[Buddha-l] Dharmapala

[JKirkpatrick]

Apparently Sri Lanka has for some time had a divine dharmapala in the person/form of Vishnu.

The pdf of the following article by Holt can be found here: 
http://www.shin-ibs.edu/academics/_pwj/three.nine.php

_Mythologies of Bosat Viṣṇu1
John Clifford Holt
Bowdoin College

Sinhala Buddhists, who comprise two-thirds of the current population
of Sri Lanka, are exceedingly proud of the fact that their culture
is the oldest continuing Buddhist civilization in the world, dating
back some 2,300 years. While Viṣṇu is mentioned just once, and that
merely in passing, in all of Pāli canonical Buddhist literature sacred
to the Theravāda tradition,2  modern translations and interpretations
of Sri Lanka’s fifth-century CE, Theravāda Buddhist, quasi-historical
monastic chronicle, the Mahāvaṃsa, identify Viṣṇu with the sacred role
of being the people’s and the religion’s chief “minister of defense.”3 For
many, he is regarded as a veritable guardian deity of the island. This
identification has been derived in part from a reading of a seminal migration
myth recorded in the Mahāvaṃsa that explains that the ancient
arrival of the progenitors of the Sinhala people and the subsequent
arrival of Buddhism are in part the result of the protective powers
of Viṣṇu. But a careful study of the Mahāvaṃsa, together with a study
of inscriptions and medieval Sinhala literature, shows that Viṣṇu’s
Buddhistic identity as the island’s and the religion’s “minister of defense”
probably does not antedate the late seventeenth century CE.
Nevertheless, it is now difficult to find any general appraisal of Sinhala
religion, or of Sinhala deity propitiation more specifically, in either
English or in Sinhala, that does not assume that Viṣṇu has been protecting
the Buddhist religion since its inception. There are even some popular folkloric 
accounts in Sinhala kavi (poetry) that say that Viṣṇu protected the Buddha from Māra, the personification of death, on the night of his enlightenment experience._

Left out in the various citations to Geiger in this thread is his notice of this feature: From  note (3): _Wilhelm Geiger, among others, has identified Viṣṇu with the indigenous deity Upulvan, who in the seminal Mahāvaṃsa myth... is appointed by Sakka (Indra), who was in turn appointed by the Tathāgata, to protect the Sinhalese and their religion on this island where the dhamma will flourish. See Wilhelm Geiger, The Mahāvaṃsa or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon (1912)._


However, this article is mostly devoted to interesting Sri Lankan puranas about Vishnu/Rama; nothing was said if Vishnu was ever invoked to make actual war on the enemies of dharma. Vishnu's protective abilities might have been down to magic powers, for he is presented in this imaginary as celibate, wise,and clever -- as opposed to the blunderbuss wielded by Vajrapani Yaksha. (Interestingly, in Gandhara there were sculptures showing Vajrapani, armed and beside the Buddha, as Hercules). 

Joanna K.