its traders and governors with Laṅkān and mainland
Southeast Asian travelogues and Buddhist chronicles. To develop the argument about
“dangerous friendships,”I first reconstruct the motivations of the Kandyan,
Ayutthayan, and Dutch parties to the Buddhist ordination lineage transmission between
the 1740s and 1760s before engaging two series of events demonstrating that what
were initially friendly connections forged over perilous waters became increasingly desta-
bilising conduits of political intrigue and danger.
First, accounts of fatal shipwrecks, ships running aground in unfamiliar territories, and
illnesses contracted abroad reveal how Kandyan, Siamese, and European monks, traders,
and sailors managed environmental and physical hazards in service of religious connec-
tion. As successive groups of apprehensive monks and envoys stepped aboard VOC ships
in the wake of earlier failed voyages, in their travelogues and historical chronicles we see
how they sought to mitigate these perils at sea with Buddhist protective rituals. We then
move from the danger of the monsoon ocean to that of personal animosity and political
rebellion at the Ayutthayan and Kandyan courts. Bringing the reports of VOC spies con-
cerning a 1760 assassination attempt (plotted by Siamese and Kandyan monks) against
Kandy’s King Kīrti ŚrīRājasiṃha (r. 1747–82) to bear on the rapidly changing feelings
and fortunes of each party, I advance the notion of “dangerous friendship”to characterise
the religious (dis)connection at the centre of a now-disintegrating triangular relationship.
During the 1760s and especially after, the foreign-born “Nāyakkar”king and his family,
descendants of a high-caste matrilineal dynasty of Southern Indian nobles, increasingly
13
Evgeny Roshchin, Friendship Among Nations: History of a Concept (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2017), 7–8.
14
Ibid., 9.
15
Ibid., 219–20.
16
Remco Raben, “Ethnic Disorder in VOC Asia: A Plea for Eccentric Reading,”BMGN—Low Countries Historical
Review 134:2 (2019), 116–7.
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became the target of personal and political troubles which were justified in terms of his
religious, and later, ethnic classifications.
While the diplomatic language of Buddhist and Dutch parties to this tendentious,
sometimes perilous, and ultimately short-lived moment of triangular religious diplomacy
was one of friendship, by drawing itself more intimately into the religious affairs of
Ayutthaya and Kandy, the VOC’s friendship was a dangerous one. Furthermore, despite
the religious and political value of the exchange of monks for both kingdoms, by enthu-
siastically drawing themselves more intimately into one another’s religious dynamics, this
“Buddhist friendship”would have dangerous political consequences, especially for Kandy,
consequences the VOC was—because of its ongoing mediation of Buddhist connection—
uniquely poised to exploit. The Company, eager to exacerbate political turmoil in
Kandy and newly appreciative of the shared importance of Buddhism to both kingdoms,
attempted to install a Siamese puppet king on the throne in the aftermath of that failed
rebellion.
17
Siamese and Burmese Buddhist chronicles and VOC intelligence about these
events reveal how royals, monks, and Dutch agents navigated the disconnected world
of hazardous political intrigue left in the wake of those earlier missions of friendly
religious diplomacy.
The VOC as Buddhist Cultural Broker
The Cūḷavaṃsa (an eighteenth-century continuation of the Mahāvaṃsa chronicle) sum-
marises this remarkable triangulation between the Kandyan court under the reign of
King Kīrti ŚrīRājasiṃha and before, the Ayutthayan court under King Borommakot
(r. 1733–58) and after, and the VOC. Upon receiving a request from Kandy to supply
monks to the island, the chronicle relays that in 1751 “the wise king [Borommakot]
[. . .] chose a chapter of priests, at the head of whom was Upāli, an elder distinguished
for moderation and contentment, and endued with gentle manners, and of an upright
behaviour. [. . .] A stately ship that was thus sent with an image of [a] gold [Buddha]
and other presents which made the voyage across the deep sea that abounded in terrors
and perils, arriving in perfect safety [. . .] in the beautiful island of Laṇká.”
18
Wise kings,
upright monks, and perfectly safe voyages made in stately ships across seas full of terror
and peril (Figure 1)? This late eighteenth century Pāli chronicle of the monarchs and
monks involved in restoring Kandy’sbhikkhu (Pāli: full male monk) ordination lineage por-
trays the Dutch as “charged with the protection of (the seacoast of) [Laṅkā].”
19
Before
considering the perils of the sea and of foreign courts, let us first consider why the
VOC acted at its own material and financial risk as the broker of Buddhist monks between
Ayutthaya and Kandy.
Dhiravat na Pombejra and Remco Raben characterise the relationship between the two
crowns and the Company as especially fractious. Their contact was lubricated by friendly
diplomatic programmes of negotiation and gift giving, but was ultimately bolstered by
espionage,
20
and personal animosity was rife amongst parties calling one another friend.
17
Reinier Broekhuizen, “VOC als Kingmaker: Hoe de VOC een Thaise Prins op de Troon van Kandy Wilde
Zetten,”(MA Thesis, Utrecht University, 2013), 59–71; K. W. Goonewardena, “A Dutch Mission to Tenesserim
and Glimpses of the Mid-Eighteenth Century Ayutthayan Kingdom,”in International Conference on Thai Studies,
August 22–24, 1984, Bangkok, vol. 3, Relations Between Thailand and Other Countries (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn
University, 1984), 10.
18
L. C. Wijesiṇha, trans., The Mahávaṇsa, Part II: Containing Chapters XXXIX to C (Colombo: George J. A. Skeen,
Government Printer, 1889), 360–2.
19
Ibid., 360.
20
Remco Raben and Dhiravat na Pombejra, “Tipping Balances: King Borommakot and the Dutch East India
Company,”in In the King’s Trail: An 18th Century Dutch Journey to the Buddha’s Footprint: Theodorus Jacobus van
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For example, in his 1757 Memoir, Joan Gideon Loten, the VOC governor at Colombo from
1752 to 1757, betrayed a rather negative opinion of the “blood-relations”of Kīrti Śrī
Rājasiṃha. “[T]he Nayakars,”he wrote, “are certainly the instruments most subversive
of the Company’s interests on this Island, and who for no other reason than their own
advantage do nothing but attempt to wrest from the Company the profits which it has
enjoyed since early times and divert them to themselves.”
21
In the final section of the art-
icle, we will return to some ways in which this fraught “Nāyakkar”designation was used.
