King Mahanama
king of Anuradhapura
Mahanama was King of Anuradhapura in the 5th century, whose reign lasted from 412 to 434. He succeeded his brother Upatissa I as King of Anuradhapura and was succeeded by his son Soththisena.
According to the chronicles at first, this Mahanama was a monk and had an illicit relationship with the queen of Upathissa I. Then with the help of the queen he killed Upathissa and become king while placing the Queen of King Upathissa as his queen too. Anyway, after being king he has deeply devoted himself to Buddhism.
During his time Abhayagiriya Monastery complex had become a larger wider and more powerful monastery than any other monastery in the country. As the guardian of the Tooth Relic of The Buddha, it becomes famous worldwide. With the environment of different ideas and different viewpoints, it transforms into semi university state and becomes a placement for keeping a thousand types of Buddhist scripture. Not only Buddhist scripture but it also was kept other knowledge in their too. So this is the very reason many foreign students came to Sri Lanka to study here. Not only Buddhist monks worldwide especially in India, and the Southeast Asian region countries, China and also normal scholars had the opportunity to study that knowledge.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “King Mahanama” as king of Anuradhapura. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as king of Anuradhapura. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15059050. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “King Mahanama” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.