The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka: Part 2

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press.

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Welcome to the second episode of a three part podcast dedicated to finding the 7 greatest wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka.

250 years after the creation of the island’s first great wonder – the reservoir of Panda Wewa, the second took root - literally. Strictly speaking this wonder was not home grown – but rather an import that, in going native, came to symbolise everything about the land, then as now. No building this, nor even a book or garden, but a tree, a single tree – the Sri Maha Bodhi, The Tree Of Enlightenment, an A list celebrity tree to outshine anything anywhere else in the world; not just Sri Lanka’s oldest living tree, but also the oldest recorded tree on earth.

As a tree, it gained its bloodline from the bodhi tree in Bihar under which Lord Buddha sat sometime around 500 BCE prior to attaining his enlightenment, a nirvana of not inconsiderable benefits, including a full understanding the true nature of everything. Its illustrious history aside, the near relatives of bodhi trees are arguably more beautiful, including, as they do, figs, banyans, breadfruits, jacks, mulberries.

But history is rarely written by the beautiful. It is the survivors that get to tell the story and although there is no such thing as an average life span for a tree, the bodhi tree squats confidently at the extreme end of the spectrum, living for anything up to 3,000 years. It can tell stories that would put Scheherazade herself to sleep.

The bodhi still growing in Anuradhapura dates back to 236 BCE. At the time of its arrival, the country was still making tentative if immutable steps as an embryonic nation; and its appearance was to coincide with the reign of the island’s eighth recorded king, Devanampiya Tissa.

It arrived just a few years after Buddhism itself arrived on the island, protolyzed by Mahindra, the son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka. Clearly, the young missionary had painted a compelling picture of his new island abode in his letters home for he was soon joined by his sister, Sanghamitta. She brought with her a golden vase in which grew a sapling of Lord Buddha’s original Bodhi-Tree.

Accompanied by nuns and an entourage of useful craftsmen, Sanghamitta landed in the north of the island and was met by King Devanampiya Tissa himself. With some ceremony, he escorted the party to Anuradhapura along a road said to have been softened with white sand (an enhancement that the present day Road Development Agency might take note of); and the Bodhi sapling was planted in the city’s Mahameghavana Grove.

The world that this tiny tree then looked out upon was already more than a little magnificent. From its plot stretched a new and constantly enlarging city, the creation of Pandukabhaya, a staggering construction by any measure. As the ancient Athenians were putting the finishing touches to the Acropolis and the nascent Roman Republic issuing its first tentative laws, the palaces, and structures commissioned by Sri Lanka’s first great king rose up through the jungle, a tropical Versailles.

Beyond its walls and moats stretched the Rajarata, the land ruled by the king, extending from the northern tip of the island to incorporate most of the island with the likely exception of the impenetrable hill country and the far south – Ruhana.

The small bodhi tree’s very survival depended on all the components of a flourishing nation – a caringly and calibrated civil service, and phenomenally effective water management to feed the growing state. This in turn was enabled by international trade, culture, writing and an evolving new language – Sinhala; by roads, hospitals, horticulture, and an engineering capability that was able to assemble large stone palaces and temples. Surrounded by such professionalism, it is little wonder it flourished, and, in a sense, arrived just as the party began.

Many successive kings enriched the land on which it grew. Magnificent stone and later metallic statues were positioned around it, along with a fine canal and walls to protect it from wild elephants; a protective barrier mirrored as recently as 1969 by a golden fence. Now positioned on a high terrace, surrounded by 4 other terraces, its temple is one of the country’s most sacred sites; and from its vantage point it has borne witness to almost all of recorded island history: two thousand three-hundred-years of it.

The tree itself is managed by priests, supported by a committee, and a panels of experts and agencies within the government’s environment ministry. It has given rise to innumerable other direct descendants, thirty two of which are notable trees in their own right.

Three of the most prominent grow in temples in Colombo, Nuwara Eliya and Monaragala. One was planted near Kandy in 1236 by a minister of King Parakramabahu II, and several others by early Kandyan kings around 1635. Another, in 1472 near Colombo, was planted by a somewhat overwrought King of Kotte, Bhuvanaikabahu VI.

Four in Trincomalee, planted in 1753, mark the moment Buddhism began to recover from the onslaught of colonization. Two even have British associations. The future King Edward VII planted a bo tree in 1875 in Peradeniya Gardens during a state visit more associated with big game hunting and dancing girls; whilst in 1803 a British officer, Davy hid in one to (briefly) escape a massacre in Kandy.

The saddest though is one planted around 522 CE by a poet loving king, soon to kill himself in grief for the murder of his friend, Kalidasa, a writer with a finer sense of poetry than he had for women.

And although the Sri Maha Bodhi is in many respects a tamed and urban tree, it is also, by virtue of being a plant, an iconic symbol of the island’s remarkable biodiversity. Its very existence infers the exceptional quantity of Sri Lanka’s endemic species; its wide array of climatic zones; and ecosystems that include vast forests that still cover almost a third of the entire land.

Almost 100 years later a start was made on ancient Sri Lanka’s third great wonder – one that was to comprise Asia’s equivalent of the three great pyramids of Giza – the three great stupas of Anduraupura: the Ruwanweliseya; the Abhayagiri; and the Jetavanaramaya.

Stupas are a structure exclusive to Buddhist countries. The shape is made for perfect skylines. Bells, bubbles, pots, lotuses – even heaps of paddy: Sri Lanka’s many thousands of stupas were built in a range of related shapes, and in such numbers that it is unlikely that a five-minute car journey anywhere in the country will fail to take you past one.

They are still being constructed to this day – in Kandy, Kalutara and Kotmale, to name just three.

Whatever their shape or age, they are outstanding architectural creations, mesmerizingly graceful as they rise over their visiting pilgrims, providing them with a place to meditate and a home for the relics and religious objects they venerate. And its three most important ones are found in the island’s heartland - Anuradhapura.

The oldest of the tree is the Ruwanweliseya, built between 161 to 137 BCE by King Dutugamunu, with a height today of 103 meters. The first steps in its construction are told in extraordinary detail by the Mahavamsa Chronicle which started “on the f...