Similarly, in Siam, in the journal of Theodorus van den Heuvel, the VOC opperkoopman
(Dutch: chief merchant) at Ayutthaya from 1735 to 1740, King Borommakot is described
as “greedy,”“arbitrary,”and as having a “capricious temperament.”
22
In spite of these perceptions, friendly relations with Kandy were essential to the
Company’s business on the island, and to the continued control of its ports.
23
Batavian
authorities directed Company officials in Colombo to placate the Kandyan aristocracy
Figure 1. Two sacred Buddha footprints—one in Siam, the other in Lan
ka
—separated by a sea “abounding in
terrors and perils.”Wall painting, Wat Phutthaisawan, Ayutthaya, Thailand, circa late seventeenth century.
Photographed by author.
Den Heuvel’s Account of His Voyage to Phra Phutthabat in 1737, ed. Remco Raben and Dhiravat na Pombejra (Bangkok:
Royal Netherlands Embassy, 1997), 64.
21
Joan Gideon Loten, Memoir of Joan Gideon Loten, Governor of Ceylon, Delivered to His Successor Jan Schreuder on
February 28, 1757, trans. E. Reimers (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1935), 10–1.
22
Bhawan Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants at the Court of Ayutthaya: Dutch Perceptions of the Thai
Kingdom, c. 1604–1765 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 184, 192; Raben and na Pombejra, “Tipping Balances,”74.
23
L. S. Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 1707–1782 (Colombo: Stamford Lake, 2008), 99.
6 Tyler A. Lehrer
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in order to enjoy, to the fullest extent possible, access to the kingdom’s cinnamon lands.
24
Nira Wickramasinghe has demonstrated that Kandy’s stance was to regard the VOC’s pres-
ence and trading operations on the island littoral as the “feudatories”and protectors of its
interests.
25
This perception was also reflected in the experiences of ordinary labourers
living in the intermediate zones between the kingdom and low-lying VOC-controlled
territories, who Kandy had little difficulty recruiting when war erupted against the
VOC in the mid-1760s. However, the Company’s relationship with Kandy does not alone
explain why the VOC would supply the ships, labour, and costly gifts needed to restore
a Buddhist ordination lineage. Lorna Dewaraja has suggested that if the Dutch had not
been willing to supply vessels in service of Kandy’s desire to revive the defunct bhikkhu
lineage, it was likely they would have turned to British forces in Madras, or to the
French in Pondicherry.
26
Of no less importance is the Company’s relationship with Ayutthaya, and the motiva-
tions of King Borommakot to dispatch monks, texts, and ritual objects on Dutch ships. In
the Ayutthaya Chronicles we learn that the Siamese king “manifested His holy compassion
by being pleased to have crown servants commissioned as an embassy to convey a holy
royal missive and escort articles of royal tribute [. . .] to the Holy Lord of Langka. Then
the King was pleased to have the Reverend Ubali [Upāli] and the Reverend Ariya Muni
[. . .] go out to establish the Holy Buddhist Religion and ordain noble youths within the
Continent of Langka.”
27
Why Ayutthaya? The suggestion that the VOC might search for
bhikkhus in Siam rather than from Pegu or Arakan—from which Kandy had initially
hoped to locate them—most likely came from Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff, governor-
general of Batavia from 1743 to 1750, who had served as the governor of Colombo before
that.
28
After consulting with Abraham Arnouts, his Colombo opperkoopman (who was pre-
viously based in Siam), the Company persuaded an influential courtier named Leuke
Ralehamy, a Kandyan disāva (Sinhala: provincial chief administrator) that the manner
of Buddhism practised in Pegu was also found in Siam. Not incidentally, there, and not
in Burma, the Company had a lodge, and a relatively amicable but unstable trading rela-
tionship. Correspondence between the VOC and Kandy in 1746 reveals that the Company
deemed a mission to Pegu absolutely “out of the question,”writing that Arakan would
also be impossible because “here, too, the realm has been troubled by heavy internal war-
fare. [. . .] Thus, no Dutchman dare visit without fear of death.”
29
Incredibly, during the 1740s the VOC was employed by Kandy to determine the suitabil-
ity of Buddhist monastic practices in mainland Southeast Asia.
30
After its trading opera-
tions in Siam dwindled to one ship a year following a withdraw in 1741, the Company’s
desire to reestablish contact with Ayutthaya, as intermediaries of Kandy’s own desire
to acquire monks from a friendly foreign court, was an opportunity it could not refuse.
31
na Pombejra and Raben have argued that the VOC’s patronage of Buddhist connections
24
Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “Baron van Imhoff and Dutch Policy in Ceylon 1736-1740,”Bijdragen Tot de
Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 118, no. 4 (1962): 456–7.
25
Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 12.
26
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka,99–100.
27
Richard D. Cushman, trans., The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya: A Synoptic Translation, ed. David K. Wyatt
(Bangkok: The Siam Society Under Royal Patronage, 2006), 452.
28
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 100.
29
Dutch National Archives, The Hague [hereafter DNA], VOC 9897: Translation Sinhala ola ŚrīVijaya Rājasiṃha
to Governor Julius Stein van Gollenesse, 25 September 1746; Report of Meeting of Kandyan Envoys with the Dutch
Governor, 10 July 1746.
30
K. W. Goonewardena, “Ayutthia in the Twilight Years and Its Triangular Relations with the V.O.C. and Sri
Lanka,”Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 6:1 & 2 (1980), 7, 28.
31
Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants, 195.
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was not at all altruistic, and despite the significant expenses it incurred hoping to placate
Kandy so that the kingdom would “remain tractable, dependent, and inclined to grant
trade privileges,”in Ayutthaya, the Company endeavoured unsuccessfully to gain access
to surplus rice and other commodities it hoped to secure as backup for its Laṅkān and
Southern Indian settlements.
32
Of course, maritime religious connections across Southern Asia long predate the arrival
of European explorers and traders. After the centralisation—purification, in a Buddhist
hermeneutic—of the Laṅkānbhikkhu orders under the MahāVihāra temple in
Anuradhapura in the twelfth century, numerous mainland Buddhist centres ranging
from Arakan, Pegu, Nakhon si Thammarat, Sukhothai, and Ayutthaya intensified their
exchanges of monks, texts, and knowledge with the newly prestigious form of Laṅkān
monasticism.
33
New evidentiary syntheses of archaeological and textual evidence by
Himanshu Prabha Ray and Kate Crosby also point to underacknowledged Buddhist ritual
and meditation practices which circulated across the region, many of them carried to
Kandy by the Siamese monks.
