Amarapura Nikaya

The Amarapura Nikaya is a Sri Lankan Theravada monastic fraternity founded to escape a caste restriction, and its origin is a direct consequence of the closed character of the older order.

Ordination refused, then imported

The valid higher ordination restored to Sri Lanka in the eighteenth century was held by the Siyam Nikaya, whose ordination was confined in practice to the highest, govigama, caste. Monks from other castes, excluded from that ordination, travelled to the Burmese royal capital of Amarapura in 1803 to receive higher ordination there and brought the lineage back to the island, founding a new fraternity named for the city that had ordained them. The founding of the order is therefore not a doctrinal dispute but a caste dispute, worked out through the acquisition of a rival ordination lineage from abroad.

A federation of lineages

The Amarapura Nikaya grew as a body drawing its monks from the communities the Siyam Nikaya would not ordain, and it developed as a looser federation of several lines rather than a single centralised order, reflecting its origin among different excluded groups. Together with the later Ramanna Nikaya it forms the counterpart to the caste-restricted Siyam Nikaya, so that the three-fold division of the Sri Lankan sangha is in large part a record of a social exclusion answered by the importing of ordination. The order remains one of the principal fraternities of Sri Lankan Buddhism, and it later played a significant part in movements of Buddhist revival on the island.

The Amarapura Nikaya exists because the Siyam Nikaya's caste restriction left monks from outside the Goyigama community with no path to full ordination on the island at all, forcing them to travel to the Burmese capital of Amarapura in 1803 to receive higher ordination through an entirely separate lineage and then bring that ordination back to Sri Lanka to found a fraternity explicitly open to men of any caste.

Having been founded specifically to overcome one kind of exclusion, the new fraternity did not remain unified for long: further disagreements, often themselves rooted in caste and regional lineage differences among the very communities the Amarapura Nikaya had opened ordination to, produced repeated splits over the following decades, so that the fraternity exists today not as one body but as a loose family of numerous distinct Amarapura chapters, each independently organised, a degree of internal fragmentation considerably greater than either the Siyam or Ramanna fraternities display. Despite this fragmentation, the founding principle held: ordination within the Amarapura tradition has remained open on the basis the 1803 founders intended, making it, whatever its internal divisions, the direct institutional answer to the restriction that had excluded its founders from the older fraternity in the first place.