Place · relic temple · Sri Lanka
Temple of the Tooth, Kandy
The temple complex at Kandy, Sri Lanka, housing the Buddha's left canine tooth — brought from Kalinga by Princess Hemamala and Prince Dantha around 371 CE — whose possession has legitimised Sinhala kingship since the Anuradhapura kingdom. The temple complex now standing was built mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries under the Kandyan kings; the relic itself is kept in a nested set of seven gold caskets. The Esala Perahera, the annual August procession of the tooth through Kandy on a caparisoned elephant, is one of the great Buddhist festivals of South Asia. The LTTE truck-bombed the temple in January 1998, killing seventeen; the relic survived.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Sri Lankan chronicles; Dalada tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 7.294, 80.641
Connections (2)
- Monument relocationYapahuwa
The tooth relic legitimised whoever held it, so it moved as the capital retreated before invasion from south India — Anurādhapura, Polonnaruwa, Yāpahuwa, and finally Kandy. It was taken from Yāpahuwa to the Pāndya country and recovered by embassy, which is what a relic worth a kingdom is worth. The Esala Perahera that carries the relic through Kandy each year involves dozens of caparisoned elephants and several thousand dancers, and is the largest religious procession in the island.
- Life routeJoseph Vaz
Vaz worked eastward into the Kandyan kingdom, the one part of Ceylon the Dutch did not hold, and was eventually protected by the Buddhist king Vimaladharmasurya II and his successor, who let him build churches and move freely after he had impressed the court during a drought and an epidemic. He learned Sinhala and Tamil and wrote devotional works in both; his canonisation took place in Colombo in 2015.
On these journeys
Sources
Sri Dalada Maligawa — UNESCO Kandy
Open Temple of the Tooth, Kandy in the repository →