The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

366 HEVIEW ARTICLE
a theme borrowed from the life of the Buddha, who descended from the
thirty-third heaven to the summit of Mt. Meru on a stairway of gold,
silver and crystat.ssa
Finally we may take up the problem of the opening sections of TS
beginning with the name Sinhanavati itself, deriving from sinha (also
siha), "lion". This is also an international motif, with associations
outside the Thai area. In Mon tradition sihariija came from India to
found Tbaton and died in the year of the Buddha's nirvana.s9 The
theme goes back even farther, to Ceylon, where it provides an explana.
tion for one of the names of the island, sihaladipa.
There the "lion"
king was first called sihalabahu and· was a son of a lion and a Vanga
(India) princess.
Later he became king of Kalinga and was given the
name sihala. His descendents were the first colonists and conquerors
of the island and established the ruling dynasty there. No better
comment on the Northern Thai story of a lion king can be made than
Geiger's on the Ceylon story, "The mythological and legendary character
of these traditions is manifest, on the whole as well as in the details.
Their tendency obviously was to join the dynasty ruling in Ceylon with
the most prominent dynasties of India, the Kalinga rulers and the
Sakyas". Since it is known that one current, at least, of Buddhism and
associated literary traditions passed from Ceylon to Lower Burma to
Northern Thailand, in the case of TS we cannot even adopt Geiger's
further hypothesis that, " ... in all those stories there is at least the
germ of historical truth ... Ceylon was overrun by three successive
waves of immigrants ... " etc.9o In TS we are faced with nothing but a
literary motif, the lion king who came from India to found a local
kingdom, which came to Northern Thailand from farther afield and bad
been used by the Mon in writing their chronicles and even earlier by the
Ceylonese.
88a) G, Coedes, Angkor, p. 47.
8 9 l Sir Arthur Phayre, History of Burma, London 18 8 3, p. 2 8 8, n. 1 ; Glass Palace
Chronicle, p. 49.
90) Geiger, op. cit., section 21, p. 28, for both quotations.