In recent years, a new kind of argument has quietly gained traction, largely on the fringes of Sri Lankan social media and local YouTube channels. Some channels claim – their various videos having accumulated millions of views – that the historical Buddha did not, in fact, emerge from the Middle Gangetic plain of northern India and southern Nepal, as almost two centuries of scholarship maintains, but instead from the island of Sri Lanka itself.
At first glance, these assertions appear too peripheral to merit scholarly comment. Yet it would be a mistake for ‘credentialed’ historians to dismiss the existence of such claims. They reveal something profound about how the past is always up for contestation – especially in moments of crisis and polarisation. In Sri Lanka, and across South Asia more generally, history tends never simply to reside ‘in the past’. It lives in legal arguments, street protests, heritage claims, and the everyday entanglement of religion and national identity.
How, then, might historical research approach this phenomenon – not simply to ‘debunk’ it, but to understand why it appeals to so many? What can a more careful, critical reading of old texts, inscriptions, and archaeological traces teach us about the politics of myth-making today?
That Sri Lanka should even appear as a potential birthplace for the Buddha would likely surprise many outside the island. For more than two centuries, the consensus – built on ancient monastic travelogues by Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang, early Buddhist texts, and archaeological excavations across Bihar and Nepal – has located Buddhism’s founder squarely in the Middle Ganges region. Yet the island’s own textual and epigraphic record complicates this neat picture in unexpected ways.
In the early Pali chronicle Dipavamsa, for example, the island is described as an abode of Buddhism where the bodhi tree – under which Siddhartha Gautama is believed to have become the Buddha – took root in transplanted form. Later Sinhalese boundary books like the Sri Lamkadvipaye Kadaim and Tri Simhale Kadaim blur the lines between the island and the wider Buddhist geography of Dambadiva and Jambudvipa – the terms which Buddhist texts associate with the religion’s origins. Cave inscriptions and local lore also seem to preserve the faint echo of a Buddha who appeared to belong to this land as much as to any other.
None of this, of course, means that the Buddha was ‘Sri Lankan’ in the sense imagined by modern nationalist discourse. To read the island’s Buddhist past through such a lens is to mistake a rich, transregional history for a narrowly territorial claim. It does instead reveal Sri Lanka’s deep entanglement within a far-reaching subcontinental Buddhist world – a world that thrived precisely because it transcended borders, with ideas, relics, lineages, and origin stories moving freely across seas and kingdoms. Against the primordial nationalism that seeks to root the Buddha in a single homeland, this history reminds us that Buddhism’s foundations were always cosmopolitan and mobile, shaped by exchange rather than exclusion. Such recognition is vital today, for it challenges the modern desire to turn fluid traditions into fixed identities.
Furthermore, to describe the Buddha as ‘Sri Lankan’ at all is to commit a profound anachronism. The political entities and cultural geographies of early Buddhism bear little resemblance to the bordered nation-states of today. The Buddha’s world was one of shifting kingdoms, monastic networks, and trading routes – a landscape connected by pilgrimage and exchange rather than by national frontiers. Recognizing this is essential: it exposes the categorical error at the heart of any and all attempts to claim the Buddha as a figure of territorial belonging.
What, then, is at stake when local YouTube channels or fringe bloggers claim the Buddha for Sri Lanka alone? Partly, this is a story of competing nationalisms. Just as India and Nepal continue to squabble over who owns the Buddha’s birthplace – Lumbini’s border location makes for regular diplomatic spats – Sri Lanka’s own nationalist fringe is tempted to stake its own exclusive claim. The subtext is clear: if the Buddha ‘belongs’ here, then perhaps so does the right to police who counts as an authentic Buddhist or an authentic Sri Lankan.
As historians like Ananya Vajpeyi and Audrey Truschke have shown in the context of India’s debates over Hindutva, the contest over the religious past is never merely academic: Vajpeyi highlights how Hindu nationalism seeks to recast history as moral ownership of the past, while Truschke exposes how such projects weaponise historical memory to legitimise exclusion and violence. In this sense, struggles over the religious past rarely stay confined to books; they spill into politics, law, and public life, shaping how communities imagine belonging and authority today.
Sri Lanka’s own recent history bears witness to how quickly the invocation of a singular Buddhist identity can slide into exclusionary politics. From the ethno-religious violence of the civil war to the Buddhist nationalist movements of today, the claim to speak for the Buddha is never merely theological. It is profoundly political.
Given this context, what is the historian’s role? It is tempting to imagine that research can simply ‘correct’ the record – to say, no, the Buddha was/was not Sri Lankan, and declare the conversation closed. Yet history rarely works that neatly. Indeed, the past is not just an archive of facts to be policed for accuracy; it is a terrain where power is contested.
A more constructive response is to ask what the evidence actually shows – and to highlight where it resists simple closure. The island’s scattered boundary texts, inscriptions, and local legends are not so much proofs of an alternative origin story. Rather, they reveal how medieval monks, kings, and scribes understood their place in a Buddhist world that was far from static. They show how island communities, cut off at times from Buddhist heartlands elsewhere in Asia, laid claim to their own authority by locating themselves within a wider imagined geography of Dambadiva and Jambudvipa.
