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 painting does not stop at the shrine door: the outer wall of the sanctum is covered edge to edge in a densely packed narrative mural, registers of small figures and architecture bordered top and bottom by ornamental bands, a lowland habit the framed panel never displaced. The colonial century enters the old story here too, Queen Mahamaya given a Western blouse, crown and skirt.

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.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. de Zoysa, Asoka, and Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka. Buddhist Image Houses. Colombo: Samkathana Research Team, 2015.
3. de Zoysa, Asoka, Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka, and Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka. Evolving Traditions of the Buddhist Image House, Part I.