34
By the sixteenth century, Ayutthaya emerged as a pros-
perous and cosmopolitan upriver Siamese capital, with designated trading zones for
Siamese, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, and Dutch alike, and an impressive artistic,
intellectual, legal, and of course, religious output. Due in part to the growing size and
complexity of that society, Buddhism increasingly became an important legal, moral,
and political technology around which it could become organised, and concomitantly,
Ayutthaya began to envision itself as a new and important centre of the Buddhist
world. King Borommakot helped to advance the centrality of Buddhism in both respects.
35
King Borommakot selected a master in the Vinaya (Pāli: ordination rules and principles
of monastic community conduct) named Upāli Mahāthero to lead the first mission to
Laṅkāin 1751–53. Between 1753 and 1756, Upāli gave hundreds of bhikkhu upasampadā
ordinations before succumbing to a fatal illness.
36
The entire project to restore the
Laṅkānbhikkhu ordination lineage with a foreign importation of monks should be under-
stood as the long-simmering and precariously fulfilled ambition of a Kandyan novice
monk named Väliviṭa Saraṇaṃkara (1698–1778), who was the second to receive Upāli’s
upasampadāordination in 1753, and who went on to wield a great deal of religious and
political power for many decades. Saraṇaṃkara, a highly adept novice monk, rose to reli-
gious and political prominence in the Kandyan court by 1740, and served as a religious
adviser to the monarchs. The Syāmūpadasampadā, an account from circa 1775 by
Saraṇaṃkara’s pupil TibboṭuvāvēBuddharakkhita, recounts that “King Kirtisri [. . .] was
instructed in the doctrines of Buddhism and the laws of the land by the priest
Saranankara. Being informed that there was not a single Upasampadāpriest in the
whole of Lanká this king resolved that he would in his time glorify the religion of
Buddha. When he enquired as to what country the religion of Buddha was most prosper-
ous, he was told that it was in Siam.”
37
Nowhere in this text, which elides years of tenden-
tious diplomatic red tape, do we learn that the king first sought to locate monks in Burma.
Rather, it claims that Siamese Buddhists were initially deemed suitable. Additionally, we
32
Raben and na Pombejra, “Tipping Balances,”75.
33
Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017), 36–7.
34
Himanshu Prabha Ray, Coastal Shrines and Transnational Maritime Networks across India and Southeast Asia
(London: Routledge, 2021), 54–5; Kate Crosby, Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of
Southeast Asia (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2020), 173–4.
35
Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya, 211–2.
36
Siddhartha Buddharakkhita, trans., Syāmūpadasampadā: The Adoption of the Siamese Order of Priesthood in
Ceylon, Saka Era 1673 (1751 A.C.) (Bangkok: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1914), 56, 64.
37
Ibid., 53–4.
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are told that Väliviṭa Saraṇaṃkara taught the king not only “the doctrines of Buddhism,”
but also “the laws of the land.”In the final section, we return to the dangerous friendship
that played out between monk and king (Figure 2). But let us first understand why forging
maritime connections was a dangerous business before considering the dangers made
possible by that connection.
Danger on the Monsoon Seas, 1741–1754
Beginning with Kandy’s first attempt to secure bhikkhus in 1741, nearly every voyage
across the Bay of Bengal encountered trouble. Despite immense and sometimes fatal dan-
gers, in Buddhist sources the eventual success of the mission is attributed to lifesaving
protective rituals done by seafaring monks. The Saṅgharāja Sādhucariyā, a biography of
Saraṇaṃkara, recalls the events of the first fateful voyage in 1741 during the reign of
King ŚrīVijaya Rājasiṃha (r. 1739–47), Kīrti Śrī’s predecessor. “Their ship hit sand in a
shallow part of the sea when approaching [Pegu]. As the ship sank, the Sāmaṇera [novice
monk] of Vaṭavana and the youth went ashore with the help of rafts and headed upland.
Figure 2. Solias Mendis, Kı
rti Śrı
Ra
jasimha and Välivita Saranamkara, wall painting at Kelaniya Ra
jamaha
Viha
ra, circa
1925–45. Photographed by author.
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The rest of the people drowned at sea. [. . .] Thieves robbed and beat Vaṭavana and the
young men [. . .] but some sympathetic, virtuous people treated them with kindness.”
38
Despite the danger of the monsoon seas and the violence the novice monks encountered
in unfamiliar lands, we see glimmers of friendly assistance, such as kindness shown by
those “sympathetic, virtuous people.”Wagenaar provides substantive details about this
voyage.
39
The Constantia, a VOC ship, departed in late February 1741 for Batavia.
Following a stop from April until early June, it set sail for Malacca where it anchored
until July. When it approached mainland Southeast Asia in September, having lost both
of its anchors, the ship encountered weather so bad that it was no longer seaworthy
and within days, a passing English vessel collected the stranded Kandyan and Dutch
travellers.
Under the additional weight, the English ship capsized and most of the Kandyans
drowned. When the remaining survivors were brought to the mouth of the Irrawaddy
River by British forces, Doranāgama Rāla, the sole surviving Kandyan envoy, was on his
own. While stranded he attempted to contact the court at Pegu about acquiring monks,
but without the “royal letter”from the king—this too drowned—his overtures amounted
to nothing.
40
When he arrived back in Kandy in March 1742, he complained about the
impolite behaviour of the Dutch company men he encountered, and their bad
navigation.
41
Another mission was sent five years later that would also be aborted, this time not
because of trouble at sea, but because of a change in political regime. Doranāgama
Rāla, accompanied by two others, Mīdēniye Rāla and Vilbāgedara Rāla, together with sev-
eral other envoys, royal letters, and gifts, departed in early February 1747 from Galle
aboard the Sara Jacoba. In September, the VOC notified Kandy that the party had reached
Batavia, where they would soon make their way to Siam. Doranāgama then became ill and
died. The remaining party set sail for Siam, arriving safely. In August, likely the same
month they reached King Borommakot’s court, King ŚrīVijaya Rājasiṃha died.
42
Although the Ayutthaya Chronicles highlight Borommakot’s“holy compassion”and willing-
ness to restore the bhikkhu ordination in Kandy, we know that in 1747 he was not yet
ready to do so unless he was certain that the new Kandyan ruler would sanction it. It
would take until 1750–1 for Saraṇaṃkara and the new king, Kīrti ŚrīRājasiṃha, to contact
Ayutthaya through the VOC again. King Borommakot was agreeable, and the elder monk
Upāli, along with his retinue of bhikkhus, novices, texts, and ritual objects made their way
towards Batavia aboard the combination of a Siamese ship and the VOC’sTulpenberg.
