With the establishment and consolidation of Portuguese rule in the Sinhalese areas of the littoral, the Kandyan kingdom became the sole surviving link in the age-long connection between Sinhalese power and the Buddhist religion. It was the heir to the traditional relationship between the state and religion. The two most treasured relics of the Buddha, the tooth relic and the alms bowl, always kept in the possession of the king at the chief administrative centre on the island and associated with the continuity of Sinhalese kingship, passed into the hands of the Kandyan rulers after the 1590s.
Throughout much of the eighteenth century, however, Buddhism was in a state of debility, worn out and almost moribund, to the extent that valid ordination of bhikkhus was a perennial problem. Both Vimala Dharma Sūriya I and Vimala Dharma Sūriya II made special efforts to revive the s•sana, and sent missions to Arakan in Burma to obtain bhikkhus from there to help restore the upasampad•, the higher ordination, in Sri Lanka. Any success achieved through this process was no more than temporary, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had become practically impossible to hold a valid ordination ceremony. The result was that those who entered the Buddhist order did so without the prescribed rites. They came to be called gannin•nse, an indeterminate status, part layman, part monk; at best they were a parody or caricature of the bhikkhus, at worst a travesty. They retained their lay names, continued to engage in secular activities, wore a white or saffron-coloured cloth rather than the traditional saffron robes of the bhikkhu, and few if any were celibates. Indeed, the prospect of a comfortable living on temple properties was very often the main attraction for entry into the Buddhist order in the form of gannin•nses. Few of them had mastered the Buddhist texts, most were content to indulge in magic, sorcery, astrology and divination and were, in fact, priests or magicians rather than bhikkhus in the ideal and doctrinal sense.1
The most remarkable and purposeful effort at Buddhist reform came, surprisingly, from within the sangha itself in the mid-eighteenth century with the formation of the Silvat Sam•gama (the brotherhood of the pious) by Välivita Saranankara (1698–1778), a s•manera (unordained monk).2 The Silvat Sam•gama called for a return to more exacting standards of conduct for the sangha, where piety, devotion and a sound knowledge of the scriptures rather than family influence and connections would be the qualifications for admission to the order, and where the ideal of poverty was juxtaposed with the reality of the gannin•nses’ devotion to the affairs of a householder’s life. Narendrasimha, the last Sinhalese king of the Kandyan kingdom, was less than enthusiastic about fostering a Buddhist revival of the sort that Saranankara had in mind; the Kandyan radala, who had a vested interest in temple property controlled by scions of their families in the role of gannin•nses, did not view such a reformist movement with much kindness either. But the situation changed dramatically when the N•yakkar dynasty assumed the Kandyan throne. In their eagerness to compensate for their marginal political status as a foreign dynasty, the N•yakkars extended the most lavish patronage to the regeneration of the authentic religious and cultural traditions of the people.3
The first priority, as the Buddhist reformers saw it, was the restoration of the upasampad•, and Śrī Vijaya R•jasimha was persuaded to take the initiative in this by sending a mission to Thailand for this purpose under his auspices. Three missions were despatched, and the third, sent in 1750 in the last year of his reign, was eventually successful. In 1753, a group of Thai monks reached Sri Lanka and in that year the upasampad• was restored. While the restoration of the upasampad• was the greatest contribution of the Thai monks to the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka in the second half of the eighteenth century, the monks were also instrumental in reasserting the primacy of Buddhist symbols and practices over those of Hinduism which had gained ascendancy during Buddhism’s period of decline. It would appear that the annual Äsala perahära owes its present form to their initiative. Under the Sinhalese rulers of the Kandyan kingdom this festival was celebrated as an occasion for the ceremonial worship of Hindu gods, and had no connection with the Temple of the Tooth or with any other Buddhist temple. The Thai monks persuaded Kīrti Śrī R•jasimha to reorganize the perahara and to introduce a new dalad• (tooth relic) perahära into the general ritual complex of this annual ceremony, with a position of primacy over all the other perahäras in it. The Äsala perahära in this form symbolically underlined the primacy of Buddhism within the Sinhalese religious system, even if it did not restore or re-establish it.4
We turn next to the institutional aspects of this revival of Buddhism. There was first of all the establishment of the Siyam Nik•ya, the most important of the modern Buddhist sects; and next the development within it of the Malvatta and Asgiriya chapters, both adhering to the same doctrinal tenets and each of equal status. When Kīrti Śrī R•jasimha decreed in 1765 that the upasampad• ceremony could only be performed at Malvatta and Asgiriya, they came to have exclusive rights over the admission of novices to higher ordination, not merely within the Kandyan kingdom but in the Sinhalese areas of the littoral under the control of the VOC. The title of sanghar•ja was conferred on Saranankara, but was discontinued after his death. All this formed part of a process of centralizing the affairs of the s•sana, and the development of a strong establishment with close links with the state.
