Northern Tour

After returning home from Colombo, Dan went to his new field site, the temple run by the student of a heretical monk. My first evening in the annex alone was quiet until after dark when two bats flew in the open doors to the patio and got stuck in the bedroom. I turned off the lights in the living room then darted into the dark, bat-filled bedroom, and turn on the lights to motivate them to leave.

After securing the house and reading myself to sleep I had to get up and use the bathroom. When I turned around to flush I noticed the biggest spider I had ever seen on the wall of my bathroom. This spider was brown, fuzzy, and drastically larger than anything I had ever imagined in North America and anything I had ever seen on display at a science museum. Its leg-span was the size of a baseball and the lower abdomen was the size of a quarter. Worn out from dealing with the bats, I was simply too terrified to kill it. “How could my life in Sri Lanka be complete without encountering something that could kill me in my own bathroom?” I reasoned as I pulled the covers of the bed around me. I felt grateful that it hadn’t been a scorpion or a snake as I drifted off to sleep to dream about spiders for the rest of the night.

When I woke up the next morning, I postponed using the bathroom as long as possible. When I couldn’t stand it any longer I gingerly walked into the bathroom, carefully inspecting every surface as if as massive brown spider would be difficult to spot. I could detect no trace of the previous night’s visitor. The next day was Sunday, so I mounted a solo visit to the Botanical Gardens in the morning. Sri Lanka had lost to Australia in the Cricket World Cup the night before, so I felt a little nervous that someone might see my blond hair and think I was an Aussie, but I decided that everyone was probably too tired from staying up the night before to cause me any trouble. I was curious to see how the Sri Lankan public would treat their team. “Would they burn the players in effigy and attack their homes like in India?” I wondered, “Or would they murder their coach like in Pakistan?” As it turned out the returning team was given a hero’s welcome with full-page ads in the papers congratulating them and celebratory banners posted outside of stores thanking the multi-ethnic, multi-religious, team for representing Sri Lanka so well on the international stage.

My run in the Gardens went well. I brought my iPod velcroed into its shoulder strap to help me ignore everyone. If the pod of Muslim women was laughing at me or the gaggle of Sri Lankan young men were taunting me, I didn’t know as I ran in a zone of my favorite songs. After stopping at Food City on the way home, I realized that I only had fifteen more days in Sri Lanka. I knew that our last two would be spent at the Galle Face in Colombo, “so those don’t really count,” I told myself, “It’s more like 13, and when Dan gets back from his field site we are going to become tourists again.” After Dan’s last trip to gather data we were finally going to finish our Northern Tour of the World Heritage Site ancient cities.

We had started the Northern Tour in August, before even moving into the annex. The ISLE undergrad study-abroad program that had served as Dan’s first bridge to Sri Lanka in 1996 was in session and Dan wanted us to accompany them on the Northern Tour because a prominent archeologist from Peradeniya University led the students through the sites.

Approximately 100 kilometers north of Kandy, the first stop was Anuradhapura, the first capital of Sri Lanka in the fourth century BCE. The Cakravartin King Ashoka sent his son, the arahat Mahinda, accompanied by several monks on a diplomatic mission to Anuradhapura in the early third century BCE. The delegation was received by King Tissa, the grandson of the founder of the city, who took the 5 precepts of a Buddhist layman and became the first royal patron of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Some archeological evidence at Anuradhapura suggests the presence of Buddhist and Jain monks prior to Mahinda’s arrival, but Tissa’s official patronage and support of the Buddhist community founded what would become one of the ancient world’s foremost bastions of Buddhist scholarship over the course of its 1200-plus years as a capital city and major trading center. Drawn by its monastic libraries, the monk Buddhagosa traveled from India to Anuradhapura in the fifth century CE to make the knowledge of the Sinhala monks available to the entire Buddhist world and wrote his “Path of Purification” commentary during his visit. Because of the easily traveled flat, dry landscape, not only monks made the trip to Anuradhapura. Frequent military invasions from the Indian mainland resulted in occasional Hindu rule such as the reign of the Tamil king Elara. Acknowledged by Pali chronicles as a good an just ruler, after a forty-year reign he was defeated in the early second century BCE by the Sinhala cultural hero Dutugemunu, whose name means “Gemunu the Vicious.” Anuradhapura was finally sacked and deserted in 1017 CE after an invasion by the Cholas from Southern India. The destruction to the crucial irrigation system of earthen tanks was so severe that the area was almost completely abandoned until British excavation of the ruins was followed by tank restoration and resettlement projects.

