There are many Sinhalese Buddhists who are mortified by the turn their country has taken under the Rajapaksas.
“Our country is a Sinhalese one and we are its unofficial police,” one monk announced.
Prabhakaran had come to personify the movement, and his end, so wretched, became the emblem of Tamil defeat and Sinhalese triumph.
The tooth did not, according to Sinhalese tradition, form part of the relics distributed after the cremation of the Buddha.
Sinhalese and Burmese traditions also credit him with the despatch of missionaries who converted Suvarṇabhûmi or Pegu.
A learned thera who knew the Sinhalese Tipitaka was imported thence, as well as a branch of the Bo-tree.
The Sinhalese tradition agrees on the whole with the data supplied by Indian inscriptions and Chinese pilgrims.
Some of these are on a small scale; but altogether several thousands of Sinhalese find a precarious existence in digging for gems.
The king of Pegu, who wished to marry a Sinhalese princess, sent an embassy to Ceylon to arrange the match.
The bow and arrow are their only weapons and the arrow tipped with iron obtained from the Sinhalese forms a universal tool.
also Singhalese, "pertaining to Sri Lanka," 1797, from Sanskrit Sinhala "Sri Lanka, Ceylon," from simhala-, literally "of lions," from simhah "lion." As the name of a language spoken there, it is attested from 1801.
