In the afternoon we went up the rock to see the temples. A great rock, 500 or 600 feet high, similar to that at Kurunégala. Half-way up stretches a broad ledge, 100 yards long, commanding a fine view over hill and dale, and between this ledge and an overhanging layer of rock above are niched five temples all in a row. No façade to speak of, mere stucco walling, but within you pass into large caverns full of rude statues. The largest of the temples is 150 feet long, 40 deep, and 23 high in front—a great dark space with perhaps fifty colossal images of Buddha sitting round in the gloom with their sickly smile of Nirvana, and one huge figure, 30 or 40 feet long, lying down in illumined sleep; all crudely done, and painted bright yellows and reds, yet rather impressive. The sides too and roof of the cavern are frescoed in the same crude manner with stories from the life of Buddha, and with figures of the Hindu gods. Withal, a fusty smell, a thousand years old, of priests none too clean, of flaring oil-lamps, of withered flowers and stale incense, oppressed us horribly, and it was the greatest relief to get out again into the open. Devos says the scene is very striking at the great festivals, when multitudinous pilgrims assemble and offer their lights and their flowers and their money, on benches each before the figure they affect. Tomtoms beat, worshipers recite their prayers, lights twinkle, and outside the light of the full moon pours down upon the rock. Monkeys native to the rock are fed on this ledge in hundreds by the priests.
Ceylon is of course mainly Buddhist, and all over the hilly part of the island rock-temples of this sort, though smaller, are scattered—some mere shrines with a single seated or recumbent image of Buddha. They are commonly built among the woods, under some overhanging brow of rock, and the story generally runs that the cavern had in earlier times been occupied by some hermit-saint, or yogi, and that the temple was built in remembrance of him. There is a little one of this kind half-way up the rock at Kurunégala, and it is tended by a boy priest of about thirteen years of age, who, barehead and barefoot, but with his yellow priest-robe wound gracefully about him, attends in a dignified manner to the service of the shrine. He is generally followed by a little attendant (every one has an attendant in the East)—a small boy of about nine—who turns out to be his khoki, or cook! This sounds luxurious, but by rule the Buddhist priests should live the most abstemious lives. They are supposed to have no money or possessions of their own, and to be entirely celibate. Each morning they go out with their begging bowls on their arm to get their daily food. They go to a house and stand near the door, asking nothing. Then presently the woman comes out and puts a little rice in the bowl, and the priest goes on to the next house. When he has got sufficient he returns, and his attendant cooks the food (if not already cooked) and he eats it. For each priest has the privilege to choose a boy or youth to be his attendant, whom he trains up to the priesthood, and who takes his place after him. This perhaps explains the presence of the small boy khoki above.
The Buddhist priests, like the Hindu priests, are drawn mostly from the comparatively uneducated masses, but there is no need in their case that they should be Brahmans. A vast tolerance, and gentleness towards all forms of life, characterises the Buddhist institutions; but in the present day in Ceylon the institutions are decadent, and the priests, with a few exceptions, are an ignorant and incapable set. The efforts of Col. Olcott however, on behalf of the Theosophical Society, and of Sumángala, the present high priest of the island, a man of great learning and gentleness, have done something in latest years to infuse a new spirit into the Buddhism of Ceylon and to rehabilitate its esoteric side.
At Kandy in one of the Buddhist temples outside the town there is a standing figure of Buddha twenty-seven feet high, carved in the face of the solid rock, and the temple built round it—rather fine—though with the usual crude red and yellow paint. It belongs to the time of the kings of Kandy, and is only about 150 years old. Many of the ordinary cave-temples are extremely old, however—as old as Buddhism in the island, 2,000 years or more—and likely were used for religious purposes even before that.
After looking at the Dambulla temples, which are said to have been constructed by the king Walagambahu about 100 B.C., we gained the summit of the rock, whence you have a view over plains towards the sea and of ranges of hills inland, not unlike that from the rock at Kurunégala; and then descended, not without difficulty, the precipitous side. Evening fell, and darkies came out with lamps to our aid.
The same night I pushed on by mail-coach to Anurádhapura, leaving Modder behind, as he unfortunately had to return to Kurunégala the next day.
CHAPTER VI.
ANURÁDHAPURA: A RUINED CITY OF THE JUNGLE.
The remains of this ancient city lie near the centre of the great plain which occupies the north end of the island of Ceylon. To reach them, even from Dambulla, the nearest outpost of civilisation, one has to spend a night in the “mail-coach,” which in this case consists of a clumsy little cart drawn at a jog-trot through the darkness by bullocks, and generally full of native passengers. Six times in the forty-two miles the little humped cattle are changed, and at last—by the time one has thoroughly convinced oneself that it is impossible to sleep in any attainable position—one finds oneself, about 6 a.m., driving through woods full of ruins.
Here, on the site of a once vast and populous town, stands now a small village. The care of Government has cleared the jungle away from the most important remains and those lying just around the present site, so that the chief feature is a beautiful park-like region of grass and scattered trees, in which stand out scores, and even hundreds, of columns, with statues, huge dágobas, fragments of palaces, and innumerable evidences of ancient building. It is a remarkable scene. The present cutcherry stands on the shore of one of the large reservoirs which used to supply the city and neighborhood, but which at present, owing to want of rain and deficiencies of channels, is nearly dry. On climbing the embankment the bed of the lake stretches before one, with hundreds of tame buffalos and other cattle grazing on its level meadows; a few half-naked darkies are fishing in a little water which remains in one corner; on either hand the lakebottom is bounded by woods, and out of these woods, and out of the woods behind one, high above the trees loom green and overgrown masses of masonry, while below and among them labyrinths of unexplored ruins are hidden in thick dark tangle. It is as if London had again become a wilderness, above which the Albert Memorial and S. Paul’s and the Tower still reared confused heaps of grassy stone and brickwork, while sheep and oxen browsed peacefully in the bed of the Thames, now diverted into another channel.
