ABSTRACT
I will not concentrate on the biographical material within the first document. At certain points it touches Mulgirigala’s answer to, ‘Was the Budha the descendant of a god or of a man?’ but it is not the same. The battle with Mara at the Buddha’s enlightenment, for example, is dismissed in a couple of sentences. It is enough here to say that it belongs to the hagiographic and the nationalistic, drawing both from the island’s historical chronicles and Pali and Sinhala narrative. It is further illustration of the extent to which later Western accounts reduced the richness of the tradition.
