Degaldoruwa

Degaldoruwa, a cave temple cut into the rock a few miles east of Kandy, holds what is widely judged the finest surviving work of the Kandyan school. Its walls and ceiling were painted by a workshop of Sittara masters led by Devaragampola Silvattenne Unnanse with the painters of the Nilagama family, the commission begun under Kirti Sri Rajasinha and carried to completion in the reign of Rajadhi Rajasinha that followed.

The great Jataka cycles, the accounts of the Buddha’s former lives, run across the surface in continuous narrative, crowded with the dress, ceremony and incident of eighteenth-century court and village life. Where Dambulla is vast, Degaldoruwa is whole and exact, a single sustained programme by the tradition’s leading hand, and for that it is often taken as the measure against which the rest of the Kandyan school is set.

Story-cycles such as the Vessantara and the Sutasoma Jatakas fill the shrine, and it is in the crowd of their incident that the painters’ own century shows itself most plainly. In the ranks of Mara’s demon army, sent to break the Buddha’s meditation, they set muskets in the hands of the attackers, the firearms of colonial Ceylon carried back into a sacred battle, so that the Degaldoruwa walls are read as a record of eighteenth-century Kandy as much as of the Buddhist canon.