Medawala

The earliest wall paintings of the Kandyan school that can be fixed to a year survive in a room barely larger than a shrine cupboard, a single wooden chamber of about 3.6 by 1.5 metres raised on short stone pillars in the village of Medawala, north of Kandy. A copper-plate grant of King Kirti Sri Rajasinha, dated to the Saka year 1677, allows the murals inside it to be placed at about 1755, and that date has gone uncontested. What makes the room remarkable is that the painting on its walls is already mature: the style the record catches at its first datable moment is not a beginning but a tradition in full command of itself, so that Medawala is the point from which the great Kandyan cycles at Ridi Vihara, Degaldoruwa and Dambulla are measured back rather than forward. The temple has been studied since Charles Godakumbura devoted a monograph to it in 1964, but the recent close reading by Asoka de Zoysa returns to it with a single question, why these particular images were chosen for so cramped a space, and reads from the answer a set of firsts and a political programme.

The temple on pillars

Medawala belongs to the form the modern surveys call the tampita vihara, the ‘image house on pillars’, a small single-roomed timber building set on short granite stumps or boulders and walled in wattle and daub, its plank floor levelled on layered beams above the uneven pillar tops. The type emerges in the early Kandyan period of the mid eighteenth century, in the wave of temple-building that followed the restoration of the higher ordination in 1753, and Medawala is the earliest dated example of it. The valid line of that higher ordination had lapsed on the island, and was restored in 1753 when King Kirti Sri Rajasinha brought a company of monks from Siam to confer it afresh, the beginning of the Siyam Nikaya. The sanctum is dark and windowless, and the arrangement within is fixed: on stepping through the low doorway the worshipper faces the seated Buddha beneath a makara torana, flanked by fly-whisk bearers and gods, while the side walls and the ceiling carry the narrative and the ranks of lesser figures in horizontal bands. The stone altar and its arch are built and plastered separately from the wooden shell, so that the image and its painted heaven form one detachable unit set into the timber room. The Buddha seen there today is a later white marble figure brought from Burma; the original, on the evidence of temples of the same date such as Suriyagoda, was most likely a seated Buddha in meditation.

A new company of gods

Over the arch at Medawala the older canonical pair of gods is joined by two newcomers, the first appearance of a scheme that would be copied into the twentieth century. Nearest the crown, flanking the demon mask of the Kirti Mukha, stand two ascetic Brahmas of the higher heavens; below them the two gods the Pali canon had long placed beside the Buddha, Mahabrahma with his goose to the Buddha’s left and Sakra, or Indra, with his white elephant to the right. Joined to these, for the first time in Sri Lanka, are Vishnu at the far right and Siva at the left, each with his mount, the eagle Garuda and the bull Nandi, set at the opposite outer edges of the arch, gods of the Vaishnava and Shaiva traditions who had never before been shown venerating the Buddha on the island. Their arrival answers to the long interaction with the South Indian dynasties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, out of which the Nayakkar kings of Kandy themselves had come. A local mark of the early date is that each god at Medawala is given three arms rather than the four of the fuller later iconography, one raised in salute to the Buddha, the others turned outward in blessing to the worshipper.

The chief disciples introduced

Along the lowest register of the side walls run the Arhats, the enlightened elders, turned three-quarter face towards the Buddha, each holding a full lotus or a sapu flower between thumb and forefinger. Set apart from them, on the wall closest to the Buddha and alone among the ranks in clasping both hands at the breast in the gesture of homage, are the two chief disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana, the first attempt in Kandyan art to give the pair their own place beside the master. The one on the right is painted with blue skin, the iconographic sign of Moggallana and his supernatural powers, so that the two can be told apart. What begins at Medawala as two small figures almost lost in a corner grows, in the temples that follow, into a settled convention, the disciples painted ever larger and nearer the Buddha until, by the twentieth century, they stand as free sculpture at his side.

