By the account preserved in the Mahavamsa, Sri Lanka's great Pali chronicle, King Devanampiya Tissa had already welcomed Buddhism to the island through the mission of the monk Mahinda, traditionally named as Ashoka's son, when a further request went back to the Mauryan court: for a branch of the Bodhi tree itself, and for ordained women who could establish the bhikkhuni lineage for Sri Lanka's own women, beginning with Queen Anula and her household. Ashoka's daughter Sanghamitta was chosen to lead the mission.
The chronicle narrates her departure in considerable ceremonial detail. A sapling was cut from the southern branch of the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, placed in a golden vessel, and escorted with royal honors to the Ganges, where Sanghamitta and eleven companion bhikkhunis boarded a ship at Tamalitti. The party reached Sri Lanka within a week, landing to a reception organized by the king himself, and the sapling was ceremonially planted at Anuradhapura, where it became the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi.
Sanghamitta's ordination of Queen Anula and the women of the royal court established the bhikkhuni order in Sri Lanka as a going institution rather than a single ceremony, and later Theravada tradition across South and Southeast Asia traces its own bhikkhuni lineage, where one survives or has been revived, back through this founding act. The tree she is credited with bringing has itself been continuously tended at Anuradhapura ever since, giving Sanghamitta's mission the unusual property of being anchored to a living, physically continuous object rather than to text alone.