What an unspeakable blessing that against such, calamities a security should have been found by the introduction of a grain calculated to germinate under water; and that a perennial supply of the latter, not only adequate for all ordinary purposes, but sufficient to guard against extraordinary emergencies of the seasons, should have been provided by the ingenuity of the people, aided by the bounteous care of their sovereigns. It is no matter of surprise that the kings who devoted their treasures and their personal energies to the formation of tanks and canals have entitled their memory to traditional veneration, as benefactors of their race and country. In striking contrast, it is the pithy remark of the author of the Rajavali, mourning over the extinction of the Great Dynasty and the decline of the country, that "because the fertility of the land was decreased the kings who followed were no longer of such consequence as those who went before."[1]
1: Rajavali, p. 238
Simultaneously with the construction of works for the advancement of agriculture, the patriarchal village system, copied from that which existed from the earliest ages in India[1], was established in the newly settled districts; and each hamlet, with its governing "headman" its artisans, its barber, its astrologer and washerman, was taught to conduct its own affairs by its village council; to repair its tanks and watercourses, and to collect two harvests in each year by the combined labour of the whole village community.
1: Mahawanso, ch. x. p.67.
Between the agricultural system of the mountainous districts and that of the lowlands, there was at all times the same difference which still distinguishes the tank cultivation of Neuera-kalawa and the Wanny from the hanging rice lands of the Kandyan hills. In the latter, reservoirs are comparatively rare, as the natives rely on the certainty of the rains, which seldom fail at their due season in those lofty regions. Streams are conducted by means of channels ingeniously carried round the spurs of the hills and along the face of acclivities, so as to fertilise the fields below, which in the technical phrase of the Kandyans are "assoedamised" for the purpose; that is, formed into terraces, each protected by a shallow ledge over which the superfluous water trickles, from the highest level into that immediately below it; thus descending through all in succession till it escapes in the depths of the valley.
For the tillage of the lands with which the temples were so largely endowed in all quarters of the island, the sacred communities had assigned to them certain villages, a portion of whose labour was the property of the wihara[1]: slaves were also appropriated to them, and an instance is mentioned in the fifth century[2], of the inhabitants of a low-caste village having been bestowed on a monastery by the king Aggrabodhi, "in order that the priests might derive their service as slaves."[3] Sharing in a prerogative of royalty, some of the temples had, moreover, a right to the compulsory labour of the community; and in one of the inscriptions carved on the rock at Mihintala, the "Raja-kariya writer" is enumerated in the list of temple officers.[4] The temple lands were occasionally let to tenants whose rent was paid either in "land-fees," or in kind.[5]
1: Ibid., ch. xxxvii. p. 247.
2: Rock inscriptions at Mihintala and at Dambool.
3: Mahawanso ch, xlii. TURNOUR, MS. translation.