An exploration of the meaning of space in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy
La signification de l’espace dans le Temple de la Dent à Kandy
p. 177-195
Résumés
This paper is in two parts. First, it attempts to show that the worship of the Tooth Relic of the Buddha, enshrined at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, expresses a dual aspect; the space in the Temple, while expressing both, emphasizes the dominant aspect, which consists in the worship of the Relic as a divinised representation of the Buddha. In the second part temple space is seen as the central focus of an integral spatial whole consisting of the capital city and the kingdom. Ritual, the dynamic aspect of space, is freed from walled boundaries and periodically overflows into the city in the pageantry designed to ensure prosperity and well-being. During such pageants this centrifugality is met with the centripetal flow of peripheral rulers, bringing about an inextrical mix of politics, religion and geographical boundary.
Cet article se divise en deux parties. Dans la première, il montre que le culte de la relique du Bouddha, déposée à Kandy dans le Temple de la Dent, fait référence à deux univers religieux distincts. L’organisation spatiale intérieure au sanctuaire les exprime tous deux, marquant toutefois la prédominance de la référence bouddhique qui voit dans la relique une représentation divinisée du Bouddha. La seconde partie s’attache à définir l’espace du temple dans son rapport à la totalité formée par le royaume et sa capitale. Cet espace possède cependant une dynamique rituelle que les limites matérielles et architecturales du temple proprement dit ne peuvent contenir. On le voit alors se répandre à travers la ville et manifester dans la fête la prospérité et le bien-être. Au cours de ces manifestations le mouvement centrifuge que l’on vient de décrire se mêle à un mouvement inverse animé cette fois par les chefferies de la périphérie du royaume, créant ainsi un inextricable réseau aux implications politiques, religieuses et territoriales.
Texte intégral
1In the first part of this paper, I describe the space of the Temple of the Tooth, known as the Palace of the Tooth Relic, in Kandy, Sri Lanka. In the second part, I attempt to contextualise the Temple within the broader sacred building complex of the city, suggesting that elements of cosmo-magical symbolism,1 common in South and Southeast Asia, underlie this complex.
2There are two varieties of religious buildings in Buddhist Sri Lanka, vihāra and dēvāla. Vihāra, which we can designate by the term ‘ temple ’ are Buddhist temples which house images of the Buddha and his disciples. Dēvāla are “shrines of the gods”, containing images of the gods derived primarily from the Hindu pantheon, but incorporated into Buddhist worship. We may use the term ‘ shrine ’ to refer to them. Although the Temple of the Tooth houses a representation of the Buddha, namely the Tooth relie of the Buddha known as Dalada, and is therefore a vihāra, it must be classed in terms of architecture and space, in the dēvāla (i.e., ‘ shrine of the gods ’) category rather than the vihāra (the ‘ Buddhist temple ’) category. The reason for this is that in the state-sponsored cult at the Temple of the Tooth, the Tooth Relic is treated as a divinised representation of the Buddha: although the Relic certainly has a Buddha-aspect, it also has a clearly defined divine aspect, which is the primary focus of its cultic worship at the Temple of the Tooth. Worship of the Buddha in divinised form goes back to the early history of Sri Lanka. In India too with the rise of Buddhism the Buddha was accepted by some kings as the primary object of cultic worship for gaining prosperity and well-being for the kingdom, though with the decline of Buddhism these rulers returned to the worship of Hindu gods. The state cult in early Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms was built around the idea that the king must, through mystical means, establish access to the heavenly world and enable the uninterrupted participation of the human kingdom in the eternal bounties characteristic of that world. It was therefore necessary, if the Buddha were to be the primary object of worship in this cult, that he be worshiped in a super-human form.
3The main distinction between the vihāra and the dēvāla is that the former is a relatively ‘ open ’ place and the latter a relatively ’ closed ’ or inaccessible place. This is in keeping with the fact that the Buddha, a historical human person who expounded a philosophy, led a life of daily involvement with society to whose members he actively explained it; whereas the gods are powerful non-human beings, access to whose benevolence is only possible through the observation of meticulous rules designed to keep them secluded from the impurity of human beings. Figure 1 illustrates the two structures.