The king appointed the chief bhikkhus, and the latter in turn, the incumbents of smaller pansalas. He endowed the important temples, as the dis•vas did, with land grants. (Since the bhikkhus were generally recruited from the Govikula, the endowment of family temples by pious nobles led to close ties of kinship between the chiefs and the bhikkhus.) The inhabitants of villages attached to Buddhist temples (viharagam) came under the authority of its chief bhikkhu, while the dēv•lēs dedicated the services of, and collected dues from, the people resident in villages attached to the dēv•lē (dēv•lēgam). Apart from services due to the viharas or the basn•yaka nilamēs, temple tenants were also liable to unpaid public service, especially at the important national festivals in the capital city. As in the past, the king intervened in disputes regarding incumbencies of viharas; he was, in fact, the final arbiter in them. Again, the king appointed incumbents, at his discretion, to newly built viharas and pansalas, as well as to restored and re-endowed temples.5
The overriding authority of the ruler in religious affairs was demonstrated most starkly in Kīrti Śrī R•jasimha’s decree, promulgated after the establishment of the Siyam Nik•ya, which restricted its membership to the Govikula alone. Saranankara acquiesced in this, although it went against the Silvat Sam•gama’s well-established practice of ignoring caste distinctions among its membership. With Kīrti Śrī R•jasimha’s decree, the non-Goyigama bhikkhus were rigorously excluded from the sangha; indeed, a large number of them were even prohibited from performing the ceremony of higher ordination. This caste exclusiveness in the sangha was nothing new either in the Kandyan kingdom, or in the Sinhalese kingdoms of the past; indeed, it was well established in the days of the Dambadeniya kings in the thirteenth century. What was significant in Kīrti Śrī R•jasimha’s decree was that it ostentatiously legitimized caste exclusiveness. Equally important, the acquiescence of the Siyam Nik•ya leadership in this demonstrated afresh the strength of traditional values in the Buddhist revival.
The reaction to this appeared within a generation, not in the Kandyan kingdom but in the low country where, in the last years of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, a predominantly non-Goyigama fraternity of bhikkhus, the Amarapura Nik•ya, was established on the refusal of the Siyam Nik•ya to grant upasampad• to non-Goyigamas.6 The authority of the exclusively Goyigama Siyam Nik•ya was still unchallenged within the Kandyan kingdom.
Saranankara’s work was as much a landmark in the world of Sinhalese learning and literary activity as it was in the history of the sangha. It arrested a decline that was well-nigh complete, and although the vigour of the revival he initiated subsided considerably by the turn of the eighteenth century, the resuscitated tradition was kept alive by a system of pupilary succession, to undergo further refinement in a second wave of revivalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The last substantial figure in the classical literary tradition7 of the Sinhalese, which had reached its peak in the Kotte kingdom and the reign of Par•kramab•hu VI, had been the sixteenth-century poet Alagiyavanna. But his poetry revealed a decline in literary skill; control of the classical idiom was poor and the poetic idiom was forced and artificial. The panegyrics of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries represented a further degeneration of the classical tradition. A refreshing contrast was a more popular literary form: a balladic type of narrative verse, its imagery drawn from the poet’s environment and its highly evocative language based on folk speech instead of an archaic poetic diction and conventional literary stereotypes. Among the significant prose works of the mid-seventeenth century were the R•jaratn•k•raya and the R•j•valiya, a chronicle surveying the story of Sri Lanka from its earliest beginnings—from the time of Vijaya—to the accession of Vimala Dharma Sūriya II. All these works were a blend of myth and historical fact. More down-to-earth are the Kadayim-pot and Vittipot—of which there were a large number in this period—compendia of traditional lore depicting the history of royal lineages and the prestigious Kandyan families, with descriptions of important landmarks in the country and territorial boundaries. Although these were generally prose works, they were sometimes interspersed with verse. However, the sum total of these literary works did not amount to an outburst of creativity or originality. On the contrary, they underlined the collapse of the classical literary tradition of the Sinhalese.
