The most important cultural and spiritual attraction in Kandy is the Tooth Relic Temple on the northern edge of the Lake. The temple houses one of the Buddha’s teeth – probably the most important Buddhist relic in Sri Lanka and said to have been snatch from the flames of the Buddha’s funeral in 483 BC and smuggled from India to Sri Lanka in the 4th century AD in the crown of a prince. The tooth has resided in several places in Sri Lanka since including Anuradhapura before ending up in its permanent home here in Kandy. At one point in its eventful history, the tooth was stolen and taken back to India. It finally came to rest in the central shrine of the temple in Kandy under the auspices of the British.
The front of the temple was extensively damaged by an LTTE bomb in 1998 although there is little evidence of the damage now. Although there is still tight security including barracades around the entrance to the complex and screening of visitors.
The temple is surrounded by a moat and is a wonderful example of traditional Sri Lankan temple design with carved stone pillars and decorated wooden beams supporting a tiled roof to form a galleried cloister. In the central courtyard is the two-storey tooth shrine surmounted by a gilded and rather out-of-place modern canopy on metal supports built with Japanese donations. The temple was mainly constructed by Kandyan Kings during the 17th and 18th centuries and is decorated with some wonderful painted walls and ceilings.
Behind the central courtyard is the new Ahut Maligawa shrine hall which displays several buddhas and a sequence of paintings around the walls depicting scenes from the life of Buddha and the saga of the tooth relic. The upper two floors of the Ahut Maligawa house the Sri Delada Museum which contains a number of artifacts, some facsimile documents dating from British rule and photographs of the damage caused to the temple by the 1998 bomb.
Also within the temple grounds are the Audience Hall – an open-sided pavilion with carved wooden columns; Rajah Tusker Hall where the stuffed remains of Rajah the ceremonial Muligawa Tusker who served the temple for 50 years and died in 1988 is on display.
After the temple we visit two adjacent Buddhist Devales or temples to the gods who support Buddha, and St Paul’s Catholic Church which retains a strong British flavour with its flowering arranging rotas and notices written in very old fashioned English.