Anuradhapura and Mihintale

Tuesday 3rd June 2003. Anuradhapura 1pm
We slept well, thanks to the effective air conditioning, but needed our mosquito nets and could hear tapping, scuttling sounds in the darkness from the wall lizards in our room.

I’ve been thinking of what we have learned about Buddhism since being in Sri Lanka and I realise just how little I am able to understand it. Committed Buddhists will never kill or harm a lesser creature, believing it could be the reincarnation of a relative returned in a different form as they strive to attain their Nirvana. How though, if Man is considered to be the only creature with the intelligence and wisdom to strive for Nirvana, can it ever be achieved if people return as animals? Such a philosophy might help explain though, why there are so many wild, bald, scabbed, flea infested, mangy dogs around all the ancient sites. They are thin, half-starved, bleeding around the ears, permanently scratching and frequently females with distended udders and young puppies to feed. They are tolerated and ignored.

Before we came to Sri Lanka I’d felt considerable sympathy for the concept of Buddhism. I’m not so positive now that we are here and see its effect. In many ways it seems to be an excuse to obviate responsibility, to sit back and simply accept what Fate brings, expressing neither great joy nor sorrow. It seems to me that 'though Fate may well win in the end it’s in human nature to strive to influence it in some way. Man needs hope and desire. We need to help each other and to care what happens to those around us.

Sunil however is a quiet, calm, gentle, delightful person with great faith. He also has a great sense of humour and is everything that seems positive about Buddhism. I suppose, understanding so little about it, it's not surprising that I have an ambivalent attitude towards it.

It’s a great relief that we are able to stay for two nights at the same place. There was less hassle getting going this morning and now we have an hour’s break back at the hotel during the hottest part of the day. I’m longing for a swim in the hotel pool but my stomach still feels very full from the nicest curry and fried fish we’ve had since coming to Sri Lanka. This was followed by buffalo curd with a banana and palm syrup. Very nice.

So whilst waiting for digestion to take place and for Ian to come out from under the shower, there is time to fill in on the morning’s activities.

First we visited a really nice temple. The site is known as Isuramuni Rajamaha Vihara, part of the Anuradhapura complex. Here both Margaret and I got into trouble, me because my skirt only reached my knees and Margaret because she was wearing a sleeveless dress. We were eventually lent pieces of sheeting to cover our immodesty. The trouble is that we don’t always know in advance on this tour, exactly where we will be visiting until we arrive, with the risk that we may not all be suitably dressed. The site was well worth the aggravation however with delightful elephants carved on the rocks and a beautiful painted Buddha in a rock cave. The walls were painted, as usual, with scenes from the life of Buddha and the ceiling was painted in designs that would have done credit to William Morris had he ever included Buddhist colours and styles in his designs. Until the capital moved to Kandy this temple housed the Tooth of the Buddha. The monks wore robes in yellows, oranges, rusts and reds. I asked Sunil whether the different colours signified anything but he said not.

Isuramuni Rajamaha Vihara at Anuradhapura, Carvings of elephants bathing. 3rd century BC

Next, we visited the nearby ancient capital of the country, which is a huge site, where we spent the morning under a blazing, bright sun with a temperature of 33 degrees in the shade, walking with bare feet and heads around the remains of different temples dating from the 4th century BC. 112 different kings ruled Anuradhapura each adding to its original splendour.

Pilgrims left lotus flowers as offerings to Buddha. These were filched by troupes of monkeys who would sit eating them, discarding the stalks for their tiny babies to play with. They’d run up the famous old Bo tree – the oldest recorded tree in the world, known to be over 2,200 years old. This is a sacred tree. A sapling was taken from the original tree in India under which Buddha gained enlightenment. A man with a catapult was employed to hit the monkeys and knock them out of the sacred tree! (I really don’t think I understand Buddhism. How do they reconcile that with their belief in the reincarnation of ancestors?)

At this site I got told off because I’d forgotten that my sunhat was still on my head! Throughout our visit we were urged by itinerant salesmen to purchase model Buddhas, postcards, metal boxes and other assorted souvenirs. That apparently does not defile the site. Only monkeys and women seem to cause offence.