In our car hired from Malik, Dan and I had arrived before the ISLE students at the first site in the Anuradhapura area, Vessagiriya. When I stepped out of the car I saw a series of caves formed by three large, bulbous, outcropping of rock shoved together on a otherwise flat, featureless landscape. Dan explained that the cave complex is thought to have housed early Buddhist and Jain monks. “What were the Jains doing way down here and why did they die out?” I asked.
“Probably because Buddhism eventually received the royal patronage,” Dan answered, “but who really knows,” he finished as we walked toward the first cave formed by two of the large boulders overlapping. Dan then showed me how the first thing the monks did was carve a drip-ledge into the rock above the opening to the shallow cave so that rainwater would run off to the side and not into the cave. We then ascended the footholds cut into the boulder to the top of the pile of gigantic rocks and crossed the structure to the other side. Under a ledge three beds had been carved into the rock. The rock inside the demarcated area of the bed was polished into a smooth undulating profile to suit the contours of a human spine. “First a drip ledge, and now this,” I remarked. “How far away are they from ‘High and luxurious beds?’” I asked sarcastically, referencing the eighth precept taken by Buddhist monks.
“Yes, this is the origin of the corruption of the Sangha right here,” Dan joked back as he turned to look at in inscription under the drip ledge. I studied the beds, realizing that I was seeing something incredibly ancient, a humble modification to the landscape made and used by ascetics who were practically contemporary to the Buddha in the grand scheme of history. “How old are these things?” I asked.
“Probably fourth or fifth century before Christ,” Dan answered without turning around.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“These symbols,” he said excitedly, moving to the side and pointing, “These look like Brahmi characters.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Brahmi is an ancient script from which all South Asian writing systems derive,” Dan explained. “This character would indicate that this site is very old, fifth century before Christ or so.” I peered at the character that looked like a backwards “K.”
“That’s the short ‘a’ sound,” Dan explained, “These inscriptions are the names of the donors who funded the monks to live at this site,” he continued as the ISLE bus pulled up.

I sat with the ISLE students and listened to the professor give a background of the site and point out the drip ledges while Dan’s old friend Herath, the Sinhala teacher, dragged Dan back down the hill to chat in Sinhala. I followed the group around the site like the kid nobody wanted to talk to while Dan and Herath caught up. The ISLE program had just gotten underway and the study abroad undergrads were just getting to know each other and forming their own preliminary cliques. I didn’t really factor into the equation for them. For some reason I didn’t feel like I could just walk up to a group of the girls and say “hey, how do you like Kandy so far?” since I had just gotten there myself and was pretty miserable. I trailed behind the little herds as they explored the beds cut into the rock and Dan showed the Brahmi character to Herath and they both seemed very excited about it, jabbering in Sinhala. “This is going to suck,” I realized gloomily.

