Sacred Tooth Relic of Kandy

The Sacred Tooth Relic of Kandy, known in Sinhala as the Sri Dalada, is a tooth venerated by Theravada Buddhists as a relic of Gautama Buddha and kept in the Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, in the hill city of Kandy, Sri Lanka. The relic is never displayed directly; it rests within a bell-shaped gold reliquary, the karandua, itself the innermost of seven nested caskets of diminishing size, each richly worked in gold and set with gems.

For the greater part of Sri Lankan history the tooth was more than a devotional object: it was the palladium of the Sinhalese monarchy, and the king who held it was held to hold the legitimate right to rule the island. That political charge kept the relic moving with the royal capital across the centuries and made its custody a matter of statecraft as much as of religion.

Today the temple is the ceremonial heart of Sri Lankan Buddhism, part of the Sacred City of Kandy inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, and the relic is the focus of the great annual Esala Perahera, in which a replica casket is borne through Kandy on a caparisoned elephant amid dancers, drummers and torchbearers.

According to the Sri Lankan chronicle tradition, preserved in the Dathavamsa and the Mahavamsa, the tooth was taken from the Buddha's funeral pyre and kept for centuries in India, at Kalinga. In the 4th century CE, as war threatened the relic, it was carried to the island of Lanka, the accounts say concealed in the hair of the princess Hemamala, who travelled with the prince Dantha, and presented to King Kirti Sri Meghavarna of Anuradhapura, who enshrined it in his capital. From then on the relic was inseparable from Sinhalese kingship. As successive dynasties shifted their seat, the tooth went with them, housed in turn at Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambadeniya, Yapahuwa, Kurunegala, Gampola and Kotte; the ruins of its shrines mark those former capitals.

In the late 16th century the relic came to Kandy under King Vimaladharmasuriya I, who built a two-storey shrine for it beside his palace; the present Sri Dalada Maligawa stands on that site and was much expanded under later Kandyan kings. During the European colonial period the Portuguese claimed to have seized a tooth relic and destroyed it publicly at Goa, but Sinhalese tradition holds that the object taken was a substitute and that the true relic remained safe in the interior. After the British deposed the last king of Kandy in 1815, custody of the relic passed to the temple's lay and monastic guardians, and it has remained a national and religious symbol through independence and into the present, surviving even a 1998 bombing of the temple.

For the tradition, the relic's authenticity is secured by an unbroken line of custody: the chronicles trace it from the Buddha's cremation through Kalinga to Anuradhapura, and its uninterrupted royal veneration is taken as sufficient warrant. The custodian temple presents it as a genuine left canine of Gautama Buddha, and the surrounding ritual, architecture and statecraft all assume that identity.

Historians and scientists treat the question more cautiously. The relic has never been removed from its caskets for examination, so no anatomical, radiometric or other test has ever been applied to it; its identity therefore cannot be confirmed or refuted by physical evidence. Nineteenth-century European observers who claimed to glimpse it described an object larger than a human tooth, which skeptics take as evidence against the attribution, while defenders answer that the relic is not to be judged by ordinary measure. The documented history is itself layered: the Portuguese destruction narrative and the counter-claim of a substitute mean that even within the historical record there is dispute over whether the present tooth is continuous with the one venerated at Anuradhapura. The consensus position is that the object is authentically the relic that Sri Lankan Buddhists have venerated as the Buddha's tooth since late antiquity, while its literal origin in the body of Gautama Buddha remains a matter of faith rather than demonstrable fact, hence a status of debated.

The Sacred Tooth Relic is among the most venerated objects in Theravada Buddhism and the single most important religious symbol in Sri Lanka. Daily services, the thevava, are performed before the relic three times a day with drumming and offerings, and pilgrims queue to pay respect before the closed inner shrine during the brief periods when it is opened. The relic's political meaning has never entirely faded: through the Kandyan kingdom and beyond, custody of the tooth conferred legitimacy, and even in the modern republic the temple remains a site where religious and national identity meet.

The relic's public face is the Esala Perahera of Kandy, held over ten nights in the lunar month of Esala (July or August). A gold replica of the relic casket rides atop the Maligawa Tusker, the lead temple elephant, escorted by hundreds of dancers, fire-twirlers, whip-crackers and drummers in one of Asia's great religious processions. The relic itself does not leave the temple. Because the tooth is shielded within its nested caskets and shown only by the caskets, the tradition maintains a deliberate reticence about the object, a reticence that is itself part of its sanctity and part of why it has never been examined.