Journey
Sri Lanka — the Buddhist island
The island took Buddhism in the third century BCE and kept a written canon when India did not — the Pali texts were committed to writing here about 29 BCE. Its capitals, its relic and its chronicles tie religion to kingship more tightly than anywhere on the mainland. The Tooth relic still determines where the capital is, which is a constitutional fact rather than a devotional one.
Stops (11)
- Mihintale · Mihintale — where it arrived
The hill where Mahinda is said to have met King Devānampiya Tissa out hunting in about 247 BCE and tested him with a riddle about mango trees before teaching him. The Mahāvamsa makes this the founding moment of the island's history, and the Poson full moon still fills the hill.
- Anurādhapura · Anurādhapura — the capital and the tree
Capital for over a thousand years, with monasteries covering square kilometres and irrigation tanks that watered them. The Sri Mahā Bodhi grew from a cutting of the Bodh Gayā tree brought by Sanghamittā in the third century BCE — the oldest human-planted tree anywhere with a recorded planting date.
- Sigiriya · Sigiriya — the rock and the frescoes
Kāsyapa built a palace on top of a two-hundred-metre rock in the 470s after murdering his father, approached through a lion's mouth and past a gallery of painted women on a polished wall. Eighteen years later he lost a battle at its foot, the court returned to Anurādhapura, and monks reoccupied the rock.
- Dambulla Cave Temple · Dambulla — the painted caves
Five caves under an overhang, given to the sangha by Valagamba in the first century BCE after he had sheltered there in exile, and painted and repainted since — some two thousand square metres of murals over a hundred and fifty Buddha images. A living temple rather than a ruin.
- Polonnaruwa · Polonnaruwa — the second capital
The capital after Anurādhapura fell to Chola invasion, and the seat of Parākramabāhu I, who rebuilt the irrigation system and reunified the sangha. The Gal Vihāra's four rock-cut Buddhas are the high point of Sinhala sculpture; Hindu shrines from the Chola period stand in the same city.
- Yapahuwa · Yāpahuwa — the stair and the flight
A rock citadel of the 1270s with an ornamented stair of unmistakably south Indian design, built as the capital retreated south-west under invasion from the mainland. The tooth relic was kept here and carried off to south India when the site fell — kingship following the relic, and the relic following the war.
- Temple of the Tooth, Kandy · Kandy — the tooth and the kingship
The Temple of the Tooth in the last independent Sinhala capital. Possession of the relic legitimised the ruler, so it moved with the capital through Anurādhapura, Polonnaruwa, Yāpahuwa and on to Kandy. The Esala Perahera that carries it through the streets each year is the island's largest procession.
- Kelaniya · Kelaniya — the visit and the paintings
Near Colombo, where the Mahāvamsa places the Buddha's third visit to the island. The stupa is ancient and the present temple's murals are Solias Mendis's of the 1930s — a nationalist retelling of the island's Buddhist history painted at the moment independence was being argued for.
- Adam's Peak / Sri Pāda · Adam's Peak — one footprint, four religions
A single hollow at the summit read as the Buddha's footprint by Buddhists, Śiva's by Hindus, Adam's by Muslims and St Thomas's by some Christians. Ibn Battuta climbed it. The pilgrimage season runs from December to May, and the path up is lit the whole way.
- Koneswaram, Trincomalee · Koneswaram — the Śaiva claim on the same island
A cliff-top Śiva temple over Trincomalee harbour, one of the Pancha Ishwarams, destroyed by the Portuguese in 1622 and partly recovered from the sea in the twentieth century. The island's Tamil Śaiva geography is as old as its Buddhist one and is generally told separately from it.
- Mahāvaṃsa · 5th–6th century
The Pali chronicle of the island, compiled at the Mahavihara from earlier monastic records and continued as the Culavamsa — the longest unbroken historical record in South Asia. Its origin story has Prince Vijaya, grandson of a lion and a human princess, exiled from Sinhapura in eastern India and landing on the day of the Buddha's death, which is where Sinhala takes its name from.