Attanagoda

Attanagoda, the Sri Visuddharamaya, stands in the country between Kegalle and Kandy, and like Dodantale it is a soldara vihara, a two-storey image house with a Kandyan sanctum raised over an arcaded ground floor. Dated to the late nineteenth century, it belongs to the late flowering of the tradition, the decades of the Buddhist revival, and it is among the most ambitious and the most crowded of all the image houses of the hill country. Four double Tuscan columns carry its façade, full columns with base and pediment, and the seventy-inch veranda of the upper floor, open to a panorama of paddy fields, gives the building the majesty its recorders remarked on.

The most decorated of the two-storey shrines

Where the earlier image houses kept a narrow repertory, Attanagoda spends without restraint. The wooden ceilings of the ground floor are worked over with the whole Kandyan decorative alphabet: the jasmine picca mal along the beams, the liyaval creeper, the nari lata that opens into the figure of a woman, and the Hamsa Puttuva, the knot of amorously entwined geese, here in a late four-colour palette richer than the old earth reds. The guardian figures at the sanctum door are wound about with cobras, many of them, coiling over the bodies of the Naga Rajas in a way seen almost nowhere else. Even the main image departs from the rule: where a tampita sanctum almost always holds a seated Buddha, Attanagoda, like Mahalloluwa in the Gampaha country, gives the place to a recumbent one.

The defeat of Mara, moved outdoors

The boldest stroke is a matter of placement. The Maraparajaya, the assault of the demon Mara on the Buddha at the moment of his awakening and the rout of his hosts, was by long convention a subject for the sanctum ceiling, and in the great cave temples of Degaldoruwa and Dambulla it was given wide expanses of rock to fill. At Attanagoda the painters lifted the whole battle out of the sanctum and set it on the ceiling of the veranda, where there was room at last for the full demonic army. Senake Bandaranayake and the scholars who followed him read the move as unique among the two-storey shrines, and as a late development of Upcountry art, the tradition stretching its old programme to fit a new kind of building. The sanctum holds a fuller life of the Buddha than most, running from the invitation of the gods to descend, through the birth and the great renunciation, on to the Seven Weeks after the Enlightenment, a completeness the early image houses seldom attempted.

A late and self-aware art

Attanagoda is a temple that knows it is late. The clocks and Roman numerals painted among the older motifs, the landscape backgrounds ordered by a borrowed perspective, the very confidence with which the decorative repertory is multiplied, all mark a nineteenth-century hand working long after the kingdom that first shaped the manner had gone. The sponsors, in the fashion of the revival, had themselves painted on the walls, set for good beside the sacred scenes they had paid to raise. The building’s classification stays in doubt, listed as a tampita vihara in the early surveys and quietly removed from that class by later ones, for no supporting pillars can be found. Its ambition is not in doubt: at Attanagoda the old image house, opening to colonial architecture and colonial time, gave the tradition one of its fullest and most inventive last statements.

Sources

1. de Zoysa, Asoka, Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka, and Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka. Evolving Traditions of the Buddhist Image House, Part I. Samkathana Research Team, University of Kelaniya.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake. The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo. 1986.
3. Herath, H.M. Unpublished survey of the tampita vihara type. 1997.
4. Heritage Buildings of Sri Lanka. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.