#Mahinda

“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.”

“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.”