The classical languages, Pali and Sanskrit, were essential ingredients of traditional scholarship, and Pali in particular had a special significance in the context of Saranankara’s age; the revival of the study of this, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, was essential for the revitalization of that religion. Saranankara and his disciples rescued the classical tradition from the demise to which it had seemed inevitably destined. For all its vitality, this literary revival was intrinsically atavistic in outlook and its keynote was formalism. The prose and poetry of this era were lacking in full control of the classical idiom and displayed little originality.
The literature of the period was not all in this classical mould, or merely that of a learned elite. The tradition of folk literature, especially folk poetry, was still alive and very active. Among its features were attempts at biographies (including a eulogistic one of Saranankara) in prose and verse and some impressionistic and rather stereotyped surveys of contemporary events. The erotic poetry of the period was an offshoot of the panegyric—panegyrics contained among other things descriptions of the erotic appeal and sexual prowess of the hero—but there were models for imitation in Tamil literature as well. This new genre, for all its flaws,8 had one outstanding quality: a robust secularity which set it off from the classical tradition of the day, in which the subject matter of verse and prose was religious in content and outlook.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are a period of modest achievement in architecture and the arts in general. This partly reflects the meagreness of the economic resources of the Kandyan kingdom, to which the Portuguese forays of the early seventeenth century and the Dutch economic policy as well as their invasions of the 1760s, contributed in no small measure.
The town of Senkadagala (modern Kandy), like most cities and towns of ancient Sri Lanka, was more or less square in layout, with its streets running north-south and east-west. Senkadagala consisted, in fact, of two square enclosures with the smaller one containing a number of temples and the one on the east dominated by the king’s palace which faced east. The Dalad• M•lig•va or the Temple of the Tooth was attached to the king’s palace and the complex of shrines associated with the former was in the same locality. Vimala Dharma Sūriya I is said to have built his palace in Senkadagala in the Portuguese style. After it was burnt down by de Azevedo, and the replacement built by Senarat had suffered a similar fate, not much attention was paid in the later years to the embellishment of the royal palace at Kandy. The Kandyans were ready to abandon it at short notice, or even to burn it down in the face of invaders. R•jasimha II’s position was altogether stronger, and in the more settled political conditions of the day he built a new palace in the capital and another later at Hanguranketa. His palace at Kandy, more elegant and substantial than those of his predecessors, was enlarged by Kīrti Śrī R•jasimha, ironically to be burnt down by the Dutch shortly afterwards. The rather unpretentious structure that survives today is the palace as rebuilt by Kīrti Srī R•jasimha and renovated by his successors. The walls of its central hall had originally been decorated in fine taste with stucco reliefs and terracotta plaques of which little survives today. Of the palace at Hanguranketa there is hardly a trace.
One important manifestation of the revivalist spirit of the second half of the eighteenth century was the great interest shown in rehabilitating the ancient temples and places of worship neglected or abandoned in the past, such as those of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva9, or vandalized by the Portuguese, such as the shrines on the littoral. The reigns of Kīrti Srī R•jasimha and his successor R•j•dhi R•jasimha are especially distinguished in this regard. Of the former, it has been said that there was ‘hardly a vihara of any importance in the Kandy district which was not restored by him or newly built by him’.10 The ruined cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva were in the grip of two immensely powerful forces—an impenetrable forest cover and malaria—far beyond the capacity of the Kandyan rulers to overcome. As a result, their efforts at restoring the shrines there were futile exercises without any prospect of success. But the reconstruction of shrines on the littoral destroyed by the Portuguese was easier to accomplish. Indeed, R•jasimha II had shown how this could be done. In 1588, Thomé de Sousa had devastated the celebrated dēv•lē at Devundara. After the Portuguese had been forced to relax their grip on the Matara district, R•jasimha II had erected a dev•le there dedicated to Vishnu; it was the precursor of a distinctive Kandyan type of architecture. Kīrti Srī Rījasimha restored the dev•le at Munneswaram near Sal•vata (Chilaw), which had suffered great damage at the hands of the Portuguese.
