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royal authority to correct the abuses of the church and 
restore harmony among conflicting sects. "With a view to 
his happiness hereafter," writes Dharmakirti Thero in the 
Nikdya Sangraha^ " he caused religious edifices to be built 
by spending several sums of a thousand pieces ; he con- 
structed great Royal Viharas, ' RajaMahaViharas,' numbers of 
Aramas^ such as Sidurugiri Vihara, directed the erection of 
pirivenas, ' cloisters after the honorary family titles borne 
by his race, called Kanchipura Purandara, ' Chief of the City 
of Kanchi,' Giriwansasekhara/ Crown of the Giriwansa race,' 
and Nissanka Alakeswara. Moreover, in the neighbourhood 
of his ancestral holding, the noble city of Rayigampura^ 
coveted by numbers of men of many lands and replete with 
all the requisites of cities, he constructed different viharas 
for the great body of priests, those that inhabited villages 
and those that lived in forests, and feeding them with the 
four kinds of alms he continued to lay up a great deal of 
merit." " By his liberality, fair speech, goodness, and 
affability," the same author tells us, " he won the favour 
of the people." Warrior and statesman, Alakeswara seems 
also to have been a man of culture and a patron of 
literary men. 
Civil war broke out on the death of Bhuvaneka Bahu V. 
of Kotte {circa 1401).t So long as the old king lived Vira 
Bahu Epa laid no claim to the lowland Provinces which 
constituted the newly-formed kingdom of Kotte. Now, 
Vira Alakeswara Wijaya Bahu of Rayigama, elder brother 
of Vira Bahu of Gampola, disputed the latter's right to succeed 
and sought to keep him out of the low-country. Alakeswara 
appears to have instigated and supported this movement. 
However, he took the precaution of not openly espousing 
the cause of either brother. His object seems to have been 
to place a weak Sovereign on the throne of Kotte, whom he 
* Pirivena originally meant a "cell" (see word in Childers' Pali Die- 
tionstry, mistranslated " college " in the Mahdwansa), 
t Possibly in the readjustment of a mutilated text this date has been 
inserted in a wrong place in the Rajdmliya (tide p. 68), 
