Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
around the perimeter. On the south shore, in front of the Malwatte Maha Vihara, the circu-
lar enclosure is the monks' bathhouse.
Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic
BUDDHIST TEMPLE
Buddhism Museum admission Rs 500; temple 5.30am-8pm, puja 5.30-6.45am, 9.30-11am &
6.30-8pm, World Buddhism Museum 8am-7pm, Sri Dalada Museum 7.30am-6pm)
Just north of the lake, the golden-roofed Temple of the Sacred Tooth houses Sri Lanka's
most important Buddhist relic - a tooth of the Buddha.
During
puja
(offerings or prayers), the heavily guarded room housing the tooth is open
to devotees and tourists. However, you don't actually see the tooth. It's kept in a gold cas-
ket shaped like a dagoba (stupa), which contains a series of six dagoba caskets of dimin-
ishing size.
The entire temple complex covers a large area and as well as the main shrine there are
numerous other temples and museums within the complex. The following are some of the
key sites.
Behind the shrine stands the three-storey Alut Maligawa, a newer and larger shrine hall
displaying dozens of sitting Buddhas donated by Thai devotees. The design resembles a
Thai Buddhist shrine hall in tribute to the fact that Thai monks re-established Sri Lanka's
ordination lineage during the reign of King Kirti Sri Rajasinha. The upper two floors of the
Tooth Relic; 7.30am-6pm)
, with a stunning array of gilded gifts to the temple. Letters and
diary entries from the British time reveal the colonisers' surprisingly respectful attitude to
the tooth relic. More recent photographs reveal the damage caused by a truck bomb set off
by the LTTE in 1998 that destroyed large parts of the temple.
To the north inside the compound, and accessible only via the Temple of the Sacred
Tooth Relic, is the 19th-century Audience Hall, an open-air pavilion with stone columns
awa tusker who died in 1988.
