Suriyagoda

The Suriyagoda Rajamaha Vihara, near Kandy, is a tempita shrine, its image house raised clear of the ground on a ring of stone pillars, a form of temple architecture that belongs to the Kandyan hill country alone and survives today in only a handful of examples. Raising the floor of the shrine on pillars was a practical answer to damp and to the vermin that plague ground-level wooden construction, and it gives buildings of this type a distinctive silhouette: a wooden superstructure under a tiered, tiled roof, set above an open stone base, quite unlike the solid masonry and rock-cut shrines that dominate elsewhere in the Kandyan repertoire. Its murals were painted within the wider eighteenth-century revival associated with Kirti Sri Rajasinha, and the interior belongs to what scholars class as the Central Kandyan school, the style that grew chiefly around temples built and painted in and near the capital during his reign before spreading further afield.

Its wall paintings share the wider conventions of that style. Figures are set out in narrow horizontal registers rather than one continuous scene, the story carried by continuous narration, a figure repeated at more than one point in a single register so that a devotee follows events by walking the length of the wall, and the palette stays close to the tradition’s core range of red, yellow and black, laid over a firm outline drawn first and finished last.

The temple’s entrance carries guardian deities flanking the doorway, the protective figures that stand watch at the threshold of a Kandyan image house, a convention repeated at temples across the kingdom to mark the passage from the ordinary world into sacred space. Unusually, the principal Buddha image within the shrine is itself a painted figure rather than a sculpture in the round, seated in ochre and gold against a red ground bordered with lotus and floral ornament, so that at Suriyagoda the mural tradition carries a role elsewhere given to statuary.

The paintings are associated, in one source, with the workshop of Deldeniya Sittara Naide, a named master of the Kandyan Sittara; the attribution to Suriyagoda rests on that single account and is offered here as attested rather than settled. If correct, it sets Suriyagoda’s murals among the works by which the named Sittara are individually remembered, rather than credited only to an anonymous workshop or a lineage.

Its combination of the tempita form with a complete Kandyan painted interior, doorway guardians, a painted principal image and the narrative and decorative registers found across the tradition’s temples, has made Suriyagoda a model example of Kandyan-period temple building and painting together, small in scale but complete in what it shows of the eighteenth-century hill-country style.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake. The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo, 1986.
2. de Zoysa, Asoka, and Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka. Buddhist Image Houses.
3. suriyakantha.org. ‘Contextualising Kandyan Period Temple Painting.’