Nalanda Gedige

Nalanda Gedige looks like a Hindu temple and served the Buddha, and that contradiction is the whole interest of it. Standing now above the Bowatenna reservoir in the centre of the island, to which it was moved stone by stone when the tank was made in the nineteen-eighties, it is the one building in the country raised in the full South Indian manner, the Dravidian temple form of the Pallava country, and yet its plan is a Buddhist one, and a pillar inscription found on the site shows it was a Buddhist monastery.

The building is all stone, where the island’s shrines are usually brick, and it is put together in the Pallava way: a pillared hall, a short passage, a small windowless cell for the image, an ambulatory round it, and a stepped tower rising over the whole in receding tiers. On the stonework are carvings that set it apart again, weathered tantric reliefs, among them frankly erotic couplings of a kind the island otherwise does not show and that are compared to the temples of Khajuraho in northern India; time has worn them so far that what exactly they depict is no longer agreed. Over the sanctuary, it is reported, sits a figure of Kubera, the god of wealth, on a lotus, said to be the only such image on the island.

When it was built is not settled. Paranavitana read the late Pallava style as of about the eighth century, others have argued as late as the eleventh, and the honest span is the eighth to the eleventh. It is the clearest thing the island keeps of the long traffic of forms across the strait, a Hindu architecture taken up for a Buddhist use, its builders unknown, its very stones carried to higher ground in our own time so the rising water would not take them.

Sources

1. Mudiyanse, Nandasena. Mahayana Monuments in Ceylon. 1967.
2. Schroeder, Ulrich von. Buddhist Sculptures of Sri Lanka. Hong Kong: Visual Dharma, 1990.
3. Department of Archaeology, Sri Lanka.