4The vihāra consists of a rectangular image house surrounded by a verandah. The roof is of two slopes, the outer one sheltering the verandah (Coomaraswamy 1908 : 118). A dēvāla consits of a series of rooms in a row, connected with each other. The first is a spacious rectangular area called the ‘ long house ’ (diggē), next an ante-room, followed by the sanctum which houses the images of the gods. The sanctum is known as the ‘ palace ’ (māligāva). The sacred area of a vihāra is usually accessible from three directions, the fourth being the direction where the images are located. The dēvāla, in contrast, has only one door which opens into the ante-room. A worshipper would first enter the longhouse, then the ante-room and only then reach the sanctuary, where he is forbidden to enter, and curtains shroud even his view of the divine images. The idea of the long house itself is significant for it expresses the distance that exists between man and god.
5The central space of the Temple of the Tooth is laid out as an elaboration of the space in a dēvāla, with a long-house, ante-room and other spatial devices which make it a ‘ closed ’ place. (During the official worship this central area is literally closed to the public, although it is accessible at other times, expressing the dual, i.e., Buddha-like and god-like, aspects of the Tooth Relic as worshiped in the state cult.)
6In strictly Buddhist worship, an individual freely visits a vihāra and worships the images and other representations of the Buddha directly by chanting Pali stanzas and making offerings such as flowers and incense. The benefit of this worship is the acquisition of ‘ merit ’ (Sinhalese, pin; Pali, puñña) whose primary value lies in the facilitation of good future births. In contrast, the primary form of worship of the gods consists of a worshipper approaching the deity through the mediation of a priest. The purpose of such worship is the achievement of an immediate benefit, such as health or success in an enterprise. In the Temple of the Tooth both kinds of worship take place, because of the Tooth Relic’s dual nature of possessing a Buddha aspect and a divine aspect.
7The difference between propitiation of a god at a dēvāla and the state-sponsored worship at the Temple of the Tooth, both of which seek mundane benefits, is that, whereas the former is a private act seeking benefit for private individuals, the latter is a public act where the benefits sought are for the society as a whole. The desired benefits, as noted before, are prosperity, well-being, protection and so forth, with specific mention of timely rainfall, a climatological phenomenon indispensable for an agrarian society. These expectations were summed up three times every day in the concluding chant of the rituals of the dawn, day and evening:
Devo vassatu kālena
Sassa sampatti hetu ca
Pīto bhavatu loko ca
Rājā bhavatu dhammiko.
Ākasatthā ca bhummatthā
Devā nāgā mahiddhikā
Puññan taṁ anumoditvā
Ciraṁ rakkhantu lokasasānaṁ.
May the rains fall in time which is the cause of a bountiful crop. May the world be happy and the king be righteous.
May the gods and naga of great supernatural power, of sky and earth, share this merit and ever protect the world and the teaching (of the Buddha).
8The first stanza envisages harmonious and smooth working of the existing natural order of things and righteous rule of the king to result from the performance of ritual. Whereas the second, with the idea of merit from worship to be transferred to the gods who, pleased with the merit they receive, protect the world, recalls more strictly Buddhist worship productive of ultra – mundane benefits, but shares the focus of the first stanza in placing importance on the mundane benefit of protection. In both stanzas, the benefits sought are public and not private. The ritual therefore cannot be privately organized: it is a cult of the state whose sponsor is the king.
9It is the nature of this worship that determines the organization of space of the Temple of the Tooth: the Temple is but a spatial expression of the form of worship. While certain spatial features express the private worship of the Tooth Relic in its Buddha aspect, the dominant pattern of space allocation expresses the worship of the Relic as a divinised form of the Buddha.
10The official worship at the Temple of the Tooth is an elaborate one and I shall confine myself to a description of the spaces involving this worship, namely the dawn, day and evening ritual performances. That is, we will concentrate on the central space which is the essence of the Temple. Other spaces are either peripheral, such as rooms for the different categories of ritual performers, store rooms, offices and so forth, or elaborations, which need not concern us in an understanding of the central space.2
11The main entrance to the Temple faces west. Through steps and a tunnel a person entering the Temple reaches a hall of about two thousand square feet, almost empty except for the pillars that support the upper storey. This hall, which is also accessible from the north and south, is called hēvisi maṇḍape, Drumming Pavilion. In this area drums and musical instruments are played during ritual performances.