Over the next three days we slogged through the heat of the Sri Lankan plains to visit the ruins of the Anuradhapura area, crisscrossing the dirty, modern resettlement city situated on the outskirts of the ruins. We saw various Buddhist and royal gardens, tanks, bathing ponds, as well as stupas all in varying states of restoration. I listened to the lectures and walked around silently with the ISLE students, like ghost. By the third day the sheer scope of the Anuradhapura amazed me. “This place is massive,” I commented to Dan as we pulled up in our car behind the ISLE bus at the largest stupa in the world, the Jetavanaramaya, “And this stupa is huge!” I exclaimed when I saw the 400-foot, slightly lumpy, oval mound of bricks. Elaborate scaffolding for restoration jutted from one side of the stupa for new bricks to be brought to the top in small bushels and placed into the uneven side of the stupa by hand.
“It is the third largest structure in the ancient world,” Dan replied, “Right behind the Great Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre at Giza.”
“No shit,” I replied in awe as we walked towards its massive base.
“It is one of the eight pilgrimage sites here in Anuradhapura,” he continued. “The Anuradhapura pilgrimage circuit is called the Atamasthana. It consists of the Bodhi Tree, six stupas all built over relics of the Buddha, and the Lovamahapaya, the Brazen Palace. That was a large structure with a bronze roof, that’s where you get the name ‘Brazen Palace,” but wasn’t really a palace but a temple,” he explained as we began to walk along the base of the Jetavanaramaya.
“Why do people go on pilgrimages to these places?” I asked.
“For Buddhism to exist you need Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha right?” Dan asked rhetorically. “The Buddha is represented on earth by his relics, the Dharma by the texts and monks who have memorized the texts, and the Sangha is the community of monks and lay people. In the Sutras the Buddha tells his followers that pilgrims will go to heaven if they visit the places of his birth, enlightenment, first sermon, and death. Those places are way up in Nepal and Northern India, so a local tradition of pilgrimages started, it’s a form of transferred spiritual mapping.”
“But part of a pilgrimage is to leave home,” I countered, “How was it a place of pilgrimage for the people of ancient Anuradhapura to go across town?” I asked as we continued circumambulating the huge stupa.
“The pilgrimage tradition for these eight locations didn’t start until after Anuradhapura was abandoned,” Dan explained. “When Anuradhapura was a capital city all of these stupas were part of huge monastic complexes, you couldn’t just have lay people showing up there all the time. Plus you don’t have the sense of leaving home,” he added. “The Atamasthana circuit is today part of a larger circuit called the Solosmasthana,” he continued. “The chronicles of Sri Lanka record that the Buddha made three trips to Sri Lanka and visited a total of eight places all over the island. For the people of Anuradhapura, the places where the Buddha visited were the places of pilgrimage. Then after the fall of Anuradhapura, the eight places where the Buddha visited plus the eight sites here make up the Solosmasthana,” he finished. I realized that we had been walking for a while and we hadn’t even made it to the back of the Jetavanaramaya.

Dan drifted back to talk to Herath near the scaffolding while I continued around the back of the huge stupa. The flagstone terrace around the base of stupa was very uneven and I had to walk slowly and carefully. An all-male work crew toiled in the blazing sun moving bricks from their delivery site in the parking lot to the base of the scaffolding and into buckets to be hoisted up to the area of repair at the top of the stupa. Women worked in smaller groups re-fitting the large paving stones to repair the uneven terrace. As I worked my way along the base of the stupa, I remembered my trip to South India. While touring temples in Tamil Nadu, I realized that many of the temples marked the locations of important acts of the gods and goddess. I was stuck by the Hindu worshipper’s incredibly strong sense of connection to the divine through geography as my guide explained that goddess Parvatti had done her penance on that very spot. “Relics make sacred geography portable,” I reasoned, squinting to look up the bulging side of the brick stupa. “Back home is almost totally devoid of spiritual geography,” I thought as I moved into the shade of the stupa, “Unless you want to pilgrimage to the Morton Thrifty Food to see the image of the Virgin Mary spontaneously formed from a drip in the ceiling of a case in the frozen food section,” I ruminated. I paused to rest in the shade of the stupa and tried to feel like a Buddhist pilgrim, like I was somehow closer to the divine standing next to the gargantuan structure. When I was unable to feel inspired I headed back to the car.

In contrast to the construction-zone Jetavanaramaya, the Bodhi Tree at Anuradhapura was a living Buddhist site. After Ashoka’s son Mahinda came to Sri Lanka with an entourage of monks, his sister came along as well, bringing a cutting from the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha The cutting was planted in Anuradhapura and is the oldest continually tended tree in the world with monastic records dating back to it’s planting in 288 BCE. Cuttings from the Anuradhapura Bodhi tree have been transplanted to Buddhist temples all over the world.

