#thuparama

[cluelessbackpacker]

Sri Lanka - An unintended, unexpected piligrimage

The Buddhist heritage and influence in Sri Lanka hits you the moment you step of the airport - from the street-side Dagobas, Buddha statues and the Bodhi Trees to the saffron-clad Buddhist monks and the evening prayer chants in town centers. 

For a country that is barely 30kms from our south coast, I realised that my knowledge of the culture and people was zilch. Little did I know that this country houses the most important Buddhist relics anywhere in the world and that Lord Buddha had visited Sri Lanka thrice in his life!

The trip has been nothing short of a pilgrimage for me:

I stood 20m from the tooth relic -  a casket containing Lord Buddha's tooth that was taken from his funeral pyre by a monk (rogue!) and carried to Sri Lanka

Touched the Dagoba which contains Lord Buddha's begging bowl!

The famous lonely planet cover photograph of the Thuparama Dagoba apparently contains Lord Buddha's right collar bone.

And the massive (but slightly underwhelming) Abhayagiri Dagoba supposedly contains an imprint of Lord Buddha's footstep

And of course the Maha Bodhi tree -  a sapling of the original Bodhi tree was carried from India and planted in Anuradhapura.

I can only hope that I am now loaded with Buddha's blessings :)

[rometaprobaneparallels]

The Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum, dating from approximately 500 BC, is perhaps one of the most archetypal of the classical Roman temples. Even in its ruined state, the temple's elevated mass and colonnade reveal the prominence that the temple would have had in its contemporary urban context. The Abhayagiri Monastic Complex pictured in the image below, represents curious similarities in its spatial formations. The emphasis of the capital as the point where the load-bearing vertical stone element meets the wooden roof, is readily apparent in both instances. Was Laugier's instinct right - does architectural form generate from an intuitive need to express tectonic operations? While sheer coincidence is an alternative explanation, the idea that there is some fundamental understanding of building being expressed here, is one that suggests possibilities in reading the parallels between these forms and functions across the globe, and even across time.