スリランカの仏教王権 : アヌラーダプラ時代における王権とサンガ

摘要

This article considers the relationship between the Saṅgha and the kingship of Sri Lanka during the Anurādhapura period, in which the legitimacy of the rule of the king was based on Buddhism. The character of a king was evaluated by Buddhist values in Sri Lanka, where Buddhism became the state religion, although the king was also required to be a warrior and a hero against destroyers of the Buddhist Order. The king, who was compared to the Bodhisatta as the head of the laity in the early Anurādhapura period, came to rank above even the Saṅgha and control it in the late Anurādhapura period, although he was in fact part of the laity. In the second century B.C., King Duṭṭ.hagāmaṇī, the most famous hero in the Anurādhapura period, was the first figure whose demise was related in the chronicle as being associated with Bodhisatta Metteyya. Then, after the introduction of the doctrine of Vetulla in the third century A.D., the acts of the king were described as those of the Bodhisatta. In the early Anurādhapura period, the kings who pursued the ideal of the Bodhisatta tended to show favorable feelings for the Abhayagiri nikāya, which received the doctrine of Vetulla. However, this tendency did not always appear after the mid-Anurādhapura period, because the concept that the king was sacred was in harmony with the ideal of the Bodhisatta, and the political ideology of the Bodhisatta king became widely accepted. In the late Anurādhapura period, around the tenth century, the legitimacy of the kingship came to be founded on the claim of the king being a blood relative of the Buddha. The kings'claim that they were descendants of the line of the Buddha greatly helped to strengthen and justify their power politically as well as religiously. Despite being laity, some kings composed Buddhist literature and preached the dhamma to monks. Only a person who is a Bodhisatta, i.e. destined to eventually become the Buddha, came to be considered qualified to be a king of Sri Lanka. Further, the king's demise came to be expressed as nibbāna around this time. The king, who had attained a status almost comparable to that of the Buddha, came to direct or implement the purification of the Saṅgha. Moreover, the purified Saṅgha strengthened the legitimacy of the rule of the king. Therefore, the interdependent relationship between the king and the Saṅgha became more concrete and definite.