On May 14th, 1985 two busloads of LTTE soldiers attacked pilgrims spending the poya or full-moon day observing the precepts under the sacred Bodhi tree, killing 120 pilgrims. The result was a heavily fortified Bodhi tree complex. We were all patted-down twice before entering the sandy area around the 6.5-meter high terrace forming as a large planter for the sacred tree. “That tree is doing pretty well for a 2,300 year old tree,” I remarked to Dan once we entered the enclosure on the evening of the third day of the tour.
“That’s a newer tree,” he explained, “They planted it to shade the real tree. The real tree is just a little thing, see there, supported by the gold crutches,” he said pointing up and under the lush Bodhi tree to a little gnarled branch growing out of the ground as we walked up the first set up steps to the first terrace.
“Ok, that makes sense,” I conceded, looking at the listing little tree. We stood on a lower terrace with the Bodhi trees planted in another terrace just above our head craning our heads to see the little Bodhi tree. “For the Army’s flag-blessing ceremony they take the flag of each regiment and go all the way up and place them around the original tree itself,” Dan explained as we walked around the inner terrace. “Some people feel that this tree is the closest thing on earth to a living Buddha.” he remarked as we watched the pilgrims dressed in white praying and offering flowers.
“South Asians love trees,” I remarked. “That’s what I’ve learned in my travels.”
“That’s the wall the LTTE drove the bus through on poya day for the 1985 massacre,” Dan pointed to the wall of the sandy enclosure as we rounded another corner of the terrace. “One of the monks I’ve interviewed a few times up here was a little monk at the monastic college nearby,” he continued. “When the massacre happened he and a few of the other monks snuck out of their dorms to go and see the bodies.”
“No kidding,” I replied, imagining what a mess the whole place must have been as we completed our circumambulation back to the place where the pilgrims reverently prayed. I noticed that the Peradeniya professor and his family were among the Sri Lankans placing flowers.


By day four, I could hardly believe that we were at another monastery ruin, “This place must have been totally over-run by monks,” I thought, envisioning saffron robes swarming over the sprawling complex of ancient building foundations and piles of rubble.
“One of the interesting things is that there were orders of Theravada as well we Mahayana monks practicing here,” Dan commented, “there were three main fraternities, The Mahavihara was the more conservative, Theravada group, the Abhayagiri Vihara was more Mahayana, and the Jetavana Vihara, which was actually a part of the Abhayagiri.”
“But only Theravada survives today right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dan acknowledged. “Mahayana Buddhism started to develop in the first century of the Common Era. Both schools were represented here throughout the occupation of Anuradhapura, but when the city was sacked and the capital was moved to Polonnaruva the king consolidated the monastic fraternities and began the tradition of writing laws for the Sangha. The kings continued writing laws for the Sangha until the fall of the Kandyan kingdom to the British,” he finished as we walked around the exposed foundations of the ancient monastery.

“The thing about Anuradhapura is that the stuff here is really old, especially for a Buddhist site” Dan remarked. It’s much older than the stuff you see in Thailand for example.”
“I guess that’s true,” I remarked thoughtfully, “I never really thought about it, but Bagan in Burma and Angkor in Cambodia were all started after Anuradhapura was already sacked. That’s pretty remarkable, I mean, it’s no Great Pyramid at Giza, but this stuff is old,” I teased, raising my left eyebrow.
“Oh I see,” Dan replied laughing, “Anuradhapura isn’t old enough to impress me Dan, I’ve been to the Pyramids at Giza,” he said in his high-pitched “mocking Sara” voice.
“Really though, my favorite thing is still those beds cut into the rock,” I commented. “I know it’s simple, but I’ve never seen anything like that, an ancient bed cut into the rock of a cave. I keep thinking about the monks who lived at that site. They must have been really excited and thinking that they were doing something brand-new.”
“It’s true,” he replied, “The ideas behind asceticism hadn’t really been around all that long before the time of the Buddha,” he finished as we headed back to the car.

Not all of the stupas at Anuradhapura were under heavy construction or in advanced states of disrepair. The second largest stupa, the Ruwanvelisaya, had been fully restored and now functioned as an active place of worship and focal point for a monastic residence. After Dutugemunu defeated Elara he built the enormous stupa partially out of guilt for killing so many people. When the British first encountered the Ruwanvelisaya, it was completely covered in soil and plants like an abrupt little hillock on the flat landscape. The stupa was excavated, the dome re-shaped, and the whole thing re-plastered smooth so that it looked like half of a huge boiled egg jutting out of the ground with a box crowned by a steeple on top. While circumambulating the stupa at the end of the fourth and final day, I watched the monks tie a long ribbon of stitched together monastic robes around its massive base. I caught up to Dan to ask him about the practice. “The stupa houses a relic,” he explained, “And the relic represents the Buddha, so tying the robes around the stupa symbolizes the idea that the monks robes and integrity of their lineage ties them back to the Buddha himself. That’s one of the reasons that maintaining the lineage is so important,” he added as we watched the monks roll the huge ball of robes around the lower lip of the stupa.

