The King Who Gave His Head Audiobook By Lennart Lopin cover art

The King Who Gave His Head

The Chronicle of the Hatthavanagalla Monastery

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The King Who Gave His Head

By: Lennart Lopin
Narrated by: Virtual Voice
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In the third century of the Common Era, a prince in Sri Lanka gave away his own head. Not metaphorically. Not in a parable. Quite literally.

According to the chronicle you are about to read, King Sirisaṅghabodhi — having been driven from his throne, hunted through the forests of the island’s wet zone, and finally cornered — severed his own head and left it for his pursuer, so that the reward offered for it would feed the man who found it. He did this, the text tells us, as an act of dāna — generosity. The ultimate generosity. The gift that completes the perfections.

This is a story that has been told in Sri Lanka for seventeen hundred years. It is carved in stone at Polonnaruwa. It is painted on temple walls. It is known to every Sinhalese Buddhist the way the story of Abraham and Isaac is known to every Jew and Christian — a foundational narrative about what it means to hold nothing back. And yet this text — the Hatthavanagallavihāravaṃso, the Chronicle of the Hatthavanagalla Monastery — has never been translated into English.

This is a translation in the same spirit as our rendering of the Nettippakaraṇa (The Netti: How to Read What the Buddha Taught). The main text is in plain, modern English. No Pali appears in the body text. When the author uses ornate literary conventions, we unpack them. When he describes a place, we help you see it. When the narrative assumes you know something about Sri Lankan history or Buddhist cosmology, we fill in the gap.

The endnotes carry the full scholarly apparatus: the original Pali, our translation decisions, variant readings, historical context, and references to parallel accounts in the Mahāvaṃsa and other chronicles.
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