Sigiriya

SMW, SLT still comes to you from lovely Sri Lanka, down here surrounded by the Indian Ocean. My life, and my e-mails, have been too full of reality and news, or the lack thereof, for the past few months…so I’m gonna take a pass and tell you nothing more than that I’m still here, and will be until this blog tells you something different. Whenever that might be, I still can’t say. So sorry.

And yeah, lots more people have died here since last I wrote, the peace talks in Geneva don’t seem to have gone very far, and all kinds of other fine things you can read about by doing a few web searches for news items about Sri Lanka. (And yes, I still encourage you to do so: it’s good for us citizens of the planet to be aware of what’s happening on it.) But why, I ask, would you want me to tell you about all that depressing stuff when I can do a show and tell instead about my summer vacation, oops, I mean the beautiful and impressive things to be seen in Sigiriya, Dambulla, Polonnaruwa and Kandy?These are the magnificent water gardens at the base on the western side of the rock, the main entrance. It's very impressive to walk up to the rock through these gardens.

You guessed it, you’re about to get a brief history of Sri Lanka. A very brief history, not to worry. The Veddah, SL’s ur-inhabitants, can be thought of as perhaps comparable to America’s ur-inhabitants: pushed out, killed and/or greatly reduced in number by later arrivals. There are some Veddah still remaining, but they’re not a demographic, political or cultural force. Sri Lankan culture as we know it today began being formed by immigrants from Northern India, who arrived most likely some time around the 6^th Century BC. Sinhalese legend says the son of a north Indian king was exiled for some crime, and put in a boat with 700 men – the idea seems to have been “you can’t really kill the son of the king, but you can send him off to the open ocean and let him die there.” Legend says he landed in Sri Lanka on the same day the Buddha achieved enlightenment, over on the mainland.

Lion Staircase @ Sigiriya

Greatly telescoping, by around the 4^th Century BC or so, a significant civilization had sprung up around Anuradhapura, where he and his descendants are said to have settled. Sri Lanka has three major historical capitals of which everyone talks. Anuradhapura reigned for more than a thousand years; when the south-Indian Chola dynasty conquered Anuradhapura in the late 10^th Century AD, they established their new capital at Polonnaruwa, to better watch for opposition from other Sinhalese kingdoms and bases of power further south. Though Sri Lanka’s earlier-arriving north-Indian inhabitants and the later arrivals from south India got along reasonably well for several hundred years, it seems that by the late 5^th Century, when an ousted Anuradhapura royal prince returned with south Indian mercenaries to retake his throne, those with hindsight can see the beginnings of many centuries of conflict between the Sinhalese and various populations originating in south India. Polonnaruwa was retaken by the Sinhalese fairly soon, and ruled as the major Sinhalese kingdom on the Island (pretty much no one ever ruled the whole island until the British took Kandy in 1815) for more than 200 years. After that, Sinhalese power moved south and west, and before long Europeans powers started taking their turns trying to profit from the island’s riches (in order, the Portuguese, the Dutch then the British).

These huge lion's paws are all that remains of a massive 5th-century stone lion through which one entered the highest precinct of Sigiriya. Only the bottom-most stairs, between the paws, remain; after that you continue now up through footholds hammered into the rock. Given how massive the paws are, it's intriguing to picture how it would have looked and felt to have had the whole lion there, leading you right up to the summit itself.

Cave Frescoes @ Sirigiya

These beautiful cave frescoes, painted into a niche about halfway up the rock, are one of the most famous aspects of the rock. Theories on what the women represent: King Kasyapa's concubines; celestial nymphs; or, perhaps the most current theory, aspects of Tara Devi, the consort of Avalokitsvara (a Boddhisatva) and, says the book, an important figure in Tantric Buddhism. Go figure. The big image is rather illegal, as my flash unintentionally went off. The spiral staircases go up to and then back down from the niche where the paintings are.

The last Sinhalese kingdom to hold out was based at Kandy, where no major archeological sites are located, but where Sri Lanka’s most important religious site is: the Temple of the Tooth Relic. Buddhism came to Sri Lanka in the 3^rd Century BC, when Indian Emperor Ashoka sent his son and daughter to spread the word to Sri Lanka. In AD 371, the tooth relic (of the Buddha) is said to have been smuggled into Sri Lanka, hidden in the hair of a princess. The tooth is said to have been whisked away from the Buddha’s funeral pyre. In any case, the tooth relic pretty much went to wherever the most powerful Sinhalese (=Buddhist) kingdom on the island was, and thus it ended up at Kandy. It would be hard to overstate the importance of the tooth relic, or of Buddhism in the creation and maintenance of Sinhalese identity.

An interesting aspect of Sigiriya is that the very top of the rock doesn't actually have anything all that amazing: it's got a lot of brick walls and moats that now host lilies but may once have been for bathing or just reservoirs for water. (Who'd wanna lug water all the way up there, after all?) Anyway, this image above is taken at the top; the two above and the one below are all from the garden and the moat, which forms the border around the rock compound.

Dambulla: Royal Rock Temple

So what does all this have to do with the pix we’re seeing, you ask? Sigiriya was developed, most likely as a Buddhist retreat and monastery (an alternate, mostly discredited theory says it was a fortress), by King Kasyapa in the late 5^th Century AD. He’s the guy who kicked his older brother over to south India, whence he later returned with those aforementioned south Indian mercenaries. (Does that mean we can blame the current troubles all on him??) The caves at Dambulla were already occupied by Buddhist monks, but they became a major religious and cultural site after a king took refuge there around 90BC while evading south Indian invaders. After he returned to power, he expressed his gratitude by turning the caves into the rock temples you see in these pictures. Of course, later kings added embellishments of their own, but the roots go back pretty far.