The ISLE Northern Tour continued on to Polonnaruva, the more southern and eastern Medieval capital established after the fall of Anuradhapura, but we returned to Kandy to settle into our new home and vowed to finished the Northern Tour on our own. Now, twelve days before departing from Sri Lanka, it was time to resume our Northern Tour starting with Polonnaruva. In 1070, the Sinhala King Vijayabahu drove the Cholas back to India, fifty-three years after the 1017 fall of Anuradhapura. Polonnaruva preserved as a royal capital until 1284 when the city fell to the Pandyas, who had replaced the Cholas as the dominant power in South India. The Sri Lankan capital was then established farther south at Dambadeniya, ushering in an era of smaller kingdoms scattered across the island, shifting centers of power. The Dambadeniya period marked the end of the great architectural age began a era of focus on the production of Sinhala Buddhists. The regal symbol of power, the tooth relic, was transferred from place to place before it wound its way to the Kandyian kingdom. Kandy was not a prominent or powerful kingdom and became the home of the tooth relic simply because it’s jungle location made it the last kingdom to fall to the British.

Since Polonnaruva functioned as a royal capital for a much shorter period of time, the ancient ruins were restricted to a smaller, more manageable area. It was also not recognized as a place of pilgrimage for contemporary Buddhists. The archeological sites were handily concentrated into a much smaller area easily manageable in a two-day period. Our first stop was the Gal Vihara, featuring four large Buddha statues all carved directly into one large slab of granite. I grudgingly removed my shoes at the security guard’s booth before walking into the sandy area in front of the images. “I feel like a beggar walking around Sri Lanka barefoot,” I thought unhappily as I sidestepped a pile of dog feces. I remembered the humiliation of walking barefoot through the parking lot of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy through dirty motor oil and muddy puddles. “This is to humble me in front of the image of the Buddha,” I suddenly realized as I followed Dan to the first statue in the series, a larger-than life seated Buddha in the Samadhi mudra with his hands folded in his lap. To reach the statue we had to step over the low foundation of the destroyed image house that used to surround the statue. Each statue had previously been enclosed by it’s own small structure. Standing barefoot in front of the Samadhi image in the sand, trash, and ants it struck me that walking barefoot in the presence of a Buddha image not only humbles the worshipper, but also makes one walk barefoot as the Buddha walked barefoot from the time he left his father’s house to seek enlightenment. “So it not only makes you a beggar at the Buddha’s feet,” I reasoned as I followed Dan over the low foundation around the Samadhi image and up onto the higher foundation for the next image, “But it also makes you take on a quality of the Buddha.”


The next image was a life-sized rendering of the seated Buddha teaching the Abhidharma to his mother and the gods in heaven carved into the back of a man-made cave into the rock. Next to the cave and still within the same enclosure, a lengthy inscription detailed the king’s rules for the monks. “People go barefoot in Hindu temples too,” I reminded myself as I peered at the seated statue, “So the barefoot thing is probably part of that tradition too.”

Continuing down to the left we stepped into the next foundation surrounding a seven-meter Buddha standing with his arms crossed across his chest. “You see that mudra painted on the ceiling at Dambulla,” Dan explained, “In the mural the Buddha takes that mudra after he attains enlightenment and stands up to look back at the Bodhi tree under which he had reached his realization.”
“It’s like he’s saying ‘Ok, my work here is done,” I commented as we stepped across the foundation into the next image house that once sheltered the fourteen-meter-long reclining Buddha entering Parinirvana or final extinction. The swirling grey, black marbleized grain of the granite flowed beautifully down the statue. The Buddha’s head rested on the traditional round bolster pillow with the sun-wheel symbol on its end. The pillow was executed with a depression under the Buddha’s hand supporting his head on the pillow, giving the rock a soft, comfortable appearance.

