Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c3.3

c3.3

Mediæval Sinhalese Art was the art of a people for whom husbandry was the most honourable of all occupations, amongst whom the landless man was a nobody, and whose ploughmen spoke as elegantly as courtiers. It was a religious art, and so a popular art. It was also essentially a national art; the craftsmen, forming an integral part of the Civil Service, were rewarded with grants of State land, no less than soldiers or husbandmen. It was the art of a people whose kings were ‘one with the religion and the people,’—perhaps the most significant phrase in the whole of that magnificent chronicle, the Mahāvaṃsa, from which I have so often quoted,—a phrase embodying an ideal hopeless of attainment by a foreign ruler.