Vilbāgedara Rāla’s travel account chronicles the difficulty they encountered at sea dur-
ing the 1751 voyage. “Water leaked into the ship at numerous points [. . .] in spurts as
thick as an ankle or a wrist, and the ship began to sink. Valuable articles stored in the
ship were then jettisoned and the monks began to preach the dhamma day and night with-
out intermission. Because of this all persons on board and the gifts were saved.”
43
To the
38
Āittāliyadde Muhamdiramrāla, Āittāliyadde Muhamdiramrāla’sSaṅgharāja Sādhucariyāva: The Biography of
Veliviṭa Saraṇaṃkara Saṅgharāja, trans. Wijitha YāpāBaṇdāra (Colombo: Samayawardhana Book Shop, 2020), 119.
39
Lodewijk Wagenaar, “Looking for Monks from Arakan: A Chapter of the Kandyan-Dutch Relations in the 18th
Century,”Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 48 (2003), 98.
40
Goonewardena, “Ayutthia in the Twilight Years,”8.
41
Sri Lanka National Archives, Colombo [hereafter SLNA], 1/3050: Colombo Diary, 16 March 1742; Wagenaar,
“Looking for Monks from Arakan,”98–9.
42
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 101.
43
Vilbāgedara Muhandiram and P. E. E. Fernando, trans., “An Account of the Kandyan Mission Sent to Siam in
1750 A.D.,”Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 2:1 (1959), 67; Vilbāgedara Muhandiram and P. E. Pieris,
trans., “An Account of King Kirti Sri’s Embassy to Siam in 1672 Saka (1750 A.D.),”Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society of Sri Lanka 48 (2003), 145.
10 Tyler A. Lehrer
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Buddhist sensibilities of the monks, diplomats, and Southern Asian courts which consti-
tuted the intended audience of this travelogue, the risk-mitigating virtue and lifesaving
success of the monks’dhamma preaching would come as little surprise. When the
monks’Siamese ship was towed back to Ayutthaya in 1752, they had to wait another
year for favourable monsoon winds. Vilbāgedara privately hired the VOC opperkoopman
at Siam, Nicolaas Bang, for the use of his vessel to get the Siamese monks to Batavia,
and from there they successfully sailed for the Laṅkān port of Trincomalee aboard the
VOC ship Oostkappel in March 1753.
44
They landed in late May and were brought to the
Kandyan court with great care and enthusiasm.
45
In 1754, after arriving safely in Kandy, Upāli wrote a letter to the VOC expressing his
gratitude and relief. The letter was translated into Dutch at the Colombo fort by
interpreters:
Because the favours that have been proven by the most dignified heeren hollan-
ders
46
are very great, I will keep them in mind continuously.
It is well known that the King of Siam, in name Darmasooke [Dharmāśoka], and his
royal Majesty of Candia, Dewenipoetisse [Devanampiya Tissa, r. 247–07 BCE] in for-
mer times lived in friendship with one another by sending gifts back and forth.
This has not been maintained for about 2000 years and has once again been set in
motion by the work of the heeren hollanders with the result that nowadays letters
and gifts are sent and correspondence is maintained; this being even more impos-
sible for those of us who have little luck and power because these places are [located]
very far from each other. However, it has been accomplished by the wisdom and
experience of the heeren hollanders, so that it shall be broadcast to all lands.
From the day that we left our country and arrived here, we have not suffered any
deprivation by virtue of the goodness of the heeren hollanders, and also the ship’s
authorities on which we departed have proven to be very skilled men. Having
shown many tokens of affection to the chief priests and more, everything they
had assured us [beforehand] has truly happened.
47
Upāli’s letter to an unnamed VOC recipient invokes the centuries-old relationship
between Siamese and Laṅkān Buddhists, characterised here as an interrupted friendship.
His gratitude and relief at having arrived safely are also apparent. Consider that in the
fertile upland delta of the Chao Phraya river, Upāli grew up amidst the bustling imports
and exports of this politically and economically cosmopolitan zone in the centre of the
Siamese kingdom (Figure 3), a major international trade centre and the heart of religious
and political power since the fourteenth century.
48
Although Upāli likely participated in
overland Buddhist pilgrimages, it is doubtful that he engaged in any maritime travel prior
to his attempts to reach the island. After several fatal and near-fatal shipwrecks and false
44
Goonewardena, “Ayutthia in the Twilight Years,”29–33; Lodewijk Wagenaar, “The Arrival of Buddhist
Monks from Siam in 1753: Mid-Eighteenth Century Religious Contacts between Kandy and Siam, as Recorded
by the Dutch East India Company,”in Proceedings of the International Symposium: Crossroads of Thai and Dutch
History, ed. Dhiravat na Pombejra (Bangkok: SEAMEO-SPAFA, 2007), 512.
45
R. G. Anthonisz, comp., Digest of Resolutions of the Dutch Political Council, Colombo, 1644–1796 (Colombo:
Department of National Archives of Sri Lanka, 2012), 138.
46
Following Wagenaar, “Looking for Monks from Arakan,”103, I am opting to leave this term untranslated.
Here and subsequently, the capitalisation or lack thereof for any proper nouns conforms to the original.
47
SLNA, 1/3264: 97r–8r, Translation ola High Priest Oepalie Mahateroen Wahanse, 12 April 1754; DNA, VOC
2832: 909r–10r, Translation ola High Priest Oepalie Mahateroen Wahanse, 12 April 1754.
48
Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya, 43.
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starts between 1741 and 1752, the prospect of sailing with Dutch traders to a distant land
over the monsoon seas to a place “very far”away would have indeed been quite daunting.
The reply to Upāli was drafted by none other than the VOC governor at Colombo,
Joan Gideon Loten, suggesting the extent to which the VOC appreciated how important
these monks were to Kandy, and by extension, its own operations in Ayutthaya. Full of
diplomatic overtures of “honour and affection,”and the reciprocation of Upāli’s
invocation of the millennia-old Buddhist friendship between Siam and Laṅkā,the
reply indicates a careful reading of the monk’s translated words, and the Company’s
self-conscious awareness of the delicate stakes in this complex, multisited diplomatic
triangulation. “I express my singular obligation for the friendly communication so amic-
ably exchanged,”Loten wrote, “and I give the assurance of my willingness to please your
Honourables to the best of my ability, as I have always tried to execute [good] services
for the great court.”
