The influence of Atula, who must have been an astute if not learned man, continued after the king's death and no measures were taken against the Ekaṃsikas, although King Hsin-byu-shin (1763-1776) persecuted an heretical sect called Paramats[165]. His youthful successor, Sing-gu-sa, was induced to hold a public disputation. The Ekaṃsikas were defeated in this contest and a royal decree was issued making the Pârupana discipline obligatory. But the vexed question was not settled for it came up again in the long reign (1781-1819) of Bodôpayâ. This king has won an evil reputation for cruelty and insensate conceit[166], but he was a man of vigour and kept together his great empire. His megalomania naturally detracted from the esteem won by his piety. His benefactions to religion were lavish, the shrines and monasteries which he built innumerable. But he desired to build a pagoda larger than any in the world and during some twenty years wasted an incalculable amount of labour and money on this project, still commemorated by a gigantic but unfinished mass of brickwork now in ruins. In order to supervise its erection he left his palace and lived at Mingun, where he conceived the idea that he was a Buddha, an idea which had not been entirely absent from the minds of Alompra and Hsin-byu-shin. It is to the credit of the Theras that, despite the danger of opposing an autocrat as cruel as he was crazy, they refused to countenance these pretensions and the king returned to his palace as an ordinary monarch. If he could not make himself a Buddha, he at least disposed of the Ekaṃsika dispute, and was probably influenced in his views by Ñânâbhivaṃsa, a monk of the Pârupana school whom he made his chaplain, although Atula was still alive. At first he named a commission of enquiry, the result of which was that the Ekaṃsikas admitted that their practice could not be justified from the scriptures but only by tradition. A royal decree was issued enjoining the observance of the Pârupana discipline, but two years later Atula addressed a letter to the king in which he maintained that the Ekaṃsika costume was approved in a work called Cûlagaṇṭhipada, composed by Moggalâna, the immediate disciple of the Buddha. The king ordered representatives of both parties to examine this contention and the debate between them is dramatically described in the Sâsanavaṃsa. It was demonstrated that the text on which Atula relied was composed in Ceylon by a thera named Moggalâna who lived in the twelfth century and that it quoted mediæval Sinhalese commentaries. After this exposure the Ekaṃsika party collapsed. The king commanded (1784) the Pârupana discipline to be observed and at last the royal order received obedience.