The standing and reclining Buddha were difficult to take in at close range, so Dan and I stepped out of the enclosure, across the sand, and scampered up a large sloping rock facing the four statues. “I like being able to see them all at once,” I remarked, “but judging by the foundations, the structures built around them must have been very small and cramped.”
“That’s the way it would be in a traditional cave temple,” Dan replied, “a big Buddha statue in a small space.”
“I guess it’s meant to overwhelm you,” I added, nodding. We studied the statues in silence before returning our feet to the safety of our shoes and continuing on to the various other ruins.

After two days at Polonnaruva touring the remnants of palaces, stupas, and monasteries, we traveled back down towards Kandy and back in time towards Dambulla, a monastic complex of more than 80 caves initially inhabited in the third century BCE. Somewhat on the way we stopped at Aukana to see the twelve-meter-tall standing Buddha cut directly into the rock facing the earthen wall of the large tank that supplies Anuradhapura with its water. The statue was built in the fifth century, during the middle of the Anuradhapura period. The statue faced an ancient but nearly dead Bodhi tree with a shrine around the base of the tree. “It’s going to be embarrassing when that tree is completely dead,” I remarked to Dan, scrutinizing the tree. Only half of the branches had leaves and the few leaves that clung to the lower branches had turned yellow and were falling to the ground. Standing under the dying Bodhi tree with its yellow leaves strewn over the ground felt like fall to me, but then I had to remind myself that in Sri Lanka there was no such thing as fall.

The statue and withering Bodhi tree belonged to a small, rural monastery. The younger student monk sold us our two-dollar tickets, handling the money directly while the older monk chased us down with his donation book in his hand as we admired the statue. When the monk approached Dan did not bow and did not address the monk in Sinhala. “I thought you bowed to the robes and not to the monk,” I remarked when the old monk realized that these Westerners weren’t good for any money and wandered off.
“I just can’t believe that he approached us with donation book in hand,” Dan replied unhappily.
“He just sees you as a rich Westerner he can mine for money for the Sunday school he is building, and that’s dehumanizing,” I remarked.
“Yeah, and you have to think, what’s the purpose of the Sunday school?” Dan asked me directly. I shook my head to indicate that I had no idea.
“So parents will send their kids to Sunday school and give even more money,” he answered himself. “It’s a business,” he continued, “And this is why monks should not own the temples. I know there is a really long tradition of it here in Sri Lanka, but as soon as they start doing stuff like fundraising and handling money they are pretty far from what monks should be.”
“And if you were to bow to him and address him with the proper Sinhala words to show respect for a monk and he continued to treat you as a cash-machine then I can see how that would be really humiliating,” I agreed.
“The Buddha said that some of the rules for monks would have to change,” Dan admitted, “But he didn’t say which ones, that’s the problem. But greeting people with your donation book and having your little monk selling tickets seems like it’s pretty far from the original intention,” Dan finished sadly.
“The monks own the temples here,” I added, “They have their own political party and are elected to office, its crazy how much power they have.”
“Not only are they elected to Parliament themselves,” Dan replied, “But they also get paid or gifted for endorsing certain candidates for office, the current president gave the heads of the biggest monastic fraternities expensive cars for endorsing him, but the monks won’t accept them until he agreed to pay the insurance also,” he explained.
“That’s crazy,” I replied, pausing. “What is that mudra anyway?” I asked, referring to the position of the Buddha’s hands. His left hand reached back up to his shoulder as if the statue had to hold on his robes draped over the left shoulder. His right hand pointed up to the sky with his palm perpendicular to the plane of his face. “Is that the famous ‘holding up my robes on the bus’ mudra?” I joked.
“I think it’s the vitarka plus the abhaya mudras” Dan replied. “You see a bunch of the statues in the caves at Dambulla in that posture, it represents blessing,” he explained as we headed back to the van.

After lunch we visited the Dambulla caves. The murals and statues depicting the Buddha and his life events were spread over five lower caves and were initiated in the first century BCE with major renovations in the 11th, 12th, and 18th centuries. In 103 BCE, just thirty-four years after Dutugemunu death, Anuradhapura was lost again to South Indian invasion. The king of Anuradhapura, Valagamba, was defeated by Indian invaders and fled south to Dambulla, where the monks meditating in the caves sheltered him for fourteen years. When he regained the throne of Anuradhapura in 89 BCE, he rewarded the monks by funding the construction of the large cave-temple complex. At the time of our arrival Dambulla currently functioned as an active monastery boasting its own lineage and ordination platform since the late eighties.