49
Chronicles of these events from Burma provide a glimpse into what Upāli and the other
monks faced at sea. Here too, Buddhist protective rituals served as lifesaving risk mitiga-
tion. The Yodaya Yazewin, a Burmese edition of the Ayutthaya Chronicles, relays that when a
storm also threatened this voyage:
Patriarch Ubali [Upāli] [. . .] and the 50 monks carried the Image of the Dipankara
Buddha and, placing it in the prow of the ship, took up positions to the left and
right of it. They then recited the attributes of the Lord Buddha and the sutras of
protection. [. . .]
The storm came near the ship, but because of the Image of the Dipankara Buddha
and [the recitation of] the attributes of the Lord Buddha and the protective sutras, it
did not strike the ship but blew to its right and left. [. . .]
Figure 3. Jan Luyken, Landschap in Siam met Boten: Gezicht van Siam, etching, 1687 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
49
DNA, VOC 2832: 911r&v, Reply Governor Loten to High Priest Oepalie Mahateroen Wahanse, 4 July 1754. A
Sinhala-language copy of this letter also appears in SLNA 5/64/9 (15) with a transcription date of 26 November
1884.
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Paying reverence to the Three Gems,
50
the monks [. . .] recorded the matter. Then,
sailing on, they arrived in the harbour [of the country] named Lankadipa.
51
When a severe storm threatened the success of the mission and the lives of monk, sailor,
and trader, Upāli and the monks conducted a ritual by chanting protective Pāli language
suttas and parittas (ritual formulae) in the presence of the Dīpaṃkara Buddha. To the sur-
prise of the Dutch sailors, and, we are meant to understand, through the virtue and merit
of not only this act, but of the auspicious mission to bolster a Buddhist lineage abroad, the
storm moves safely to the side. Compared to Upāli’s admission in his letter to the VOC
that they had arrived safely due to the “skill”and “wisdom”of the ship’s captain, in
this version, their safe arrival is attributed to the Dīpaṃkara Buddha and the monks’
protective rituals.
The Dīpaṃkara Buddha of aeons past has been strongly associated with the protection
of sailors.
52
His name, not incidentally, translates as both the “calmer of waters”and the
“bearer”of variously “island,”“continent,”or “lamp.”That King Borommakot selected
this Buddha (amongst many others) indicates a strong connection between a ritual
Buddhist imaginaire and real-world practices of protection from danger. The ritual was
successful thanks to the Dīpaṃkara Buddha’s presence and the monks’ritual, and the
ship made its way safely to the “island-continent”of Laṅkā.
53
After performing several hundred bhikkhu ordinations in Kandy during the three years
following his arrival, and along with Saraṇaṃkara and his pupils, Upāli created the con-
ditions for a major reformulation of monastic practice.
54
He succumbed in 1756 to what
the Cūḷavaṃsa describes as a “disease of the nose,”or to what Saraṇaṃkara’s biography
gives as an “earache-like sickness.”
55
Despite their disagreement about the locus of
Upāli’s fatal malady, these sources suggest that his religious piety and work were inex-
haustible and his conduct beyond reproach. To this day, he remains a beloved figure in
Ayutthayan and Kandyan Buddhist communities (Figure 4).
The monks who left Laṅkāfaced severe difficulties returning to Siam. By the early
1760s, friendly relations between the Company and the two crowns had deteriorated to
such an extent that return journeys had to be privately arranged. The monks who after-
wards wandered through India pretended to be Malay or Javanese to survive in that
strange environment, others died of chickenpox, still others perished at sea.
56
The few
who made their way back to Ayutthaya found the kingdom, the centre of Siamese
power since the fourteenth century, on the verge of collapse at the hands of the
Burmese. Let us now turn to one of these monks.
50
The Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha.
51
Tun Aung Chain, trans., Chronicle of Ayutthaya: A Translation of the Yodaya Yazawin (Yangon: Myanmar
Historical Commission, 2005), 82–7.
52
G. Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1968), 21–3.
53
The Mahāvaṃsa famously describes the island as dhammadīpa (island/continent of dhamma). Thai sources on
the lineage transmission following, I believe, Prince Damrong Rāchānuphāp, Ruang Praditsatan Phrasong
Sayamwong Nai Laṇka Tawip [On the Establishment of the Siamese Saṅgha on the LaṅkāContinent] (Bangkok:
Rongphimkansasana Kromkansasana, 1914; repr. 1960) refer to the island as Laṇka tawip, which connotes “con-
tinent”(i.e. jambudvīpa in Sanskrit) more resolutely than it does “island.”
54
Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 139.
55
Buddharakhita, Syāmūpadasampadā, 64; Vilbāgedara and Fernando, “An Account of the Kandyan Mission,”
49–5; Wijesiṇha, The Mahávaṇsa, Part II, 366.
56
Alexey Kirichenko, “The Itineraries of ‘Sīhaḷa Monk’Sāralaṅkā: Buddhist Interactions in Eighteenth-Century
Southern Asia,”in Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Michael R. Feener and
Anne M. Blackburn (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), 56.
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Danger at the Kandyan Court, 1758–1765
The next sources bring our attention to an altogether different form of “dangerous friend-
ship”—political, rather than geographic or aquatic—and the tenuous bonds of connection
between king, court, and Company that it would soon strain. By the time of Upāli’s death
in 1756, thousands of privileged, high-caste Kandyan men, led by Saraṇaṃkara and
Tibboṭuvāvē, had taken the hoped-for upasampadāordination that Upāli and his peers
worked to restore. In 1756 a second voyage of monks and texts arrived from Siam after
running aground in February off the eastern coast of the island (six Siamese monks
drowned),
57
and at the end of 1759, the winds brought a final VOC-brokered shipment
of Siamese monks.
58
Amongst them was an exiled Ayutthayan monk-prince named
Krommuang Thep Phiphit.
59
Figure 4. Venerable Phra Upa
li
Maha
thero, statue, circa 2013, Wat
Thammaram, Ayutthaya.
Photographed by author.
57
Anthonisz, Digest of Resolutions of the Dutch Political Council, 141; S. Paranavitana, “A Document in Cambodian
Characters Found in the Malvatte Vihare, Kandy,”Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 48 (2003): 164.
58
DNA, VOC 2986: 1617r&v, Letter Resident Bang to Governor Schreuder, 25 February 1759.
