Buddhist Arts

Sri Dal­ada Mali­gawa Tem­ple of the Sacred Tooth is the holi­est Bud­dhist site in Sri Lanka. The tem­ple is located within the old Palace com­plex. When we vis­ited, we needed to go through a rig­or­ous secu­rity check­point due to the bomb­ing by the Tamil Tigers on Jan­u­ary 25, 1998. Once again we were also treated […]

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Sigiriya Lion Rock rises 360 meters above sea level. While it is not a Bud­dhist pil­grim­age site, it is very impor­tant his­tor­i­cally and archae­o­log­i­cally and is one of the UNESCO Cul­tural Tri­an­gle sites. As described later in this post, it was also home dur­ing sep­a­rate peri­ods of hun­dreds of years to Bud­dhist monas­tic orders. The […]

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We vis­ited Sri Lanka in Novem­ber, 2007. Sri Lanka has been a Bud­dhist coun­try for the past 2000 years, 2nd only to India. Bud­dhism was intro­duced to Sri Lanka by the Indian Bud­dhist Emporer Asoka’s pen-pal, King Tissa of Anu­rad­ha­pura. 236 years after the death of the Bud­dha. Sri Lanka, a stun­ningly pic­turesque island nation, […]

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In 1978, UNESCO approved a project to safe­guard the cen­turies of cul­tural achieve­ments of six excep­tional sites in Sri Lanka. They called the sites, bounded by Polon­naruwa, Anu­rad­ha­pura and Kandy, the Cul­tural Tri­an­gle. When South Indian invaders sacked the early cap­i­tal of Sri Lanka, Anu­rad­ha­pura, Polon­naruwa became the sec­ond medieval cap­i­tal of Sri Lanka, from […]

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The Golden Moun­tain Tem­ple We arrived at the Dambulla Cave Tem­ples in the late after­noon. Our dri­ver, Aslam, intro­duced us to our guide, a mid­dle aged wiry Sri Lankan, who we quickly learned pos­sessed a pas­sion­ate wealth of knowl­edge about Bud­dhism and the Cave Tem­ples. I had my cam­era and tri­pod because I wanted to […]

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