Two stories of a lost child

The two long narrative bands at Medawala both turn on the loss of children, and their pairing has drawn the most personal reading of all. On the right wall the Vessantara Jataka, the most loved of all the birth-stories, is compressed into nine scenes drawn from the forest exile, in which Prince Vessantara gives away his two children to a wandering brahmin and has them at length restored; the cycle stops short of the tale’s famous summit, the gift of his wife, and shows only the losing and the recovering of the children. On the left wall, in six scenes, appears the Uraga Jataka, a story so rarely painted that Medawala is the only tampita vihara known to carry it, in which a brahmin family meets the snake-bite death of a son with composure, schooled by their constant meditation on the impermanence of life, until the disguised god Sakra, come to test them, is satisfied and reveals himself. Both narratives were recited in verse at Kandyan funerals, the laments of Vessantara’s wife among them, so that a visitor to the shrine met on its walls two stories that the ear already knew. From the deliberate choice of two child-loss cycles for so small a room de Zoysa builds what he expressly calls ‘my hypothesis’, that the donor had lost a child of his own and had the two Jatakas painted in search of solace. He offers it as a reading, not a fact, and the walls themselves keep the donor’s grief, if grief it was, unspoken.

The twin pair on the wall

Above and beside the Jatakas, and given more wall than either, run two devotional cycles that appear together at Medawala for the first time as a matched pair: the Solosmasthanaya, the Sixteen Great Sites in the island held to have been hallowed by the Buddha’s three visits, and the Sat Satiya, the Seven Weeks he passed in meditation after the Enlightenment. The two are the visual counterpart of two Pali verses of veneration, the Solosmasthana Vandana and the Satsati Vandana, which the manuscripts and the printed prayer-leaflets alike set down as a fixed twin sequence, one following the other. Reciting the verses, the devotee in the shrine could look up and see the very places and events being named, the worship of the word and the worship of the image folded into a single act. The paired cycles trace back, on the authority of the preface to a mid-twentieth-century litany, to the reign of Kirti Sri Rajasinha, the same years in which Buddhist practice on the island drew fresh inspiration from Siam, and the little sanctum reads as a painted setting-out of the liturgy of that revival. From Medawala the twin pair passes into temple after temple of the later Kandyan period.

The donor painted larger than the saints

The most unexpected figures at Medawala stand on the walls nearest the door, and they are neither gods nor saints but living men. On the right, attended by servants who carry offerings in woven baskets on their heads, is a Kandyan chief whom Bandaranayake identified, provisionally, as Dunuvila Nilame, the nobleman who is thought to have carried out the king’s commission to raise the shrine; on the left are two monks, one of them named as the Venerable Deniye Chandaratana, who may have guided the building. What arrests the eye is their scale. The donor and the monks are painted larger than the Arhats, and even the servants are larger than the enlightened elders they share the wall with, a reversal of the old rule by which size answered to spiritual rank. The chief’s dress is rendered with the care of a portrait, down to the fine bordered muslin of his court costume, the frilled collar and the worked belt that marked the highest Kandyan rank. The reading built from this is of a turning point: that portraiture in Sri Lankan painting begins here, at Medawala, more than a century before the donor portraits that art historians have usually credited to British influence at the close of the nineteenth century. Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka holds the same, that the naming of a living face in Kandyan art runs earlier than the colonial encounter, and finds portraits of Kirti Sri Rajasinha himself across the later temples on pillars. It is a reading advanced against the received account, not reconciled with it. Medawala matters the more for a second reason: it is one of the few Kandyan temples where such a donor has been matched by name to a real person from the inscriptions, a caution against reading every crowned worshipper in a Kandyan mural as the king himself. At Dambadeniya a like figure in the royal-donor pose turned out, on closer study, to be a court official, Migastenne Adigar, and not the king at all, which is exactly why the named inscriptions at Medawala give the historian a fixed point from which the wider convention can be checked rather than assumed.