12The area to the west of the Drumming Pavilion is elevated except for the entrance tunnel that divides the area. On the north side elevation is a stupa and in the south, an image house known as palla māle, the Image House of the Lower Floor. Thus, the two floors of the Temple denote not simply two elevations, but two places of worship, reminiscent of a general classificatory pattern among the Sinhalese between ‘ upper ’ and ‘ lower ’ categories. The Image House of the Lower Floor (indicated in figure 2 as “Lower Floor Shrine”) is important because a ritual performance identical to that of the Upper Floor, performed for the Tooth Relic, is performed there simultaneously with the former. Steps on the west side of the south elevation lead to an octogonal structure known as the pattirippuva, which has no intrinsic relation to the central ritual, but is meaningful in terms of the relation between kingship and ritual to which we shall refer later, for the octogon is an illustration of the fusion of temple and palace.
13To the east of the Drumming Pavilion, and surrounded peripherally by the north, east and south wings of the Temple and an interior courtyard ( “Inner Compound” in figure 2), is the physically and ritually central space of the Temple.
14Its lower floor consists of two rooms, the “Long House” (diggē) and the Great Treasury (maha aramudala), the first reminiscent of a dēvāle, as noted before.3 The space above these constitute the Upper Floor of the Temple. This floor is accessible from the Long House through a very narrow staircase ( “Stairway” of figure 3), and through large stairways from the north and south sides ( “Entrance Stairway” and “Exit Stairway” of figure 3). Although the upper storey of the Temple is larger than the space above the Long House and the Great Treasury as figure 3 shows, the term “Upper Floor” strictly refers to the latter space. This space constitutes the true center of the ritual because on its far end (east) is located the Sanctum, known as the Living Palace (väḍasiṭina māligāva), of the Tooth Relic. The spaces on the north and east sides of the Sanctum serve as storage spaces, the ‘ Clothes Pavilion ’ (halu maṇḍate) housing some of the objects used in the sacred ritual (tēvāva) performed by monks, acting as priests, behind drawn curtains; and the ‘ Housewatcher’s Verandah ’ (gepalun barāňde) housing certain objects such as musical instruments, used by minstrels (kavikāra) who sing in praise of the Relie during ritual performances on Wednesdays and quarters of the moon, occupying the Sandalwood Room (haňdun kūḍama) (figure 3). The Pingo Placing Verandah (kattiyana barāňde) is a pantry and storage room for the gold and silver vessels used in the elaborate food offering which forms part of the daily ritual performances.4 The Sanctum, as already mentioned, houses the Daladā, the Sacred Tooth Relic. During the official ritual performances, no one but the officiating monks and a sole lay assistant (vaṭṭērurāla) of high caste are allowed in the Sanctum, and even when it is open for public worship, a monk stands at its threshold and accepts offerings on behalf of devotees. Those who wish to cross the threshold are not barred from doing so, but the tact that not all of them do it cannot be fully explained in terms of the over-crowding which requires worshippers to maintain a smooth flow of traffic.5 It can be understood as a spilling over into the open phase of ritual, a characteristic feature of the closed phase where worshippers are not allowed to go into the Sanctum. The open phase, as suggested before, is an expression of the Buddha aspect of the Tooth Relic and the closed phase, the divine aspect. The fact that an officiating monk stands at the threshold of the Sanctum even in the open phase and accepts offerings from worshippers, which is an act of mediation, expresses the relatively “closed” nature of even the “open” phase, and thereby the pronounced affinity of the Temple to a dēvāla.
15Thus the space of the Temple of the Tooth illustrates the fusion of two modes of worship, first, the official worship sponsored by the state and performed by functionaries remunerated for their services. This mode, structured on the pattern of Hindu worship known as pūjā, expresses the divine aspect of the Tooth Relic. The second mode is the free worship of the Buddha as the Enlightened One by individual worshippers suffused with religious emotion, which does not form an indispensable part of the first mode. In the first mode the benefits expected, as mentioned before, are prosperity, well-being, and protection for the kingdom as a whole, and the benefits are mundane. In the second mode, the expected benefit is merit (pin, puñña), which is understood as an enhancement of an individual worshippers’s moral worth, capable of facilitating happy future births. Though the space in the Temple illustrates both modes of worship, the first mode occupies primary importance because of the state-sponsored and nationally-significant nature of the cult. The primacy of this mode relates the Temple space to that of the broader sacred complex of Kandy located immediately outside the Temple. We now turn to an exploration of the meaning of this relation.
