Dambulla Cave Temples, Sri Lanka

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 get good pic­tures of the amaz­ing Bud­dhist art­work in the caves. I had no idea we were also going to learn so much from our guide. He was insis­tent, as most great teach­ers are, that I pay full atten­tion to him before shoot­ing pho­tographs. I was happy to oblige.

Dambulla Cave Tem­ples is one of the largest cave tem­ple com­plexes in SE Asia. It is also well vis­ited as a pil­grim­age site. In one cave our guide asked, “why do you think there are so many Bud­dhas side by side lin­ing the walls of this cave?” Being the clue­less, non-Buddhist West­erner that I am, I won­dered the same thing! It’s very sim­ple. This is so that there are plenty of Bud­dhas for the pil­grims to pray to. While it was nice to be there when it wasn’t very crowded, being wit­ness to hun­dreds of pil­grims would have been an amaz­ing experience.

Our guide spoke emphat­i­cally of Bud­dhism being a phi­los­o­phy rather than a reli­gion with the most impor­tant mes­sage being the teach­ing of med­i­ta­tion or “no mind.” Every­where in the caves are Bud­dha images in med­i­ta­tion. I felt at peace just being in the pres­ence of such quiet med­i­ta­tive wis­dom (or non-wisdom). Not only that, but the artistry on the walls and ceil­ings of the caves was cap­ti­vat­ing. All of my senses were alive with the won­der of it all.

Back­ground and History

The cave tem­ples, oth­er­wise known as the Golden Moun­tain Tem­ple, are located in cen­tral Sri Lanka. Accord­ing to UNESCO, around the 3rd cen­tury BC, this area became the loca­tion for the largest Bud­dhist monas­tic set­tle­ments on the island of Sri Lanka.

There are 5 caves with the Maharaja Vihara being the old­est and most archi­tec­turally sig­nif­i­cant. A vihara was an early San­skrit word for Bud­dhist dwelling, which took on greater mean­ing as time went on. Caves 1, 2 and 4 where built in the 1st cen­tury BC. The 3rd cave was built dur­ing the reign of Kirti Sri­ra­jasimha, the King of Kandy, in the 18th cen­tury and the 5th is the newest, repainted in 1915.

In this pic­ture in cave 5, you can see that the paint is peel­ing. This is due to the use of chem­i­cal rather than nat­ural paint pig­ments, which have proven to be less resilient. Also the later cave stat­ues were cre­ated using plas­ter vs. stone in the older caves.

Nir­vana and parinir­vana were major ele­ments in each cave tem­ple, as I’ll demon­strate in pic­tures that fol­low. The fol­low­ing attrib­utes of parinir­vana were explained by our guide. The pic­ture on the left illus­trates the feet of the Bud­dha in parinir­vana. The feet are are exactly one above the other in the nir­vana pose. The pic­ture on the right shows the flame above the Buddha’s head in nir­vana. This is miss­ing in parinirvana.

Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Parinir­vana
1. Eyes are half closed vs. open
2. No flame above the head
3. Open palm
4. Empty (flat) stom­ach
5. Feet slightly apart

Cave 4: Pho­tog­ra­phy was banned for a time in recent his­tory because a tourist sat on a Bud­dha statue to have her pic­ture taken. You can see in this pic­ture that this Bud­dha is more brightly painted than any other in this room. If you visit these sites, you must be respectful.The rule in the cave tem­ples is that while you can take pho­tos of the Bud­dhas, you can­not take pho­tos of peo­ple. This pre­vents peo­ple from tak­ing dis­re­spect­ful pho­tos of them­selves or oth­ers with the Buddhas.

What fol­lows is a slide show of some of the pho­tos I took while climb­ing the stairs to the caves and inside all five caves. If you click on any pic­ture, you will get a descrip­tion of it. The Dambulla Cave tem­ples are a mag­nif­i­cent artis­tic trib­ute to the Kandyan artists of the late 18th cen­tury, who brought the walls to vibrant life, espe­cially in Maharaja Vihara or Cave 2, the largest of the cave tem­ples. How­ever, some of the sur­viv­ing art goes back much ear­lier and has sur­vived amaz­ingly well.

Tagged as: Buddha, Buddhism, Buddhist art, Buddhist Pilgrimage Sites, Cave Temples, Dambulla, Golden Mountain Temple, Meditation, nirvana, parinirvana, Sri Lanka