Dimbulagala

The forest monastery of Dimbulagala rises from the plain south-east of Polonnaruwa, known in its early records as Dhumarakkhapabbata or Udumbarapabbata and, to British surveyors of the nineteenth century, simply as Gunner’s Quoin. Tradition, carried in the island’s chronicles, holds that the exiled prince Pandukabhaya sheltered here for four years in the fifth century before the common era, before he went on to found the kingdom at Anuradhapura, and that King Devanampiyatissa, Anuradhapura’s first Buddhist ruler, raised a vihara on the rock soon after. Brahmi inscriptions cut into the drip ledges of caves scattered across the outcrop attest to a monastic presence reaching back to this early period, long before any painting now visible was made, and Dimbulagala went on to serve for centuries as one of the island’s principal forest hermitages, a retreat for monks who chose isolation over the city monasteries.

The paintings that survive belong to a far later phase of that long history, in two plastered caves known as Maravidiya, a name meaning roughly ‘death’s path’, after the exposed and difficult climb by which they are reached along the rock’s southern face. On the walls can still be made out the Sasa Jataka, the story of the hare who threw himself onto a fire to feed a beggar and was set by the god Sakka into the face of the moon in reward, and a scene from Devadatta’s attempt on the Buddha’s life, the loosing of the maddened elephant Nalagiri in the hope that it would trample him. A further fragment on the cave’s side wall shows the Buddha seated on a raised, cushioned dais under an arch, three worshipping figures to his left, and a second, larger seated Buddha, surrounded by more figures, is painted in the same cave.

What survives is Polonnaruwa painting of the same family as the Tivanka walls: the scenes drawn in a bold, fluent outline and coloured in the warm ochres and reds of the tradition over a lime-plaster ground, the narrative carried in registers across the cave wall rather than held in single icons. The Sasa Jataka and the charge of Nalagiri are told in that crowded, moving manner, the hare and the maddened elephant set among figures and incident, while the seated Buddhas under their arches keep the calm, frontal type against the movement of the stories around them.

The paintings are generally placed in the Polonnaruwa period, the twelfth century, a dating supported by an inscription preserved at the site recording the patronage of Queen Sundara Maha Devi, consort of King Vikramabahu I, who reigned between 1111 and 1132 and whose court at Polonnaruwa immediately preceded that of Parakramabahu the Great. The inscription does not by itself date the paintings with certainty, since royal patronage of a monastic site and the commissioning of one particular mural are not necessarily the same act, but it places substantial royal interest in the complex squarely within the right century, and no scholarly account locates the work outside the Polonnaruwa age.

Much less survives to be seen today than once did, and what remains on the Maravidiya walls is fragmentary, the plaster lost across long stretches of the painted surface. The wider monastery was itself in decline by the middle of the twentieth century, and was restored to active religious use from 1954 through the efforts of the monk Kithalagama Sri Seelalankara Thera, though that restoration reached the buildings and the community rather than the paintings. Dimbulagala lies close to the rock shelter of Pulligoda Galge, and the two sites together mark the classical tradition’s furthest reach toward the eastern edge of the island’s dry zone. As everywhere in this record, no name survives for the hand that painted either.

Sources

1. The Mahavamsa.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake. The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo, 1986.
3. archaeology.lk. ‘Archaeological Sites around Dimbulagala.’
4. Wikipedia. ‘Dimbulagala’ and ‘Dimbulagala Raja Maha Vihara.’
5. Wikipedia. ‘Kithalagama Sri Seelalankara Thera.’