II
16Our understanding of the Temple and its rituals can be broadened by placing the Temple and its ritual in the context of a large complex of ideas which underlie the organization of polity and sacral kingship in South and Southeast Asia. This complex of ideas, referred to as “cosmo-magical symbolism”6 (Wheatley 1967: 9), though clearly expressed in numerous Sanskrit texts, monumental remains, lithic records and present-day popular belief, have been for long ignored by scholars. In recent times, however, several studies have emerged that bring out in some detail these ideas and emphasize their indispensability in understanding South and Southeast Asian society.7 These ideas are varied in their detail, but in essence express the fact that the great temples of South and Southeast Asia must be understood not in narrowly pared-down religious terms that appeal to certain types of modem religious individualism, but in terms of a broad range of mystical ideas about man’s attempt to enhance prosperity and well-being in harmonious relation with his fellow social beings and the natural and supernatural worlds, through the mediation of sacral kingship. In this view, the temple exists, not in isolation, but in integral relation with space exterior to it. Temple space occupies the center of the city which is a microcosmic, mundane representation of the divine cosmos. The temple space periodically expands its boundaries to suffuse the city with its intensity, much as the cosmos exists by expanding and contracting.
17Cosmic expansion and contraction is expressed in the Sanskrit texts as the awakening and returning to sleep of Puruṣa, the Cosmic Man. Purāṇic literature describes how, at the beginning of a cosmic cycle (kalpa), Puruṣa in the form of a great god awakens and generates from his body the cosmic phenomena – sun, moon, lunar mansions, signs of the zodiac, continents, countries and so forth. He further generates from his body a logically complete social order consisting of the four castes (varṇa). At the end of the cycle, these units return to the body of the Cosmic Man who sleeps till the beginning of the next kalpa.
18In the human world the analogy of the Cosmic man was the king. Just as Puruṣa symbolised the unity, potency and power of the cosmos, the king represented these for the kingdom. As the kingdom was a microcosm of the cosmos and all units of the cosmos belonged to a single quality and order of things, a disturbance in one unit would cause disturbance in the others. For example, celestial events such as the movements of the planets and eclipses were considered to influence the affaire of the human world. Human beings could avert dangers and intensify well being by directing the course of the aberrant events through appropriate ritual behaviour. The person pre-eminently capable of effecting such direction was the king. The person and behaviour of the king was therefore considered to be intimately associated with the health, prosperity and well-being of the kingdom.
19The king was the mediator between the human and divine worlds. In this role the king was charged with the task of facilitating the worship at the center of the kingdom which alone kept the kingdom in health and prosperity, averting natural and other disasters. Further, the king’s good behaviour and his adherence to dharma, the law of righteousness, was conceived as magically producing good results, in addition to the benefits that must empirically result from righteousness. Thus, if the king were righteous the planets would behave normally, the rains fall in time and the crops and animals multiply; but if he were cruel, the planets would behave abnormally, the rains fail and wither the crops away, causing famine, pestilence and war and thereby, the destruction of the social order.
20As the kingdom and the larger mundane world were considered microcosmic replicas of the cosmos, the kings, even petty rulers were styled emperors of the world and of the universe. The kingdom was magically demarcated by forts erected at four points situated in the four directions. The capital, protected by fortifications, was conceived to be located at the center of the kingdom and was the territory of effective contact between the king and the kingdom. As the city symbolised the kingdom the king could circumambulate the kingdom by ritually circumambulating the city. The capital, as was the kingdom, was conceived as a square divided into smaller squares. Of these the central square consisted of the ‘ house ’, i.e., temple, of the king’s deity, a microcosm of Puruṣa, who mediated between the king and the divine cosmos, just as the king did between the kingdom and the deity. The temple as the abode of the divine microcosm on earth, faced the east, just as the macrocosmic Puruṣa did, when he generated the universe at the beginning of the cosmic cycle. The king, as the human, and therefore subsidiary microcosm of Puruṣa in the mundane world, appropriately occupied a house, i.e., the palace, located to the west of the temple. Equally appropriately, the king’s audience hall, where the king enacts the role of the microcosmic human Puruṣa, i.e., kingly rule, was placed to the east of his private quarters. Thus, the audience hall, the locus of the king’s public personality and mystical aspect, was located between the temple and his private chambers. In terms of these ideas the temple/palace does not stand in isolation but is the central space of the city and the kingdom. It is the locus of the axis mundi that united the city with the divine macrocosm.