The politics of the Sixteen Sites

Around the question of why the Sixteen Great Sites should have become, in these years, a compulsory presence on temple walls, de Zoysa builds his boldest claim, and here he sets himself openly against other scholars. His argument is that the cycle carried a political charge. Kirti Sri Rajasinha was a prince of the South Indian Nayakkar line and a Hindu by upbringing, a king of alien descent and faith ruling in the face of repeated conspiracies among the Kandyan nobility to unseat him, and he reads the painted island-wide net of sacred sites as his assertion of authority over the whole of Lanka. Several of the sixteen, Nagadipa in the Dutch-held north and Dighavapi in the east among them, lay well beyond his actual reach, and by binding them to the Buddha’s visits, sponsoring pilgrimages to them and restoring their stupas, the king could rank himself with Dutthagamini, Vattagamini and Parakramabahu, the great unifying rulers of the chronicles. The earliest written record of a royal pilgrimage to all sixteen, he notes, comes only about 1768, in the closing chapters of the Culavamsa written by the monk Tibbotuvave Sri Siddhartha Buddharakkhita, who had himself once plotted against the king and now wrote him into the line of the righteous kings.

On the reading of these sites the scholarship divides, and Medawala is where the positions meet. John Holt sees the Solosmasthanaya as a visual shorthand for the very purpose of the Mahavamsa, the assertion that the island is the appointed home of the true doctrine, defended down the centuries by righteous kings. Michael Roberts reads it as the king affirming the unity of Lanka under his single parasol. De Zoysa presses further than either, holding that the cycle is above all a demonstration of political ownership over an island the king did not in fact wholly control, and he faults Holt’s account for passing over the claim staked on the far northern and eastern sites under Dutch rule. He corrects the two scholars on a point of source as well: where Holt, and Tammita-Delgoda following him, locate the sixteen sites in the Mahavamsa, he shows from his own study of the chronicle that only ten of them are named there, the list of sixteen being a later growth. He is sharper still on the arch itself, rejecting Holt’s reading of the Medawala makara torana as a group of ‘twelve Bandara-class deities’ and the identification of the gods Saman, Vibhisana and Kataragama among the figures above the Buddha, which he holds to mistake an iconography inherited from the Indian subcontinent. These are live disagreements among named scholars rather than settled findings, and the small dark room at Medawala is the evidence all of them return to.

Silvattenne, and the everyday in the wall

The painting is given to Devaragampola Silvattenne Unnanse, the finest hand of the Kandyan court, who is thought to have worked at Medawala before his masterwork at Degaldoruwa; the copper-plate grant places the temple among the workshops of the Sinhasana Pattale, the royal guild that brought painters and ivory-carvers under one administration. How much of the surviving work is his own hand and how much belongs to assistants painting to his design the record does not settle, and the temple is best read as one commission among several the same eighteenth-century campaign carried out, at Ridi Vihara and Suriyagoda as well as here.

What sets the Medawala walls apart is their reach beyond the sacred. Alongside the king and his household the painters set down the everyday life of ordinary people, a farmer tilling his field behind a white bull among them, so that the murals become a record of Kandyan life as much as of Kandyan devotion. The Uraga Jataka here is cited as a clear case of how the Kandyan painter used colour itself to mark social rank within a single scene, the darker tones kept for figures of lower caste and yellow and gold for kings, nobles and gods, a convention that runs through the tradition but is unusually legible in this one painting. The method under it was the school’s own: the wall drawn first in fine outline, filled with the narrow palette of red, yellow and black, blue and green kept rare, and re-outlined in black at the last to bind the whole, a discipline that let a workshop of several hands paint to one design across a small building in months rather than years.

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. de Zoysa, Asoka, and Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka. Buddhist Image Houses. Samkathana Research Team, University of Kelaniya.
3. Bandaranayake, Senake. The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo, 1986.
4. Chutiwongs, Nandana, Leelananda Prematilleke, and Roland Silva. Paintings of Sri Lanka: Mädavala. Archaeological Survey of Sri Lanka, 1990.
5. The copper-plate grant of King Kirti Sri Rajasinha, 1755.
6. Rathnayaka. Vidyodaya Journal, 2025.