We saw plenty of stupas or dagobas. These are constructed from solid brick - frequently with a place inside for a relic of Buddhist significance – and then plastered over. They look like inverted pudding bowls of an unbelievably enormous size with a pinnacle rising from the top, reaching up towards Nirvana. Given the number of stupas in the Asian world that claim to contain some of the ashes of Buddha, and given the number of Christian churches in the Western world that claim to contain a relic of the cross of Christ, if they were all gathered together they’d probably exceed the size of the originals many times over!

The largest stupa at Anuradhapura, the Jetavanarama stupa, is the third largest place of worship in the world. It is constructed from enough bricks to build a three metre high wall from London to Edinburgh. (Now there’s a statistic for you!)

We went off to a nearby guest house for an excellent lunch at a long table with fans to at least keep us from completely overheating - they certainly didn’t have enough power to cool us down! We then returned here to our hotel to avoid the heat of the day.

Ruvanvelisaya dagoba 137BC

Ruvanvelisaya dagoba 137BC

Jetavanarama dagoba. 3rd century AD

Anuradnapura. Elephant pool

Samadhi Buddha. 4th Century AD

Moonstone at Mahasena's Palace. 276-303 AD

Anuradhapura. Urinal

Tuesday 3rd June 2003. Anuradhapura 10pm
Risking indigestion, after lunch several of us plunged into the tepid swimming pool. Sheer bliss! It’s the first time I’ve ever swum with monkeys running along the edge of the pool, scooping out handfuls of water to drink. They played in the branches of the tree overhanging the pool and one even drank the milk out of a jug left on a poolside table along with cups and a teapot.

Monkey playing on an overhanging branch at the pool

After a shower and a rest the hardiest amongst us left the others snoozing and set out for Mihintale. This sacred site is regarded as the cradle of Buddhism as around 247BC King Devanampiya Tissa “the Wise” was out hunting when he observantly noticed 500 monks in their saffron robes sitting on a rock. One of their number, Mahinda, came and asked him a seemly silly riddle about mango trees, to which the king, astute and observant as he obviously was, responded correctly. Having proved his ability to reason logically he was considered worthy to undertake responsibility for introducing Buddhism to Ceylon and presented with the sapling of the Bo tree that still grows at Anuradhapura.

There are hundreds of ancient caves, shrines and rock dwellings. 1840 steps lead up to the very exposed holy rock, known as Mahinda's bed, where the wind caught my sunglasses and blew them clean away! Despite this, on the very top a group of six Sri Lankan ladies chanted their prayer together. From here there were wonderful views for miles onto the surrounding flat green plains of rice fields and woodland, with sharply outlined, miss-shapen hills jutting up randomly along the skyline.

Herbal bath for treatment of snake bites

As it is a holy site we made the difficult, slippery, windy climb in bare feet and the ladies amongst up also had to wear long sarongs. The area below the holy rock however was more like a fairground than a sacred site as lighting and sound engineers worked to set up systems ready for the most important festival in the Buddhist year on June 16th, the date of the Poson full moon. Fetes always happen anyway on full moon days and shops, offices and schools are all closed. It a pity that this is something we will miss as we return home on 13th.

The monks' refectory. Slabs with the rules of the monastry. Mahinda IV 956-972 AD

Dagoba at Mihintale

Although the rest of the site also had much of interest, the climb and the heat had drained us. Standing in the sun after a large lunch, looking at ruins with a guidebook is no fun! So we returned to the hotel for another swim and another shower. Later, Sunil translated Ian’s speech for the wedding into Sinhalese and helped him to learn it whilst the rest of us gathered the glasses from our rooms and sneaked out of the hotel grounds with them and along to a quiet wooded area on the edge of the huge water tank that stretched for miles like an inland sea before us. As dusk fell we drank local beer or coke and arrack with Susantha, watching birds flying to roost and the huge fruit bats start to fly. It was a magic view across the lake to the far away hills, so very different in shape from any to be found in England. The whole landscape was so different to anything I’ve ever seen before - except maybe in TV nature films about Asian wildlife.

Later we felt our way back in the darkness along the path through the woodland and returned to our hotel for the first meal we’ve eaten since our arrival that had absolutely no curry in it.