“ Clarify it,” Mahanama corrected. “The Dipavamsa says the Buddha visited Lanka three times. We will make it a grand tour, complete with miracles. The Dipavamsa says the first king, Vijaya, landed on the day of the Buddha’s Parinibbana . We will weave that into a prophecy spoken by the Buddha himself. And Dutugamunu’s war against the Tamil king Elara? The Dipavamsa mentions it in four dry stanzas. We will write a hundred.”

Brother Dhammakitti, a young poet-scribe, knelt before Mahanama in the royal library.

His novice, Sumana, looked up. “But Venerable, it is the truth.”

“It is fragments,” Ananda snapped. “We are fighting the Brahmins from the mainland who say our king has no kshatriya blood. We are fighting the Tamils who hold the north. We need a single river of history, not a swamp.”

“I have read the Dipavamsa ,” Dhammakitti said. “It is… a skeleton.”

That night, Ananda made a fateful decision. He took the Dipavamsa and began to edit. He softened the brutal conversion of the yakkhas into a gentle sermon. He added a genealogy—a golden chain linking King Vijaya, the first Sinhalese, to the Buddha’s own clan of the Sakyas. He wrote not for monks, but for the throne.

Dhammakitti’s hand trembled. “Rewrite history?”

But one night, he paused at the section on the yakkhas . The Dipavamsa had portrayed them as mindless ogres. Dhammakitti, remembering his own grandmother’s tales of forest spirits, felt a chill.

But centuries later, when European scholars dug into the libraries of Burma and Sri Lanka, they found both.

Ananda, the scribe of the Dipavamsa , had wanted only to survive.