This statue did not always stand alone. Archaeological study of the site places it as one of four nearly identical Buddha images, originally set at the four points around a bodhighara, a shrine built around a sacred Bodhi tree in the ancient city of Anuradhapura. Of the four, only the north facing statue described here survived largely intact into the modern era. What became of the other three, whether they were destroyed, removed, or simply never rediscovered, is not part of the archaeological record that has come down with this one.
Even the survivor did not have an easy history. It was found in 1886 lying fallen on the ground at its present site, its nose broken, centuries after the kingdom that built it had declined and the site around it had gone unmaintained. What is now a carefully protected archaeological monument within Mahamevnawa Park spent an unknown span of time simply lying where it had fallen.
The statue's later reach extended well beyond Sri Lanka. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, is recorded as having kept a photograph of it during his years of imprisonment under British rule, later writing that the image had become a companion to him, offering a kind of steadiness his circumstances did not. A stone carved to depict absorption ended up, centuries later and thousands of miles from its original context, offering something like that same steadiness to a man who had never seen it in person.