The oldest of the temples in Kandy, as old as the town itself, is the N•tha Dēv•lē built by Narendrasimha, who also constructed the present Temple of the Tooth. This two-storeyed structure replaced an earlier one of three storeys, built by Narendrasimha’s father, which had been for some time on the verge of collapse. Kīrti Srī R•jasimha renovated the Temple of the Tooth in his day and decorated its walls with paintings from the Jatakas. No traces of these paintings remain today. Of the two major Buddhist viharas in Kandy, Malvatta was built by Kīrti Srī R•jasimha, while the Asgiriya complex was the work of the Pilima Talauvē family. Kīrti Srī R•jasimha was responsible for the construction of two temples on the outskirts of Kandy, the Gang•r•ma and Degaldoruva, the latter celebrated for its beautiful frescoes. Work on the audience hall in Kandy began in 1784 in the reign of R•j•dhi R•jasimha and the project was completed early in the following century by Srī Vikrama R•jasimha, who also built the elegant pattiruppuva of the Dalad• M•lig•va and constructed the decorative lake in the heart of the town.
The strongest influence on the architecture of the Kandyan kingdom appears to have been south Indian, in particular, the Malabar region—a natural development in view of the close links between it and the Kandyan kingdom in this period. As in Malabar, wood rather than stone was the basis of Kandyan architecture. The audience hall, for example, was supported on either side by two rows of richly carved wooden pillars. This design was adapted and worked in stone in the Dalad• M•lig•va. Second, one of the more interesting features of Kandyan architecture—the long verandah supported on pillars of wood, stone or masonry—was also derived from the same south Indian source. The peaked roofs of these structures rose one above the other (as, for example, in the Lank•tilaka Vihara), the walls protected from the weather by overhanging eaves. One of the distinctive Kandyan contributions to Buddhist architecture was the tämpath viharagē, a special type of image house built on piles. Buddhist temples of this period generally had a pansala or residence for the bhikkhus, a vihara or image house, and a stupa or d•gäba as well, although there were some temples without d•gäbas. Attached to almost every temple was a dēv•lē dedicated to a Hindu deity and often an image of this god was housed under the same roof as the statue of the Buddha. In some of the Kandyan temples the stupa is replaced by the tämpath viharagē, a much more indigenous structure which may have originated from the need for protection from the weather and insect pests as well.
We have more information on the domestic architecture of the Kandyans than on that of the people of previous centuries.11 The houses of the people were very simple one-storey structures—the humblest had just one room—with walls of mud beaten into a timber framework, a thatched roof and floors made smooth by a mixture of mud and cow-dung. The valauvas, the houses of the elite, were more elegant structures, but they too were generally dark with unglazed windows on the inside only, the rooms generally being arranged around an inner courtyard (hataräs midula) open to the sky.
The sculpture of these centuries was intrinsically imitative and, when compared with that of the past, quite undistinguished. None of the images or statues of this period bears comparison with the masterpieces of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva. The decline in artistic standards is best seen in the moonstones: its symbolism was forgotten and it was treated merely as a piece of ornamentation, with a variety of motifs and shapes. The moonstones of the Dalad• M•lig•va are typical of this development, with their elongated ends and rather mechanical and highly conventionalized ornamentation.
There seems to have been no connecting link between the artistic traditions of Sigiri, Polonnaruva and the Kandyan kingdom. Nevertheless, all aspects of Kandyan painting—measurement, proportions, choice and arrangement of colours, composition of figures and the relative position of figures to one another—were based on tradition formulated by generations of masters. Kandyan art is, in fact, stylized, its motifs and subjects are traditional and its style is rather two-dimensional with an emphasis on line (this does not disappear under daubs of paint but remains visible) and colour. Although the palette was limited, this had its advantages in the sense that the colours stand out brilliant and unadulterated. The best examples of traditional Kandyan art are the frescoes at Degaldoruva and at the Ridī Vihara at Kurunegala, the work of an unordained monk Devaragampola Silvätanna in the years 1771–76. The Dambulla Rock Temple was redecorated in the eighteenth century in much the same style. The paintings of the temple at Kaballalena in the Kurunegala district were also the work of the school of painters of which Devaragampola Silvatanna was the most distinguished exponent. On the littoral too, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists of this school painted the shrines at Mulkirigala in the Hambantota district, the Totagamuva Rajamah• vihara at Telvatta and the Sailabimb•r•maya in Dodanduva, both in the Galle district. The difference in style in these paintings suggests that they could have been the work of three different artists.
Even the best work of this period—at Degaldoruva and at Dambulla—although interesting in terms of colour, pattern and religious feeling was rather naive and inferior in technique and sensitivity compared to the works of the past. They are, very likely, offshoots of a school of Indian painting which flourished at Lepakshi near Vijayanagar and were thus of Dravidian derivation rather than of the Deccan or the Ganga Basin.