- Lived:
- c. 285–205 BCE · born, by the Sri Lankan tradition, at Ujjayinī (Ujjain) to Aśoka and Devī of Vidiśā → ordained at Pāṭaliputra (Patna); from about the age of thirty-two, his whole life was Sri Lanka, on and around the hill now called Mihintale
- Field:
- Buddhist monk and missionary — leader of the Mauryan mission to Sri Lanka, founder of the island's monastic order and of the Mahāvihāra, the mother-monastery of Theravāda Buddhism
- The Big Idea:
- A religion is not carried by a sermon but by a transplant — rules, ordination lines, festivals, a sacred landscape — and the transplant Mahinda made took so well that when Buddhism's Indian homeland lost the early scriptures, his island still had them, written on palm leaves.
- In their words:
- "Samanas are we, O great king, disciples of the King of Truth." — his self-introduction to a startled king on a hillside, as the Mahāvaṃsa tells it (tr. Wilhelm Geiger, 1912)
- If you remember one thing:
- The oldest complete collection of the Buddha's teachings survives because an emperor's son gave up an empire, crossed the sea, converted a king by asking him riddles about mango trees — and planted, on a small island, the library that outlived the mainland's.