Temple of the Tooth (Sri Dalada Maligawa)

The tooth at Kandy has been a political instrument for most of its recorded history, and the buildings around it were designed for that.

The claim

The tooth is said to have been recovered from the Buddha's cremation and brought to Sri Lanka in the fourth century, hidden in the hair of a princess of Kalinga.

What matters historically is not the provenance but the doctrine that grew around it: whoever holds the tooth holds the right to rule the island.

What follows from that

The consequence is architectural and geographic. Sinhalese kings built their relic temples beside their palaces, and moved the tooth whenever they moved their capital: Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambadeniya, Yapahuwa, Kotte, and finally Kandy.

The relic's itinerary is therefore a map of Sri Lankan political history. Rivals and invaders sought it for the same reason, and the Portuguese claimed to have captured and destroyed it in the sixteenth century, a claim Sri Lankan tradition rejects, holding that what was destroyed was a replica.

The present building is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work, inside the old royal palace compound.

What is actually seen

The relic is not displayed. Visitors see a gilded casket, itself containing a series of nested caskets, and even that is opened only on rare occasions.

Worship is conducted three times daily by monks of the Malwathu and Asgiri chapters, and a lay official, the Diyawadana Nilame, administers the temple, a division of monastic and lay authority that reflects the relic's dual religious and political character.

Once a year the Esala Perahera carries a replica casket through Kandy on an elephant, over ten nights, with dancers, drummers, whip-crackers and torchbearers.

1998

On 25 January 1998 three LTTE attackers drove a truck carrying several hundred kilograms of explosives into the entrance and detonated it. Seventeen people were killed, including the attackers.

The facade, the roof and the moonstone were badly damaged. The inner chambers and the relic were not.

The date was chosen: it was the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Sri Lanka banned the LTTE for the first time the following day, the attack on the tooth achieving what years of other attacks had not. Restoration took about eighteen months.

The episode confirmed the premise the whole site rests on. An attack on the relic was understood, by everyone involved, as an attack on the legitimacy of the state.

The tooth relic now kept at Kandy has moved with political power for most of its recorded history, and once survived a truck bomb aimed directly at it.

Following the capital

Tradition holds the relic was smuggled out of India in the fourth century CE hidden in the hair of a princess, arriving in Sri Lanka to become a symbol closely tied to sovereignty there. As the island's ruling capital shifted over the centuries, from Anuradhapura to Polonnaruwa and eventually to Kandy, the relic and its housing temple moved with it, on the principle recorded in local chronicles that whoever held the tooth held the right to rule.

Attacked in 1998

On 25 January 1998, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam detonated a truck bomb at the temple's entrance during the country's civil war, killing several people and damaging the building's facade, though the relic chamber itself was not breached. The temple was restored, and the attack is generally read as a strike at national symbolism rather than at the relic's religious function specifically.

The procession that carries it, without showing it

The annual Esala Perahera, a multi-day festival of drummers, dancers and decorated elephants, parades a replica casket representing the relic through Kandy's streets each year; the actual relic itself is never displayed publicly, kept within a series of nested caskets that only a small number of custodians may access.