Anuradhapura

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Anuradhapura is the ruined ancient capital of Sri Lanka, set on the island’s northern dry plain, and one of the oldest continuously venerated sites in the Buddhist world. For roughly fourteen centuries it was the seat of the Sinhalese kingdom, and over that span it grew into a city of monasteries, irrigation reservoirs, and colossal brick stupas — several of which, when built, were among the tallest structures anywhere on earth.

The city’s religious significance is tied to a specific event in tradition. The chronicles compiled by the island’s monks, the Dīpavaṃsa and the Mahāvaṃsa, hold that Buddhism reached Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, when Mahinda, a son of the Indian emperor Ashoka, preached to the king at Anuradhapura and converted the court. Soon after, Mahinda’s sister Sanghamitta is said to have brought a cutting from the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya — the tree under which the Buddha was held to have reached enlightenment — and planted it in the capital. That tree, the Sri Maha Bodhi, still stands and is still tended; believers regard it as the oldest historically documented tree on record, grown from the very tree of the awakening. Historians treat the chronicles as later monastic compositions with their own purposes, and date events more cautiously, but the broad outline of an early Ashokan mission is widely accepted.

Around the sacred tree the kings raised the monuments the ruins are known for. The Thuparamaya enshrined a relic of the Buddha; the Ruwanwelisaya rose as a vast white dome; the Jetavanaramaya, of the later period, was a stupa of fired brick on a scale matched in the ancient world only by the largest Egyptian pyramids. The great monastic establishments — Mahavihara, Abhayagiri, Jetavana — were not only shrines but centres of learning whose doctrinal disputes shaped the early history of Theravada. It was at Anuradhapura, by tradition, that the Buddhist canon was first committed to writing.

The capital was abandoned in the early eleventh century, after invasion from the Chola kingdom of southern India pushed the seat of power south to Polonnaruwa. The city was left to the forest and rediscovered, overgrown, by European surveyors in the nineteenth century; the modern Sinhalese state and the colonial archaeological service together cleared and restored much of it. Today it is at once an archaeological park and an active place of pilgrimage — the stupas whitewashed and garlanded, the Bodhi tree railed and flagged, the old kingdom’s ruin kept as something more than ruin.

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