Founded by Cinghalese invaders of the island somewhere in the fifth or sixth centuries B.C., the city attained its first splendor under King Dewanipiatissa, who came to the throne in B.C. 306. “It was in his reign,” says Burrows, “that the royal missionary Mahindo, son of the Indian king Dharmasoka, landed in Ceylon, and either introduced or regenerated Buddhism. The monarch and all his court, his consort and her women, became ready converts to the new tenets; the arrival of Mahindo’s sister, Sanghamitta, with a branch of the identical tree under which Gautama obtained Buddha-hood, consummated the conversion of the island; and the king devoted the rest of his reign to the erection of enormous monuments, rock-temples, and monasteries, to mark his zeal for the new faith.”
After him troubles began. The Tamils of Southern India—whose history has been for so long entangled with that of the Cinghalese—or some branch of the race, attracted probably by the wealth of the new city, landed in Ceylon about 200 B.C. And from that time forward the history of Anurádhapura is the record of continual conflict between the races. There was a second great invasion in B.C. 104, and a third about A.D. 106, in which the Tamils are said to have carried back to the mainland 12,000 Cinghalese captives, as well as great quantities of treasure. But the peaceful quiet-loving Cinghalese, whose chief talents lay in the direction of agricultural pursuits and the construction of those enormous tanks and irrigation works which still form one of the most remarkable features of the country, were no match in the arts of wars for the enterprising genius of the Tamils. The latter gradually pushed their way in more and more, dissensions between the two peoples more and more disorganised the city, till at last, for some reason not very clearly explained, in A.D. 769 the then king (Aggrabodhi IV.) evacuated his capital and established himself at Pollanarua, now also a buried city of the jungle.
From that time, it may be supposed, Anurádhapura rapidly dwindled away; the streets were no more filled with gay crowds, the slight habitations of the populace soon fell to pieces, leaving no trace behind (except a soil impregnated for miles and miles with the débris of bricks); the stone palaces and temples lapsed into decay. And now Buddha sits in the silence of the forest, folded in the ancient calm, just as he sat centuries and centuries ago in the tumult and roar of the city; night falls, and the elephant and the bear roam past him through the brushwood, the herds of spotted deer are startled for a moment by his lonely form in the moonlight.
If one ascends the Abhayagiria dágoba, from its vantage height of 300 feet he has a good bird’s-eye view of the region. Before him to the west and north stretches as far as the eye can see a level plain almost unbroken by hills. This plain is covered, except for a few reservoirs and an occasional but rare oasis of coco-nut palm, by dense woods. On all sides they stretch, like a uniform grey-green carpet over the earth; even the present village of Anurádhapura hardly makes a break,—so small is it, and interspersed with trees. Through these woods run narrow jungle paths, and among them, scattered at intervals for miles and miles, are ruins similar to those I have described. And this is all that is left to-day of the ancient city.
SMALL GUARDIAN FIGURE, OR DHWORPAL.
(At entrance to Dalada Maligawa.)
I suppose the temptation to make moral reflections on such subjects is very strong! For myself I can only say that I have walked through these and other such scenes with a sense of unfeigned gratitude that they belong to a past which is dead and done with. That Time sweeps all these efforts of mortality (and our own as well) in due course into his dustbin is a matter for which we can never be sufficiently thankful. Think, if all the monuments of human pride and folly which have been created were to endure indefinitely,—if even our own best and most useful works were to remain, cumbering up the earth with their very multitude, what a nuisance it would be! The great kings caused glorious palaces and statues and temples to be made, thinking to outvie all former and paralyse all future efforts of mankind, perpetuating their names to the end of the years. But Time, wiser, quickly removed all these things as soon as their authors were decently out of the way, leaving us just as much of them as is sufficient to convey the ideas which underlay them, and no more. As a vast dágoba, containing bricks enough to build a good-sized town of, is erected to enshrine a single hair from the head of a great man, so the glorious temples and statues and pictures and palaces of a whole epoch, all put together, do but enshrine a tiny atom of the eternal beauty. Let them deliver that, and go their way.
What a good thing even that our bodies die! How thankful we ought to be that they are duly interred and done with in course of time. Fancy if we were condemned always to go on in the same identical forms, each of us, repeating the same ancient jokes, making the same wise remarks, priding ourselves on the same superiorities over our fellows, enduring the same insults from them, wearing the same fusty garments, ever getting raggeder and raggeder through the centuries—what a fate! No; let us know there is something better than that. These swarms of idle priests who ate rice out of troughs at the public expense; these endless mumbo-jumbo books that they wrote; these mighty kings with their royal finery, their harlots, and their insane battles; these animal hospitals; these ruins of great cities lost in thickets; these Alexandrian libraries burnt to ashes; these Greek statues broken and buried in the earth—all that is really durable in them has endured and will endure, the rest is surely well out of the way.
Certainly, as one jogs through the mortal hours of the night in that said mail-cart, returning the forty-two miles from Anurádhapura to Dambulla (where one meets with the nearest horse coach), wedged in with five or six other passengers, and trying in vain to find a place for one’s feet amid the compacted mass of baggage that occupies the bottom of the cart, or to avoid the side-rails and rods that impinge upon one’s back and head—kept well awake by the continual jingling of bells and the yells and thwacks of the driver, as he urges his active little brahminy bulls through the darkness, or stopping to change team at wayside cabins where long conversations ensue, between dusky figures bearing lamps, on the state of the road and the probabilities of an encounter with the rogue-elephant who is supposed to haunt it—all those twelve long hours one has ample time to make suitable reflections of some kind or other on the transitory and ineffectual nature of our little human endeavor.