59
According to D.A. Kotelawele, “New Light on the Life of Sangharaja Welivita Saranankara,”ŚrīLaṅkā
Vidyālaṅkāra Viśvavidyālayīya Śāstrīya Saṅgrahaya [Journal of the Vidyālaṅkāra University of Ceylon] 1, no. 1
(1972): 119, Tammebaan was the monastic name of Prince Krommuang Thep Phiphit. Many, but not all, VOC
sources also refer to him as Tammebaan.
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In the year following King Borommakot’s death in 1758, Phiphit ended up on the losing
side of the succession dispute amongst his elder siblings, Kings Uthumphon (r. 1758) and
Ekkathat (r. 1758–67). Without a concretised system of primogeniture, factional ties and
personal animosities frequently turned succession disputes into bloody multiyear strug-
gles.
60
Under threat of death, Thep Phiphit was exiled from the court and took bhikkhu
upasampadā,
61
and was banished to the island by Ekkathat in 1759.
62
He arrived late
that year with a final contingent of Siamese monks, and unlike Upāli, was not at all
beyond reproach. This prince-turned-monk was a key actor in an aborted rebellion against
Kīrti ŚrīRājasiṃha and in its aftermath; he had been selected to take Kandy’s throne in
the event that a 1760 plot to assassinate the king succeeded.
63
It is to this royal rebellion
that we now turn.
The correspondence during the summer of 1760 between Dumbara Ralehamy (the
Kandyan disāva who succeeded Leuke) and the Colombo opperkoopman Robertus Cramer
includes a striking report about the failed assassination plot hatched against the king
by five coconspirators. These include Väliviṭa Saraṇaṃkara and his pupil Tibboṭuvāvē
Buddharakkhita, Prince Thep Phiphit, together with Ralehamy’s superior, Samanakkoḍi,
an influential adigār(Sinhala: one of two chief administrators under the king). The report
relays that they,
[. . .] have all gone to the offering place [in] annurajepoera [Anuradhapura], and
from there have returned with designs on going to keeheelelle [Kehelella].
On their way to that place, they made plans with one another to treacherously kill
the king on an appointed Thursday at seven in the evening, and to establish the
Siamese prince on the throne in his place. With letter bearers they sent an ola in
the Siamese language to the prince in Keheelelle, letting him know of their inten-
tions, and that it would be very good if he, without fail, made his way to the
Court that coming Wednesday. [. . .]
While this was taking place, the adigārof oedoegampaha [Udagampaha] arrived
at the Court and, kneeling before his Royal Majesty the King, requested that he
appear the following Thursday at the pogemalloe [Poyamalu] offering place,
where there would be a Siamese priest conducting a sermon in his mother tongue.
When the intercepted ola had been transferred to the court, and the King had read
it, his Royal Majesty asked [several] headmen and chief inhabitants to appear pub-
licly. [. . .] The king sent them to the Chief Priest Welliwitte [Väliviṭa
Saraṇaṃkara] with instructions to ask him if the story was true or not. The head-
men proceeded to the pogemalloe offering place, being the residence of that chief
priest, and there found a grave five [cobidoes]—and a coffin fit inside with protrud-
ing steel spikes four—cobidoes
64
long. Over the grave lay planks covered by earth
and manure.
65
What motivated such an extraordinary rebellion? One justification, given in a nineteenth-
century account, the Śāsanāvatīrna Varṅanāva, portrays the king as merely a nominal
Buddhist, accusing him of secretly performing Hindu rituals, even being a “Tamil heretic”
60
Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya, 243.
61
Cushman, Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya, 468.
62
Ibid., 471.
63
Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants, 208–9.
64
Acobido is approximately eighteen inches, according to Sushil Chaudhury, Companies, Commerce and
Merchants: Bengal in the Pre-Colonial Era (London: Routledge, 2016), 192–5.
65
DNA, VOC 2986: 1695r–97r, Translation Sinhalese ola Related to the Incident in Candia Concerning the
Undertaking of the Siamese Priests Against the King, 23 August 1760.
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on the throne.
66
Kīrti ŚrīRājasiṃha was the brother of his predecessor’s South Indian
chief consort, and the son of an influential Kandyan courtier named Narenappā
Nāyakkar. Towards the end of the Portuguese colonial occupation of coastal Laṅkā, the
number of “solar”caste brides on the island diminished significantly, and as a result,
Kandy forged an alliance with the South Indian Nāyakkar dynasty, resulting in the import-
ation of royal-caste Telegu and Tamil-speaking consorts and their sons to the island.
67
The rebellion and the king’sNāyakkar identification feature in an important and public
historiographic debate that raged during the Sri Lankan civil war between the 1980s and
1990s about the “origins,”precolonial continuity, and durability of what, if anything, con-
stitutes Sinhala identity. H. L. Seneviratne has contended that while the foreign-born
so-called Nāyakkar kings were “heirs to varying degrees of ‘alienness,’” and while they
“sometimes used religion to suit their political ends,”nevertheless they grew up in
Kandy, he asserts, and “the Tamil language and other ‘alien’cultural forms were presti-
gious, and socially and culturally mobile sections of the people were anxious to copy
them.”
68
More recently, Gananath Obeyesekere has observed that except for Kīrti Śrī
Rājasiṃha, all of the “Nāyakkar”kings were born in Kandy. And including Kīrti Śrī, all
of them were fluent in Sinhala, Telegu, and Tamil; the latter being an important lingua
franca in the region.
69
Michael Roberts tempers the cosmopolitanism of these analyses,
arguing that while the late twentieth-century historiographic reticence to attribute the
language of “ethnicity”to eighteenth-century Laṅkān society is fuelled by post-orientalist
scholarship and responses to wartime ethno-nationalism, contemporaneous oral histories
suggest we should take claims about the religious and ethnic affiliations of this “alien
king”seriously.
70
For instance, that the plot took place in Anuradhapura (a long-standing
centre of Sinhalese Buddhist and political power between circa 430 and 1070 CE) suggests
that anxieties about legitimate Buddhist kingship were strongly operational. Additionally,
that the king might be enticed to his death by an Ayutthayan Buddhist monk preaching
“in his mother tongue”also indicates a public desire to be strongly associated with their
religious dispensation.
Roberts argues that the plotters’charge of the king’s private performance of Śaivā
pujas is not merely a politically expedient justification alleging the supposed religious her-
esy of an “alien”king, but a window into tendentious struggles that were about ritual per-
formance and religion as much as politics and power. However, John Clifford Holt calls our
attention to the fact that the assassination plot failed probably for the very reason that
was proffered only after the fact to justify it: the charge of supposed heresy ultimately
proved unconvincing.
