Buddhism’s Oldest History Revisited: A New Text of the Dīpavaṃsa

The Dīpavaṃsa (Dīp), the first historical account of the Buddhist religion that has survived in Pali, is widely known through Oldenberg’s late-19th century edition (designated hereafter O). The editor himself admitted it was faulty due to the quality of his Sri Lankan manuscript sources, all of which he thought were derived from a faulty Burmese exemplar. This problematic edition prompted new printed editions of Dīp in Sri Lanka and Myanmar in the 1920s, but Western scholarship established it as a ‘problem’ text, and it was thus generally neglected in favour of the later Mahāvaṃsa. A new edition of Dīp has long been a desideratum, and in 2004 Frasch pointed out the existence of a Burmese manuscript of a different text of the work, which, for the purposes of the present discussion, we designate B1. The present authors identified two further mss. of this version and have begun editing a new edition based on this in comparison to Oldenberg and other Burmese mss. The Burmese sources reveal an occasionally faulty but widely disseminated text, designated B2, that is not dissimilar to O, plus the rather ‘better’ text of B1. In addition, we have also identified the so-called ‘Dīpavaṃsa-ṭīkā’, properly named the Sāsanajotikā, as a commentary on B1 by the major 19th century Burmese scholar Jāgara. The present article will give details of this analysis.