After the short, steep, 150 meter hike up the side of the hill in the blazing noon sun, we stepped up into the white, columned façade running under the original drip-ledge entrances to the five painted caves. When we entered the first cave into the cool air I felt a rush of relief from the heat. The first cave was small and utterly dominated by a garishly painted reclining Buddha similar in size to the reclining Buddha at the Gal Vihara at Polonnaruva. Squeezed between the statue and the wall of the cave I realized the claustrophobic the intimacy with which the original devotes at Gal Vihara had experienced that statue. As if reading my thoughts, Dan remarked rhetorically, “I wonder if those Buddhas at the Gal Vihara were painted.” I had no answer for his question and instead reflected that we had both instinctively moved away from the large statues and were more comfortable relating to them from a far, as an overview.

The other caves were a riot of murals and statues crammed into small spaces, including scores of standing Buddhas in the vitarka, “holding up my robes on the bus,” mudra.. Dan and I craned our necks to pick out various stories of the Buddha’s past life and events of his life as Gautama Buddha on the ceiling of the largest cave. Dan pointed out the depiction of the Buddha standing with his arms crossed looking back at the Bodhi tree under which he attained enlightenment. “So we know what that mudra means, at least to the people who painted this mural and probably to the builders at Polonnaruva too,” he reasoned. I snapped a picture. “That’s some fancy scholarship at work,” I praised him as we left the cave.

After Dambulla we headed to our hotel to rest up for the next day when I would tackle Sigiriya, the rock fortress I had seen in a book long before meeting Dan. Since Dan’s knee was bothering him I planned to do the climb alone. A bout of food poisoning kept me awake all night, ruining the early start I had planned. I had to wait until 10:00 before I was able to eat something and keep it from spewing out one end or the other. I started out alone with the driver of the van for the 30 minute drive to the base of the 370 meter magma plug left behind from the erosion of a prehistoric volcanic cone first inhabited by Buddhist monks in the third century BCE. During the reign of King Kasyapa from 477 – 495 CE it was converted to a palace with the addition of the famous frescos, Lion’s Gate, moats and gardens. According to the Mahavamsa, or “Great Chronicle,” King Kasyapa was the son of a King of Anuradhapura, King Dhatusena. Kasyapa murdered his father by walling him alive and usurped the throne that rightfully belonged to his brother Mogallana, who then fled to India. Knowing that Mogallana would eventually return, Kasyapa is said to have built his palace on the summit of Sigiriya as a fortress and pleasure palace. As predicted, Mogallana raised an army in India, returned, and declared war. During the battle Kasyapa's armies abandoned him and he committed suicide by falling on his sword. After King Kasyapa’s tenure, the fortress was re-converted to a monastery and utilized until its abandonment in the 14th century in conjunction with the general decline of Buddhism on the island during this period. It was re-discovered and excavated by the British.

By 11 AM I stood at the base of the magma plug, squinting up at it in the hazy late morning sun. After a few initial touts at the entrance to the gardens, I was generally left alone by the herds of Sinhala boys that roamed the gardens. Dan and I paid 40 dollars for admission to Polonnaruva and Sigiriya, but the locals got in free. With a cold liter of water in my small backpack I made my way to the base of the huge rock and started up the steps. I then ascended a metal spiral staircase bolted into the side of the rock to reach the cave of the frescos about halfway up the rock face. The buxom female frescoes of Sigiriya are the Mona Lisa of Sri Lanka. Their images are reproduced everywhere from advertisements, to hotel rooms, to the 2,000 Rupee note. When I saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre I was stunned by how small it was. Likewise, when I reached the little cave originally embellished with 22 frescoes, each smaller than life, I was surprised at the detail worked into each little image. Each image was a woman painted from her slender waist up. Each woman was extraordinarily unique, as if patterned on a living model. Some had pale skin-tones, some had rich chocolate skin-tones, and a few even exhibited a greenish glow that somehow managed to look elegant and beautiful. All of the images were depicted as topless except for one, and all were adorned in spectacular jewelry and headdresses. Most of the women held fruit or flowers in their hands. I remained for a while in the little niche in the side of the magma plug, studying and photographing each image. Once I was alone with the security guard he invited me over the railing to a further reach of the cave to see six more images and pointed out various faint re-drawings of faded hands and nipples. When I heard the next gaggle of boys approaching I gave the guard twenty Rupees for the extra tour and continued back down the spiral staircase to the regular ascent up the side of the rock.

