Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c26.23

c26.23

Spinning, but not weaving, was sometimes done by women of high caste. A particularly meritorious act is held to be the presentation to the Saṅgha, at the close of Vas or Buddhist Lent, of kaṭhina robes, i.e., priests' robes, spun, woven, and made up in a single day. Even kings frequently performed this ceremony, "employing hundreds of thousands of persons in all such work as picking the cotton, after it is extracted from the fruit, weighing, converting it into balls, spinning, weaving, washing, cutting into pieces, stitching, dyeing" (Rūpāvaliya, trans., p. 48). Thus on a certain occasion, Parākrama Bāhu II. offered no less than eighty such robes to the priesthood, in memory of the eighty chief disciples of the Buddha. "The learned king gathered together the inhabitants of Laṅkā—a great multitude of men and women—and set them all to work to prepare the cotton and other things, and speedily finished the work of the robes. And he caused the eighty kaṭhina robes to be given in the course of a single day" (Mahāvaṃsa, Ch. LXXXV.) And so he did on many other occasions, nor was he alone in this practice. Private individuals acquired merit in the same way; and it was on such occasions that the ladies of the household lent a hand in spinning.