Rankoth Vihara, Panadura

The image house of the Rankoth Vihara at Panadura, its stupa completed in 1894, holds one of the fuller mural schemes of the Transitional Style. Around the inner shrine runs a walled ambulatory whose walls and ceiling are filled with painting: the Jataka stories, scenes of the Buddhist hells, and the great episodes of the Buddha’s life, among them the defeat of Mara, the cremation, and the distribution of the relics. The facade is worked in decorated plaster mouldings.

Painted in the manner of its moment, the old narrative registers carried in the newer, more modelled style, it survives as one of the more complete of the lowland transitional temples. Its painters are unrecorded.