21Actual cities of South an Southeast Asia were built in varying degrees of approximation to this ideal city, conceived as microcosmic of the divine cosmos. The builders of such cities as Ankor-Wat and Madurai, to give two well-known examples, followed the model closely though in different ways, whereas numerous other cities in South and Southeast Asia only faintly resemble the model.
22Kandy, the capital of the last kingdom of Sri Lanka subdued by the British in 1815, was one of those cities which did not have any close resemblance to the model of the divine city. But there is no doubt that the idea lay beneath the visible structures of the city that survive up to the present day. From the earliest period of Aryan colonisation of the island abouth the 5th century b. c., there is evidence to suppose that cosmo-magical symbolism guided the building of cities even though the details of the model were not followed. The most dramatic example from Sri Lanka is the rock fortress of Sigiriya whose 5th century builder Kāśyapa, it has been suggested, built his capital in imitation of the divine fortress of Kuvēra, the god of wealth (Paranavitana 1950). This indicates that a given king could select his own deity as the mediator between his kingdom on the one hand and the divine macrocosm on the other. Evidence from India illustrates this, for kings are sometimes known by the particular deity with whom they had a special affinity; for example, paramamahēśvara (supreme worshipper of Śiva), paramabhagavata (supreme worshipper of Viṣṇu), and paramāditya-bhakta (supremely devoted to the Sun).
23The Indian evidence also illustrates that this supreme deity of a king’s special affinity could be a divinised form of the Buddha, for we find the title parama-saugata, ‘ supreme worshipper of the Buddha ’. It is this particular form of the Buddha that became the predominent divinity associated with kingship and the polity in Śri Lanka. Soon after the arrival of Buddhism on the island in the 3rd century B. C., a divinised form of the Buddha seems to have replaced or subordinated the existing deities as the resident of the city’s central temple, the palace/temple complex, just as in some Indian counterparts, with the disappearance of Buddhism, Buddhist icons were replaced by images of Hindu gods. The Buddha, in divinised form, was represented in the early cities of Śri Lanka by the Bowl Relic of the Buddha, brought to the island in the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa (247-207 b. c.). Mahāvaṁsa, the ancient chronicle of Sri Lanka, expresses in clear terms how the Relic was located in the conceptual center of the city, the palace itself: “[…] the bowl that the Sambuddha had used the king kept in his beautiful palace and worshipped continually with manifold offerings” (XX, 13 ; Geiger 1960 : 137). The Tooth Relic of the Buddha which arrived in Sri Lanka during the reign of Kirti Sri Meghavarna (362-409 a. d.) joined the Bowl Relic as representations of the divinised form of the Buddha. These two relies jointly held this status until about the 12th century, when the Tooth Relic became the supreme icon of worship in the state cult of Śri Lanka, as expressed in the king’s act of offering kingship to the Relic (Rahula 1956: 75).
24The centrality of Buddhism and divinised Buddhist icons in kingship in Sri Lanka, and their occupancy of the conceptually-central structure of the capital, i.e., the palace/temple complex, suggest the notion of a capital microcosmic of the divine city. Instead of a deity, it is the divinised form of the Buddha that is the true sovereign and mediator for the well-being of the kingdom. In so far as four major gods derived from Hinduism were subsidiarily worshipped in the cult of the state, the magical center of the city extended to encompass the shrines of these deities located in the vicinity of the temple/palace complex. Space at the Temple of the Tooth in the Kandyan kingdom must, in this sense, be considered to extend beyond the physical boundaries of the temple/palace building itself. However, the pre-eminent part of the state cuit was the worship of the Tooth Relic, which placed within a Buddhist framework the cosmo-magical symbolism whose origins were pre-Buddhist.8
25The Kandyan Kingdom as a whole was, geographically, a center-oriented polity, expressive of the mandata model or the “Galactic Polity” (Tambiah 1976: 102-131) to which many South and Southeast Asian polities seem to conform. Figure 4 (a) and (b) illustrate the real and schematized versions of the Kandyan Kingdom respectively.
26The kingdom consisted of two circles, first an outer circle of 12 provinces known as disā, and second, an inner circle of 9 smaller provinces known as rata. At the core, as a third circle was the capital, the city of Senkadagala, the present-day Kandy, and within it was located the sacred complex in Kandy consisting of the Temple of the Tooth and the shrines of the four major deities. The king’s palace being a part of the Temple of the Tooth was included in this complex. It is in relation to this complex as a whole that we can properly understand the space at the Temple of the Tooth. Again, though not physically, the Temple was conceptually the center of the complex. This fact was clearly brought out by the periodic liberation of the conceptual structure from the constraints of stone and masonry which took place during the pageants. For pageants are but moving temples with no walls and ramparts to hinder the free expression of their inner relations. In the pageants primacy is clearly focused on the Temple of the Tooth.
