Lecture: "The Balapiṭiya Dispute in 19th-century-Sri Lanka"

The Balapiṭiya dispute in 19th-century Sri Lanka is a dispute about the legal validity of the monastic boundary (sīmā) in Balapiṭiya, which was a  ‘water-splashing boundary’ (udakukkhepa sīmā). The dispute began in 1851 and lasted at least till 1885. In addition to the two monk groups in  Sri Lanka, which were members of the Amarapuranikāya, various high-ranking monks of the Burmese Sangha were involved in this dispute since the Sinhalese monks had sent delegations to Burma to solve the legal dispute. After an overview of the main stages in this dispute, I will go into  more detail on two publications in Pāli printed in 1880 and 1885 by representatives of the non-confusionists and the confusionists, namely the  Sīmālakkhaṇādīpanī and the Sīmānayadappana.

Petra Kieffer-Pülz is an independent scholar in the field of Indology and Buddhist Studies with an MA and a PhD in  Indology from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Her primary research interest is the cultural history and literature of  the Buddhism of South and Southeast Asia with a special focus on Pali literature and Buddhist monastic traditions (Vinaya). Her authored and co-translated works include Die Sīmā (1992), Sīmāvicāraṇa (2011), Verlorene Gaṇṭhipadas (2013), Overcoming Doubts (Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī) (2018), and A Manual of the Adornment of the Monastic Boundary (2021).

For questions and the reading group materials, please contact Christoph Emmrich at christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca.

Zoom Passcode 989442

Associated reading group, April 16:  “Ñeyyadhamma’s Formal Letter to the Non-Confusionists in Sri Lanka (1860)”

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