Such evidence does not ‘prove’ the existence of a Sri Lankan Buddha. Instead, it reminds us that Buddhism’s geography was always fluid. Monks and relics moved by sea and land; origin myths were retold and localised. Medieval writers projected their own claims backward, folding the island into the Buddha’s story to bolster its sanctity and its political legitimacy.
Some might ask: why split hairs over ancient myths when the political stakes are so high today? Should historians not simply shut down these fringe claims before they cause more harm? But nuance is not an indulgence – it is a necessity. If history is used only as a blunt hammer to ‘correct’ or ‘debunk’, it risks reinforcing the same polarisation it seeks to resist. By showing how the past was itself a site of myth-making, translation, and local reinterpretation, historical research can deflate absolutist narratives without dismissing the real cultural memory that gives them power.
For example, the Thiriyai inscriptions in northeastern Sri Lanka supposedly connect the island to the Buddha’s first lay disciples, Tapussa and Bhallika. Rather than treating this as either absolute proof or irrelevant trivia, we might read it as evidence of how early Buddhist communities linked local shrines to the wider Buddhist cosmos. Similarly, the references to Kalinga – both the ancient polity associated with eastern India and the ruined Sri Lankan site of Kalinga Nuwara – point to the ways names and stories migrate across time and place, muddying the boundaries of what counts as ‘authentic’ heritage.
When we read these traces with care, we see that Buddhism’s history in South Asia is not a tidy map with clear borders. It is an ocean of crosscurrents – migrations, exchanges, reinventions. Such a perspective does not serve the hunger for a singular and pure origin, but it perhaps offers something better: an account of the past that is big enough to hold difference and contradiction.
In the end, the rise of local revisionist claims about the Buddha’s ‘real’ homeland is not so different from other forms of historical revisionism elsewhere in South Asia – whether it is the rewriting of textbooks to serve Hindutva politics or the erasure of Islamic pasts in contemporary India. As previous History Workshop articles on Hindutva and Islamophobia remind us, historical research matters not because it can permanently settle debates, but because it can open up space for more honest ones.
Perhaps the greatest lesson is that history is never ‘finished’ business. A nineteenth-century colonial official puzzled over Kalinga’s ruins on the Mahaweli river; more than a century later, Sri Lankan surveyors mapped the same site, noting ‘traces of ruined structures’ and irrigation works that hinted at once-thriving Buddhist settlements. Today, that same Kalinga is centred in YouTube intrigues over the Buddha’s origins. Each moment reshapes what the evidence means, according to new anxieties and new desires.
This does not mean all claims are equally valid. Good historical work is grounded in rigorous method, critical reading, and careful attention to context. It does mean, however, that historians should engage with the social life of their sources – the ways old inscriptions, boundary books, and relic myths keep being mobilised for new battles over who ‘owns’ the past.
What might a more constructive conversation about Buddhism’s place in Sri Lanka’s identity look like? First, it would start by acknowledging that the island’s Buddhist past is not the exclusive possession of any one group or claim. It is the product of centuries of movement and exchange across South Asia’s porous frontiers – shaped by monks, merchants, monarchs, and pilgrims who forged ties to the Middle Ganges as much as they did to their maritime neighbours.
Second, it would resist the temptation to flatten the past into convenient certainties. The same texts that link Sri Lanka to Dambadiva show how island communities not only considered their uniqueness but also built stories to remain connected to the wider Buddhist world. These stories deserve careful reading – not as literal origin myths, but as windows into how historical communities imagined belonging.
Finally, it would return us to the problem of anachronism itself – the tendency to read the fluid, interconnected world of early Buddhism through the rigid lens of modern nationhood. Recognizing this category error is not mere ‘whataboutary’, but central to understanding why nationalist claims to the Buddha distort the very past they seek to protect. It is easy to mock a fringe blogger for ‘inventing’ a Sri Lankan Buddha, but harder to confront the ways all nations invent usable pasts – whether by sanctifying a tree at Bodh Gaya or turning ancient ruins into heritage sites stripped of their plural histories.
If this new wave of Sri Lankan revisionist claims teaches us anything, it is that history is not an inert storehouse of facts waiting to be checked off a list. It is a conversation – often messy, sometimes manipulated, always alive.
As historians, our role is not only to correct the record but to expand it – to hold open the possibility that the past, like the Buddha’s own teachings, is a terrain of reflection and questioning. When faced with polarised debates about Buddhism and national identity, our best contribution may be precisely this: to complicate, to contextualise, and to remind ourselves that the Buddha’s journey – and our own search for meaning in his name – does not end at a single birthplace or origin story.
Editorial Note: This article is a revised version of a piece originally titled ‘Was the Buddha Sri Lankan?’ published in History Workshop on 9 January 2024.