71
A fellow disāva of Ralehamy revealed the plot to the king just
in time, before he tumbled into the concealed pit of spikes.
72
While Kīrti ŚrīRājasiṃha
had the non-monastic conspirators executed, he refrained from doing so with the
monks Väliviṭa Saraṇaṃkara, TibboṭuvāvēBuddharakkhita, Thep Phiphit, and the other
Siamese bhikkhus and novices (whom he put into the hands of the VOC to ship off the
island).
73
In late 1760, he issued a royal proclamation giving the lands of several of the
66
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 122; John Clifford Holt, The Religious World of Kīrti Śrī: Buddhism,
Art, and Politics in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29.
67
For more on caste-based claims to rulership see Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka 53–71.
68
H. L. Seneviratne, “The Alien King: Nayakkars on the Throne of Kandy,”Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social
Studies 6:1 (1976), 56.
69
Gananath Obeyesekere, The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha (Colombo: Sailfish, 2017), 30–1.
70
Roberts, Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period,48–9.
71
Holt, The Religious World of Kīrti Śrī, 29.
72
P. E. Pieris, Ceylon and the Hollanders, 1658–1796 (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries Press, 1947), 67–8.
73
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 124; Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750–1900: A
Study of Religious Revival and Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 66.
16 Tyler A. Lehrer
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conspirators to the disāva who revealed the plot, and vowed to protect the newly resus-
citated bhikkhu lineage from decline. Incredibly, he named Väliviṭa Saraṇaṃkara as the
new saṅgharāja, its institutional and administrative head.
74
Anne M. Blackburn cautions against adopting a simplistic apprehension of royal agency
here. While doubtless the king and his would-be assassins’conduct were informed by
attempts to gain and retain power, certain royal acts were deemed efficacious within com-
munities disposed to interpret them in particular ways, whether they reflected self-
consciously or not on the power of representation.
75
Whatever the nature of his personal
religious commitments or practices, and why and to what extent they might have been
deemed “heretical”or “alien”in his time and after, what is clear is Kīrti Śrī
Rājasiṃha’s impressive record of Buddhist patronage, one that rendered his numerous
commitments to the religion beyond question. Kitsiri Malalgoda has argued that the
king exercised shrewd judgement in not only refraining from executing the monastic plot-
ters and the would-be Siamese royal, but also in appointing Saraṇaṃkara to the kingdom’s
highest religious office. “Any possible alienation of the mass of Buddhists against him,”
argued Malalgoda, “was thus averted [. . .]. His reputation as the greatest patron of
Buddhism during the Kandyan period was thus preserved completely intact.”
76
But why replace him with a banished Siamese prince? While the initial plot was most
likely Samanakkoḍi’s idea, and not that of the Kandyan or Siamese monks, it was most
likely the latter from whom the suggestion came to select a royal from their own
lands.
77
The Siamese were led to believe (as were the Dutch) that the Buddhism of ordin-
ary Kandyans was being supressed by the “heretic”on the throne.
78
What seems more
likely is that Samanakkoḍi at last attempted to act on his and his kin’s resentment of
the centralisation of power in the hands of a successful foreign-born dynasty.
79
When Kīrti Śrīwanted Thep Phiphit and the rest of the Siamese monks off the island, he put
the Company into a difficult situation. The VOC was unwilling to risk the newly restored trad-
ing relationship its Siamese opperkoopman Nicolaas Bang had worked out with the Ayutthayan
court, one he was not prepared to upset by any perceived “mistreatment”of their monks in
Laṅkā.“And besides, the monsoon winds are no longer suitable,”the Colombo opperkoopman
wrote to Ralehamy that August, “for sailing back to Batavia and Siam.”
80
While the Laṅkā-centred wartime historiography about the assassination plot and its
aftermath foregrounds the motivations and implications of Kandyan courtiers and the
Siamese monk-cum-royal, most do not mention the Ayutthayan prince’s broader entan-
glements. Similarly, while the micro- and macro-politics of identification, belonging,
and the concentration of power in the hands of the foreign-born “Nāyakkar”kings
embroiled the monastic lineage transmission in its wake despite their virtuosic acts of
Buddhist patronage, in the final decade of its ascendance as a major centre of trade
and accumulated spiritual and economic wealth in mainland Southeast Asia, the spectre
of persistent warfare and court intrigue also dogged, and would soon bring to an end, the
pace of daily life in Ayutthaya. Thep Phiphit stood dangerously at the nexus of both
destabilisations.
74
H. C. P. Bell, trans., “Getaberiya Sannasa,”in Archaeological Survey of Ceylon: Report of the Kégalla District of the
Province of Sabaragamuwa (Colombo: George J.A. Skeen, Government Printer, 1904), 101.
75
Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice, 104.
76
Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 66.
77
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 121.
78
SLNA, 1/748: 159–62, Translation unsigned ola to Mahabadde Mudaliyar Carl Mirando, 22 May 1762.
79
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 114.
80
DNA, VOC 2986: 1692r–3r, Letter Disāva Ralehamy to Opperkoopman Cramer, 30 July 1760; 1721r–2r, Reply
Opperkoopman Cramer to Disāva Ralehamy, 14 August 1760.
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After the rebellion, Kīrti Śrīput Phiphit into the hands of the VOC with strict instruc-
tions to keep him under guard.
81
He was reluctantly deported from the island amidst a
Kandyan insurrection against the Company in 1761. He then wandered throughout the
Malay peninsula, Burma, and Siam, continuing to cause trouble wherever he went.
82
The Ayutthaya Chronicles relay that Phiphit toured around the Malay Archipelago and
the “Brahmin municipalities”before eventually returning to Siam via Burma.
83
With war against Kandy looming in 1761–2, the VOC looked towards this ambitious
prince as a potential puppet king, hoping to depose Kīrti Śrīthemselves. Secret but unsuc-
cessful Company missions to Siam were dispatched in 1762 and 1764–5, each hoping to
obtain permission from the Siamese court to locate the prince.
84
The earlier religious mis-
sions to forge monastic linkages between Siam and Laṅkāstrengthened Dutch knowledge
about the shared religious practice between them, and this made the VOC acutely aware
that it would need a royal with a Buddhist imprimatur on Kandy’s throne.