27Though not elaborated in one to one terms to conform to the microcosmic model of the divine macrocosm, there can be no doubt that the general pattern of cosmo-magical symbolism forms the essential base of the city of Kandy. Physical evidence of this has asserted itself in some structures. For example, the man-made lake in Kandy is called Kiri Muhuda, a Sinhalese rendering of the divine Kṣīra Sāgara, Ocean of Milk. Beautification could possibly explain the deliberateness, but not the name, of the lake. Some streets of Kandy have names such as Vai-kunṭha Vīdiya (Street of Viṣṇu) and Dēva Vīdiya (Street of the Gods). The parapet that adorns the Temple of the Tooth and surrounds most of the lake, and so pictorially indispensable to the modern-day tourist post cards, is known as the ahas pavura, ‘ celestial rampart ’, with obvious suggestions of fortifications that have no foundations on earthly ground.
28The temple/palace building in Kandy is the counterpart of the cardinal square in the ideal form of the mundane city which replicates the divine macrocosm. As Inden’s study of authoritative Sanskrit texts describes that ideal form, “The center square or “heart” of the site (vāstu-hṛdaya) was to be given over to the temple or “house” of the king’s deity” (1978: 33). This is exactly what we find at the Temple of the Tooth: the center of the complex is the Sanctum where the Daladâ, the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha in its divinised form, resides. The king’s residence, “the subordinate center of the kingdom as microcosm” (Inden, loc. cit.), was to the north of the temple, a further departure in detail, for in terms of the directional symbolism we are concerned with here, it should be to the west, but since it is not located east of the temple, it does not violate the essence of the symbolism.
29It is often remarked that since about the 12th century, kingship in Śri Lanka had been inextricably bound with the ‘ possession ’ or ‘ custody ’ of the Tooth Relic. These terms are misleading since they suggest ownership, as if the Relic were an item of property. The real meaning is quite different. The Tooth Relic is, as far as the state ritual was concerned, an animate Symbol, a microcosm of the Buddha in his divinised form, the cultic worship of which was necessary for maintaining the relation the human world has with the divine cosmos, which facilitated prosperity and well-being for the kingdom. In this form the Tooth Relic is the sovereign overlord of the kingdom, the human king being the subordinate medium of relation between the kingdom and the cosmos. As mediator between the kingdom and the divine cosmos with the help of the divinised form of the Buddha as expressed in the Tooth Relic, the king was both human and divine. As Inden States referring to the Hindu king (op. cit., p. 29), the Buddhist king was neither a transcendental being like the kings of early Egypt, nor was he simply a human agent of the divine, like the kings of medieval Europe. He was divinity, priest and worshipper on the one hand and active ruler and warrior on the other. The terms ‘ possession ’ or ‘ custody ’ of the Tooth Relic by the king obscure his subordinate partnership in dominion over the kingdom and relating it to the divine cosmos. Far from being the ‘ owner ’ or ‘ custodian ’ of the Tooth Relic, the king was the Relic’s inferior.
30The king performs the dual function of sacrificing to the Tooth Relic, and protecting the kingdom from external and internal disorder by the magical powers of his body that he receives by the ritual of consecration. The king’s physical prowess is often expressed in Hindu-Buddhist ideology as the power of his two hands (Gonda 1969: 5). Thus kings are called dīrgabāhu, “long armed” or mahā-bāhu “great-armed” and the like. In Sri Lanka some of the commonest names for kings are Parakramabāhu, “valour-armed”, Jayabāhu, “success-armed”, Vijayabāhu, “victory-armed”, and Gajabāhu, “elephant-armed” and so forth; and the parricidal and incestuous father of Vijaya, the first king of Sri Lanka, was Siṁhabāhu, “lion-armed”.
