The Buddhist Ordination Rite in eighteenth century Ceylon is seen as having two kinds of symbolic meanings, the first internal to the rite and the second related to the legitimisation of royal power. The rite presents in a highly dramatic form the act of renunciation, away from the web of social relations into the woods, and away from the world on the path of Ultimate Release (Nirvana). The novice is first dressed as a Ksatriya warrior and then dramatically stripped of his princely finery and clothed in the yellow robes of the mendicant monk. Next he is solemnly admonished on how to walk the true path of asceticism. This is the first symbolic meaning. The second involves an elaboration, by the political authority (the King), of the princely attributes of the novice while he is still in the princely garb. This is done by conducting him with ceremony fit for a prince to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth which was a part of the palace complex, and enacting a ceremony of crowning him. This extension of the rite, in strict terms unnecessary for the rite itself, and done to only a select few of the novices, is seen as an attempt by the king to display his patronage of and devotion to the religion. The novice as prince is seen as a very apt mechanism for the fusion of two rituals with two very different meanings.