85
In June 1762, the VOC’s Galle-based mudaliyar (Sinhala: local Company-employed head-
man) and interpreter Nicolaas Dias Abeysinghe (Figure 5) was involved in gathering intel-
ligence about the extent to which Thep Phiphit might be deemed acceptable on the
throne:
In the matter of the Siamese prince in Candia, the first rijksadigaar [Samanakkoḍi]
was executed by the king, and this person’s cousin,
86
along with a high priest at court
who has supervision over three offering houses—another priest named Wellewatte
Toeroenance [Väliviṭa (Saraṇaṃkara) Therunansē, an honorific]—had been exiled,
but now these two people have risen again somewhat in His Majesty’s favour.
However, the cousin is still very dejected and in his heart is very bitter towards
His Majesty. [. . .]
If the gentlemen and lords of the Hon. Company were to look for the banished
Siamese prince, who was honestly committed to the Buddhist teachings that all sin-
cere Singaleese hold in the highest affection, his cousin should come, along with
those two other distinguished persons, into the Hon. Company’s lands in the quality
of envoys. [. . .]
The cousin is also a wise and noble man, and an opponent of the King, so it would
be very good if [he] were to come into the Hon. Company’s lands to retrieve that
prince.
87
This cousin is described as “geen goede vriend van Zijne Majesteit”[no good friend of His
Majesty’s], Dias’s informant claimed,
88
and through him, Governors van Eck and then
Schreuder hoped to entice Thep Phiphit and his son to return from Siam.
89
With outright
81
Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka, 125–6; Broekhuizen, “VOC als Kingmaker,”49.
82
J. H. O. Paulusz, “Prince Crumpty-Pippit and Governor Van Eck,”Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon
11:2 (1931): 93.
83
Cushman, Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya, 492.
84
DNA, VOC 3051: 1393r–5r, Secret letter General and Council to Governor van Eck, 6 August 1762; VOC 3095:
235r–8r, Appendix to Secret Council Resolution, 27 July 1764; VOC 3138: 594r–624v, Report of Secret Mission by
Willem van Damast Limberger, 5 February 1765. Substantive details about these missions are given in
Broekhuizen, “VOC als Kingmaker,”59–70.
85
Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants, 208–9.
86
Neef could also refer to a nephew.
87
DNA, VOC 3051: 1478r–9v, Account by Galle Mudaliyar Nicolaas Dias, 19 June 1762.
88
SLNA, 1/748: 159–62, Translation unsigned ola to Mahabadde Mudaliyar Carl Mirando, 22 May 1762; DNA,
VOC 3051: 1475r–7r, Letter to Mahabadde Mudaliyar Carl Mirando, 22 May 1762.
89
Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants, 209–10.
18 Tyler A. Lehrer
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war on the horizon, van Eck sent his ambassador Willem Van Damast Limberger to Siam
on two secret missions in 1762 and 1764–5 to attempt to bring the dangerous monk-prince
back to Kandy to install him as a puppet king. Each time they were unsuccessful.
90
So
enthusiastic was Governor van Eck about this that as he lay dying in March 1765, he dic-
tated a letter to the General Council urging them to make another attempt to locate
Phiphit.
91
For his part, Nicholaas Dias Abeysinghe, the mudaliyar who gathered secret
intelligence about Kandyan political disintegration for the VOC, was awarded a medal
in April 1768 by Governor Jan Schreuder for his service to the Company.
92
Conclusion
This article has endeavoured to draw together Dutch colonial and Southern Asian
Buddhist sources of knowledge to interject, into a “connected”historiography of interre-
gional economic and political friendships, the registers of disconnection, fracture, and
Figure 5. Jan Brandes, drawing of
Nicolaas Dias, detail from Ontvangst
van Gezanten van de Koning Kandy,
1785 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
90
Ibid., 211.
91
Paulusz, “Prince Crumpty-Pippit and Governor Van Eck,”95.
92
Pieris, Ceylon and the Hollanders, 143; Lodewijk Wagenaar, Galle, VOC-Vestiging in Ceylon: Beschrijving van een
Koloniale Samenleving aan de Vooravond van de Singalese Opstand Tegen het Nederlandse Gezag, 1760 (Amsterdam: De
Bataafsche Leeuw, 1994), 196.
Itinerario. Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 19
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danger. While friendship indexed Buddhist diplomacy in this short-lived moment of fra-
gile connection, these were dangerous friendships. I have attempted to show that the
desire for religious restoration, as much as economic and political objectives, was a
major force drawing two Buddhist courts and one European trading corporation and
their human actors more intimately into one another’s affairs. But more than that, this
triangular friendship was dangerous, especially for Kandy, whose weakened geographic
and political position made any internal destabilisation by virtue of its VOC mediated
religious connection with Siam an easy target for exploitation.
Company agents and governors, eager to exacerbate political turmoil in Kandy and
newly appreciative of the importance of Buddhism, sought to install a Siamese puppet
king on the throne in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt only because
the earlier missions led them to appreciate the importance of connected Buddhist
statecraft to the exercise of political power.
In drawing out the rhetorical and political perspectives of Buddhist and VOC sources
alike, I have attempted not only to heed Remco Raben’s call to resist the gravitational
force of the colonial archive’s regimes of ethnic classification and labelling,
93
but also,
in telling a story that inherently destabilises anachronistic Southern Asian areal distinc-
tions, I have endeavoured to show that all kinds of people—religious adepts and specialists
as much as explorers, traders, and sailors—crossed and transgressed hazardous maritime
frontiers in service of religious connection marked by “dangerous friendships”across per-
ilous waters and in foreign lands. Even in disconnection, the co-entailed local and global
dynamics that motivated the perilous circulations of monks and ministers on Indian
Ocean waters were at least as much the work of individual “dangerous friendships”as
they were of institutional dynamics.
Acknowledgements. My thinking and writing have benefitted from conversations with Sujit Sivasundaram,
Anne M. Blackburn, Pernille Ipsen, Deborah Philip, Bente de Leede, and Bruno Shirley, and from many hours
spent examining documents with Lodewijk Wagenaar in Sri Lanka and the Netherlands. My gratitude is also
due to the editors and reviewers at Itinerario.
Funding Statement. Research for this article was made possible by a Dissertation Planning Grant from the
American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, and by graduate research funding from the Department of History
and the Institute for Regional and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Tyler A. Lehrer is a PhD Candidate in South and Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin–
Madison.
93
Raben, “Ethnic Disorder in VOC Asia,”116, 126.
Cite this article: Lehrer TA (2022). Dangerous Friendships in Eighteenth-Century Buddhist Laṅkāand Siam.
Itinerario 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115322000213
20 Tyler A. Lehrer
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115322000213 Published online by Cambridge University Press