A shared ordination
What held this region together was not an empire but a lineage. Ordination lines travelled: Sri Lankan monks re-established the order in Burma and Siam, and Burmese and Siamese monks later re-established it in Sri Lanka when war and famine had broken it. Monks crossed the sea to be re-ordained in a line they trusted.
Pāli was the shared language of scholarship, and letters passed between courts in it. A monk trained in Chiang Mai could read and argue with a text written in Anuradhapura.
Kings and merit
Kingship here was Buddhist kingship. A ruler legitimised himself by building, by sponsoring the copying of texts, by supporting monks, and when necessary by purifying the order: expelling monks who had drifted from the discipline and reorganising what remained. Parākramabāhu I did it in Sri Lanka in the 12th century, and the pattern was repeated for the next six hundred years across the region.
Ordinary people took part in the same economy of merit on a smaller scale, feeding monks, sponsoring a manuscript, gilding an image, or ordaining a son for a season.
What it made
The temples of Bagan. The walking Buddha of Sukhothai, which exists in no other Buddhist art. The Pāli scholarship of Lan Na at Chiang Mai, where works such as the Jinakālamālī were composed. Chronicles, legal codes, palm leaf manuscript libraries, and the whole architecture of the Theravāda year: the rains retreat, the robe offering, the ordination season.
Why it matters
Theravāda becomes the defining Buddhist tradition of this whole region.
History and tradition
What historians can say
Inscriptions, chronicles and surviving buildings make this one of the better documented Buddhist cultures of the period. Bagan and the sacred city of Anuradhapura are UNESCO World Heritage sites.