The Youngest Fraternity, Built on Two Reforms at Once

Ambagahawatte Saranankara founded the Ramanna Nikaya in 1864 as the third and last of Sri Lanka's major monastic fraternities, and it was built on two reforming claims at the same time rather than one. Like the Amarapura Nikaya founded six decades earlier, it rejected the caste restriction that still limited full ordination within the older Siyam Nikaya, opening its own ordination lineage, received through the Ramanna, or Mon, region of Lower Burma from which the fraternity takes its name, to candidates regardless of caste background. But Saranankara and his fellow founders also pressed a second, stricter argument about monastic discipline itself, holding that both of the existing Sri Lankan fraternities had allowed practices to creep into ordinary monastic life that a rigorous reading of the Vinaya did not permit, and building the new fraternity around a return to closer textual observance rather than caste inclusion alone. That combination, open ordination paired with unusually strict discipline, gave the Ramanna Nikaya a distinct identity even among fraternities that already shared its rejection of caste restriction, and it emerged as part of a wider nineteenth century Buddhist revival on the island that was pushing back simultaneously against colonial era Christian missionary pressure and against what reformers saw as the laxity of establishment Buddhism.