Polonnaruwa, which I visited after Sigiriya and Dambulla and before Kandy, was initially founded by the south Indian Chola dynasty. In 1070, Sinhalese king Vijayabahu I drove the Cholas off the island and retained Polonnaruwa as his capital. It reached its peak under Parakramabahu I (1153-86), and then started a decline under his successor, Nissanka Malla (1187-96), who seems to have bankrupted the treasury trying to compete with the glory of his predecessor. It’s fitting that, after Polonnaruwa, I decided to hop down to Kandy, since that was the final base of power for Sinahlese kings in Sri Lanka.

Enjoy the pictures. It’s a gorgeous island, with amazing history. If only it could really know a prolonged period of peace without communal violence, it would be simply amazing. As it is, it’s a bit confusing to my emotions, I must admit. Ah well.

Dambulla rock as seen from Sigiriya. Look reeeeaaaallly closely right at the base of the small round hill at the center left of the pic, and you'll see something sorta shiny. I'm sparing you any closeup shots of this enormous gilded Buddha image. (Quoth Lonely Planet: "...a very kitschy structure completed in 2000 using Japanese donations. On top...sits a 30m-high Buddha...Signs claim it's the largest Buddha in the world, but it's not even the largest in Sri Lanka.")

...And the unmistakeable Sigiriya (with some other round little hillock on the left), as seem from top o' the rock in Dambulla.

This would be the Dambulla rock. Note cow in foreground. Impressive slab of rock, yet not so pittoresque as the one in Sigiriya, wouldn't you say?

Dambulla is only about 15 km southwest from Sigiriya, which puts it right at the northern edge of Sri Lanka's central hill country. Stay the course, dear reader, and you too can see pix of the hill country taken during my whistle-stop visit to Kandy!

Below: the hill country as seen from the (lower) rock at Dambulla, then from the (higher) rock at Sigiriya.

The mandatory self-portrait from the top, with the gardens wayyyy down below; another pretty lily pond on top.

Sigiriya rock with goat, Sigiriya rock with cows, toque macaque jumping from one side of a wall to another side down in the gardens at the base.

A few final images I just couldn't pass up. The wall, if you look closely, holds a damn large hornets nest - like, scary large. This is just to the left on the rock wall as you're looking at the lion's paw steps. BEFORE I saw this hornets nest, I saw this sign down in the gardens, and thought "well, now that's a novel way to make sure people don't get too loud" - not really believing it was a realistic problem. Silly me. The other - just a pretty plant in the gardens at the base of the rock.

Polonnaruwa

The travel sequence for my five-day holiday was: Sigiriya (from which a side-trip took me to Dambulla, very close by), Polonnaruwa, then Kandy at the tail end. Here we are in Polonnaruwa, looking at the Gal Vihara Buddha images, described by LP as likely the high point of Sinhalese rock carving. These are certainly among the most beautifully carved monumental images I've ever seen - look at the way the grain and texture of the rock is worked into the scultpure. Notice the beautiful way the pillow compresses a bit under the Buddha's head. Notice, in the shot with people in it, the enormous scale of these sculptures! These images were all cut from one single long slab of granite, under Parakramabahu, as part of a monastery he established at the northern end of Polonnaruwa.

Lankatilaka

The Lankatilaka image house was constructed under Parakramabahu to house the large brick Buddha you can still see there, though it would once have been covered in plaster and of course had a head. I found the whole thing extraordinarily beautiful and jaw-dropping. This was my favorite spot in Polonnaruwa (of many that I loved); though the Gal Vihara carvings you've been seeing are likely the single most-famous or most-important grouping at Polonnaruwa, I found it easier to warm up to this ruin, as it were.

Three more little images from the compound around Lankatilaka: scraps of colorful paint over a side entracne to the Lankatilaka show where once- beautiful frescoes reminiscent of Sigiriya would have been; moss-covered walls and gates dot the grounds; and algae cover a guardian animal who's been at his work for nearly 900 years!

The Quadrangle

The quadrangle, LP tells me, is the densest concentration of historical buildings in a small area in Sri Lanka. It's quite compact and feels very much like a...well, like a quadrangle on a college campus I guess.

From top: a Buddha statue in the Attadage, sole remaining structure built by Vijayabahu I - this is one of two buildings on the Quadrangle that was built to house the tooth relic; a glimpse of the Vattadage image pavilion constructed under Parakramabahu; Buddha images inside the Vattadage; a moonstone at one of the entrances to the Vattadage.

Rankot Vihara Dagoba

Though not the most obvious thing about the Rankot Vihara, this elephant frieze gets pride of place because I simply loved the decorative elephants and how the moisture has leached some fine coatings onto them, contrasted with that rich green of the moss. Ain't it purrty?

At 54 meters high, this is the largest dagoba at Polonnaruwa and the 4th-largest on the island (of the bigger, I suspect at least one or two are quite modern and not, frankly, terribly interesting, given some things I've seen...there's the occasional element of tack to contemporary Buddhist architecture in SL as I see it, e.g. that glimmer of gold from the enormous golden Buddha that I subjected you to only from the distance, next to the gorgeous and historically important Dambulla caves). It was the first building and compound at Polonnaruwa at which my jaw really started dropping - all the things you've already seen caused my jaw to drop even more, but sequentially I saw this first, and despite the heat I was a bit awestruck.

At intervals along the rounded outside of the dagoba, there are "image houses" for sculptures of Buddha and Boddhisatvas. This is one inside, with offerings of flowers. One enters these sacred precincts in bare feet (the rocks were hot!!!!) with hats doffed.