ABSTRACT
After the commentaries were completed, Theravādin Buddhists continued to produce anthologies of edifying stories on the effects of action, and especially of giving. 1 Sīhaḷavatthuppakaraṇa, a collection of 77 stories, is an important representative of this genre. We do not know the date of this text, although a work of its name is mentioned in a Burmese inscription of 1442. We also know little about the text’s redactor, although he or she apparently exercised a light editorial hand, as the stories vary significantly in style and in content, and must be the work of multiple authors. 2 Unlike Dhammapāla, the redactor of Sīhaḷavatthuppakaraṇa does not reduce disparate story traditions to a single karma theory. Instead, Sīhaḷavatthuppakaraṇa’s stories of good deeds rewarded and bad deeds punished not only draw on karmic discourse, 3 but take both the devotional and ascetic understandings of religious action further than any of the texts I have discussed so far.
