ABSTRACT
This chapter is about changing sources of authority within Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka.1 The main empirical evidence is drawn from the encounter between Sri Lankan Buddhists and Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, especially from one particular moment in that encounter: the public debate between Buddhists and Christians held at the town of Panadura, just south of Colombo, in 1873. From this, I argue that a much narrower idea of religious authority, based in the texts of the Pali canon, emerged among Buddhist reformers in the nineteenth century. The Panadura debate demonstrates this emergence quite clearly but we need to be wary of attributing too much causal force to one example.
