Ramanna Nikaya

The Ramanna Nikaya is the youngest of the three principal monastic fraternities of Sri Lanka, and it was founded on a concern for the strict purity of ordination and discipline.

A fresh ordination from the Mon country

The fraternity was founded in 1864 by Ambagahawatte Saranankara, who, dissatisfied with the state of the existing orders, travelled to receive ordination in the Ramanna, or Mon, region of Lower Burma, judging its lineage and its observance more authentic, and returned to establish a new fraternity named for that region. The founding impulse was reformist: a desire for an ordination free of the caste restriction of the Siyam Nikaya and for a stricter keeping of the monastic discipline than the founder believed the older orders maintained.

Reputation for rigour

The Ramanna Nikaya gained and has kept a reputation as the most disciplined and austere of the three fraternities, emphasising strict adherence to the Vinaya, meditation and forest monasticism, and it deliberately kept itself smaller and more rigorous rather than seeking size. It stands as the third of the Sri Lankan nikayas, after the caste-restricted Siyam Nikaya and the more broadly based Amarapura Nikaya, and its separate existence, like theirs, reflects the way disputes over caste and over the purity of ordination and discipline have repeatedly produced new fraternities in Sri Lankan Buddhism rather than reform within a single order.

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.