“This is the last crumbly old thing you have to see for a long, long time,” I reminded myself as I tackled a set of stairs cut into the rock leading to the penultimate landing. When I reached the landing there was a sign next to a pile of sandbags that read in Sinhala, Tamil, and English “Please in view of restoration efforts each person to carry one bag of sand or bricks to the top.” I noticed five workmen in lunghis resting in a corrugated tin hut as the tourists toted the canvas bags of sand up the final ascent of metal stairs bolted to the rock. I picked up a bag of sand and headed through the huge lions paws that once served as the base of a massive statue marking the entrance to the flat top of the magma plug.

Once I reached the top and handed off my sand to the laborer I walked around the perimeter of the roof of Sigiriya, admiring the view from all directions. High up on the rock, the jungle, white stupas, and the occasional gigantic standing Buddha statues dotting the surrounding landscape once again seemed lush and exotic. I felt amazed that my life had led me to this peak on this distant island off the tip of India.

When the heat of the day and lack of shade started to burn away my wonder, and I started back down the metal stairs, through the lion’s paws, and down the stairs cut into the rock. Halfway down the stairs I recognized Yuko, the Japanese woman from the Goenka meditation course at Dhamma Kuta. I greeted her and we talked for a few minutes about the things she had seen and the things I had seen since Dhamma Kuta. I didn’t want to return to the summit with her, I told her, so we said good-bye after a few minutes. I mused the oddity of the coincidence for the remainder of my decent. “I guess there is a limited number of places tourists on this rock go,” I reminded myself, “But still, it was a pretty amazing coincidence.

Back in the car park I located the van and then my driver for the trip back to the hotel. Driving to Sigiriya I had paid close attention to the route since I was traveling alone, even though Dan had used this driver two other times, we had been using him for four days, and he worked for Malik. The only drivers I was comfortable with were Manju and his brother Kapilla. “If he is going to drive me off in the woods and kill me, I at least want some lead time,” I thought to myself as I internalized landmarks and signs. On the way home when we were supposed to fork left the driver forked right I felt my pulse quicken in my chest. We had turned off the blacktop main road lined with houses and shops onto a red dirt road stretching straight out into the rice paddies. “Maybe this is a shortcut,” I re-assured myself, taking a drink of hot water from the bottle in my small backpack.

“I don’t think this is the way we came,“ I remarked to the driver as we passed over one small bridge and then another, going farther and farther away from the main road.
“I think you are just nervous,” he replied dismissively and continued driving. I had already tried to call Dan when I had completed my descent, so I knew his phone was dead or out of range, but I pulled my phone out of my backpack to check his number again or perhaps call Malik. As I stared at the empty space where the signal bars should have been I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears as I realized that I was totally cut-off.

As we continued along the red dirt road it struck me ironically how much the red clay looked like the Virginia red clay around Charlottesville back home. “But we sure aren’t in Central Virginia anymore,” I reminded myself ruefully as I started to assess my available weapons. I decided that the moment the driver started to slow down and turn off the road I would choke him with the chord of my headphones. I had been sitting behind the empty passenger’s seat so I slid over to behind the drivers seat to get into position and pulled my headphones off of my iPod in my backpack. I was mentally rehearsing swiftly bringing the cord over and down when a man on a bicycle appeared. As the van began to slow I decided that I would take no action if it seemed that the driver was asking for directions. I felt reassured as the driver rolled down his window and gestured for the driver to approach. I could tell from the man of the bicycle’s gestures that he was indicating for the driver to turn around and return to the main junction. The driver looked back at me in surprise and turned the van around. “I will never forget this day,” he remarked in amazement as we went back to the junction. “I won’t either,” I thought to myself. “I have a very good sense of direction,” I explained coolly as we proceeded back to the main road to the bridge I remembered, passed the house I remembered, and correctly negotiated the next junction. Back at the hotel we collected Dan and the luggage and continued back to Kandy.