From Monastic College to National University

The nineteenth century Buddhist revival associated with figures such as Anagarika Dharmapala reestablished pirivena education as a deliberate response to colonial era Christian missionary schooling, and two of the revived institutions took an unusual path afterward: Vidyodaya Pirivena, founded in 1873, and Vidyalankara Pirivena, founded in 1875, both grew so substantially that in 1958 the postcolonial Sri Lankan state converted them directly into secular universities, the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and the University of Kelaniya, an institutional lineage running in an unbroken line from monastic college to national university that has few exact parallels elsewhere.

Smaller pirivenas continued and continue to operate as monastic training institutions in the older sense, today generally under the oversight of the Sri Lankan Ministry responsible for Buddhist affairs and education, training bhikkhus in Pali and scripture much as their medieval predecessors did even as the largest historical examples moved entirely into secular higher education. Gombrich's social history of Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka traces this nineteenth and twentieth century revival in detail, describing a religious education system reasserting itself deliberately against colonial pressure rather than simply persisting unchanged.