The Toluvila Buddha

At the entrance of the Colombo museum a seated stone Buddha meets every visitor who comes in, and it is the companion in stone to the Samadhi Buddha of Anuradhapura, the same meditating figure carved by the same school at close to the same hour. The Toluvila image sits in the dhyana mudra, the hands laid one over the other in the lap, the legs folded in virasana, the robe over the left shoulder and the right bare, and it is among the best preserved of all the Anuradhapura seated Buddhas, its surface still crisp where the Samadhi statue has weathered. Its discoverer, the archaeologist H.C.P. Bell, thought it the finest thing he had found at Anuradhapura.

The modelling is the school at its surest: the body smooth and full beneath the clinging robe, the shoulders wide, three soft lines drawn at the neck in a manner the scholars trace to the Mathura school of India, the face composed to the same inward stillness as its Anuradhapura twin. It parts from that twin in one detail worth the noting: the earlobes are not drawn long, as the convention usually has them, a small departure that marks the hand of a particular workshop within the shared canon.

Like all its kind the figure was not meant to be seen as bare stone. The seated Buddhas of this class are thought to have been finished with plaster and paint, and the Samadhi image beside it is held to have carried inlaid eyes and a skin of gold; whether the Toluvila block kept the same is not separately recorded, so the point is better made of the type than pressed on this one statue.

The image was found at the Toluvila site at Anuradhapura in 1900 and moved to Colombo, where it presides over the museum’s hall; it is dated, on style, to about the fourth century. Its carver is unknown, as every classical carver is, and the Toluvila Buddha sits now at the threshold of the national collection, the first thing the country shows of itself, and the work of a hand it cannot name.

Sources

1. von Schroeder, Ulrich. Buddhist Sculptures of Sri Lanka. Hong Kong: Visual Dharma, 1990.
2. Paranavitana, Senarath. Art of the Ancient Sinhalese. Colombo: Lake House, 1971.
3. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908.