Dodantale

On the old Colombo to Kandy road, between Kirindiwela and Mawanella, stands an image house that puzzles the eye. It rises to two full storeys: an upper floor that is a Kandyan sanctum of timber and painted wall, and a ground floor that is a long arcade of twelve semicircular arches in the manner of a Dutch or British colonnade. The building is a soldara vihara, a two-storey image house, and Dodantale, the Sri Seneviratnarama Uposatha Rajamaha Vihara, is the most complete and the most studied of the handful that survive. It is the point at which the temple tradition of the hill country, cut off from the court that had kept it, took the architecture of the coloniser into the very fabric of the shrine.

The temple with no pillars

The tampita vihara, the image house on stumps, is Kandy’s own contribution to temple building, a wooden sanctum lifted clear of the ground on short granite pillars. Dodantale takes that idea and builds it upward. Visiting the temple, the researchers of the Samkathana team were surprised to find no pillars visible at all beneath the massive upper storey: the wooden floor of the sanctum rests instead on beams thrown across a single thick wall, more than four feet deep, and that wall is broken at ground level by twelve semicircular arches to form a rectangular arcade, its outer gallery carried on Tuscan columns. The upper storey is pure Kandyan; the lower is the round-arched, plastered architecture the Dutch and the British had made familiar along the coast, brought at last into the hill country.

What the ground floor was for is unsettled. Architects have called these arcaded lower storeys ‘preaching halls’, but Asoka de Zoysa, whose team recorded the form, doubts it: a preaching hall in Sri Lanka is rarely walled in, keeps a defined seat for the preacher and tends to a square or cross-shaped plan, none of which the Dodantale arcade shows. Even the temple’s classification stays open. The early surveys listed it among the tampita viharas, yet with no pillars to be seen, later scholarship, the National Trust’s own survey of heritage buildings included, has been unwilling to call it one. Dodantale sits at the join of two ways of building and belongs wholly to neither.

The axis of worship

The roof carries the reading further. Dodantale has three roofs in one: a two-sloped Kandyan roof over the sanctum, a lower slope over the upper ambulatory, and the lowest over the ground-floor veranda, its rafters cantilevered out so that the carved beam-ends, the gonassas, jut from the wall. Two pinnacles crown the whole. One stands directly over the head of the seated Buddha in the sanctum; the other marks the single point on the veranda from which, on entering the sacred space, the Buddha first comes into view. The Kandyan builder, who held the royal privilege to raise a pinnacle at all, used the two of them to draw an invisible axis of worship through the building, so that the devotee who looks up on entering stands, unknowing, on the line that ends at the Buddha’s head. Little in the plain exterior prepares one for that precision.

The king in the antechamber

The building is dated to the 1820s or early 1830s, in the first decades of British rule, and its murals look back to the kings just deposed. The oldest account of them is Ananda Coomaraswamy’s, who recorded in 1908 a portrait here of a Kandyan king wearing the Kurulu Padakkama, the bird pendant, and described the painting of the upper floor. In the small antechamber between veranda and sanctum, on the upper register, a royal figure is set among deities and a standing monk, most exquisitely painted, in an elaborate hat, a close-fitting jacket over a shirt of long-sleeved white muslin, and trousers striped in the court fashion, the dress pointing most likely to Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the last king of Kandy. The jewellery is rendered with a miniaturist’s care. Above, the ceiling keeps a trace of the Pancanari Ghataya, the knot of five intertwined women, and the doorway is guarded by elephant-headed lions.

These crowned figures matter beyond their finery. At Dodantale, as at Medawala, the royal portraits wear the hair long behind the neck, down to the shoulders, and Dodantale is one of the sites de Zoysa gathers to press an argument against the received account: that portraiture in Sinhalese painting, long credited to British influence at the close of the nineteenth century, had a life of its own in the Kandyan shrine. A finished, particular face of a named king, painted in the undiluted Kandyan manner well before that late colonial influence reached the hills, is his evidence.

The plot for the Tooth Relic

The temple’s name carries a story its walls do not tell. Seneviratna points to Molligoda Adikaram, a minister of the last Kandyan court, to whom Sri Vikrama Rajasinha granted the land by a copper-plate deed, the Molligoda Sannasa. Local tradition remembers something stranger. Word is said to have reached the court that Molligoda meant to carry off the Tooth Relic from Kandy and install it at Dodantale, in a building of three storeys raised to serve as a Temple of the Tooth above, royal quarters below and an audience hall on the ground, and so to claim the authority to rule that possession of the relic conferred. The king, the tale runs, set out for Dodantale unannounced to break the plan before the ceremony could be held. How much of it is true the record does not say, and it is given here as the temple’s own memory of itself rather than as history. Certain, at least, is that a great two-storey shrine stands at Dodantale, and that the ambition behind it, whatever its exact shape, was considerable.

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. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. Broad Campden, 1908.
3. Wijesooriya, Gamini, ed. Sri Lankave Tampita Vihara Sampradaya. Department of Archaeology, 1999.
4. Heritage Buildings of Sri Lanka. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.