31The physical and moral sustenance of the kingdom required that the king play his role as chief sacrifier so that the kingdom be meaningfully related to the cosmos; and as guardian of temporal authority, engage himself in maintaining the integration of the polity. In the Kandyan Kingdom this meant the performance of certain daily and cyclical rituals.9 The daily rituals based, as mentioned before, on the Hindu mode of worship known as pūjā, consisted of attending to the bodily needs of the Tooth Relic, in its form as divinised Buddha, by washing, dressing, fanning and offering food, perfume, color, light and sound. The cyclical rituals periodically reiterated the vital connection the kingdom has with the divine cosmos. These rituals also represented an overflowing of temple space into the city. The duration of the Perahära pageant, held in the lunar month of Äsaḷa (June-July) represented a period of time in which the city was charged with an intensity of ritual value symbolically expressed in the erection of poles, known as kap, which exemplified the mediating axis mundi. As the kap poles were erected in the center of the city, the pageant’s circumambulation of them also meant symbolic possession of the city and, by extension, the kingdom, by the dominant icons of the pageant.
32From the point of view of the kingdom as a whole, the duration of the Äsaḷa pageant also saw an inward flow: the chiefs of the provinces expressed their religious and political loyalty to the center by participating, as traditionally required, in the annual pageant. The kingdom’s conceptual periphery thus moved centripetally to meet and be encompassed by the centrifugally moving space of the temple/palace complex, rendering inseparable religious belief, political loyalty and geographical concept.
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 “Cosmo-magical symbolism ’ is explained in note 6.
2 The authoritative work on the Temple of the Tooth is Hocart’s minor classic (1931), minor only because of its slim size of about 40 text pages. Hocart discusses in detail the Temple space and gives copious drawings, and relates the Temple to the Western Monasteries of Anuradhapura. With emphasis in a point of view different from Hocart’s, and building on his masterly work, I have myself attempted to describe the Temple and its rituals in my 1978 work. The present account is derived from that and uses some of its illustrations.
By relating the Temple to the Western Monasteries and constructing an evolutionary series, the implication of which is that the Temple of the Tooth is, in essentials of structure, much like any other Buddhist temple, Hocart’s theory does not make the distinction between the vihāra and dēvāla that mine does. With reference to one of the temples in his evolutionary series, the Budumuttāva temple at Nikavaraṭiya, Hocart makes the interesting suggestion that influences from the Low Country of Sri Lanka, a region where traditional forms have been subject to greater change than in the geographically central part of the island, have “destroyed the primitive simplicity of plan and introduced a disorder characteristic of modem Low Country temples” (1931: 38). This comment suggests the possibility that the vihāra model 1 contrast with the devāla model may be expressing an openness which belongs to the recent post-colonial, even revivalist, era of the history of Śri Lanka. If this is indeed true, students of Sinhalese Buddhism must view the traditional Sinhalese conception of the Buddha as more ‘ divine ’ than so far understood, despite Obeyesekere’s notion of the Buddha as ‘ Super deity ’ (1963, 1966) which many subsequent writers share. Against the possibility that Hocart’s theory suggests, I must mention the ‘ openess ’ of many temples in the Kandyan region, which cannot be considered to have been influenced by the Low Country. The ’ closed ’ type temples which are also found in the Kandyan areas, are usually regional replicas of the Temple of the Tooth in the sense that they have ritual performances officially instituted either by the king or provincial chiefs (replicas of the king).
3 These are also characteristic rooms in the king’s palace because in the Kandyan state rituals, Buddha, gods and king were treated similarly, suggesting the sacral nature of kingship.
4 These performances are described in detail in Seneviratne 1978: 38-64.
5 The line of worshippers starts at Entrance Stairway and past Entrance Corridor, Pingo Placing Verandah and Sandalwood Room, reaches the threshold of the Sanctum and moves along Exit Corridor to Exit Stairway (see fig. 3).
6 This term is used by Wheatley 1967 : 9. It refers to the idea that the city is a “center”, an axis mundi that united heaven and earth (Eliade 1959: 12). The ancient city of the orient was built as an imitation of the divine cosmos, “as a repetition of the paradigmatic work of the gods” (Eliade 1961: 31). Colossal expenditures were incurred in some South and Southeast Asian societies “to render their city a worthy likeness of Indra’s capital on Mount Meru” (Wheatley, op. cit., 10).
7 Some examples are Hocart 1927, 1936, Heine-Gelderne 1942, Dumont 1962, Wheatley 1967, 1971, TAMBIAH 1976, Heesterman 1957, Gonda 1966, Inden 1976. I am indebted to these and other works in my attempt to suggest that Kandy must be understood as a sacred city expressing cosmo-magical symbolism.
8 Not surprisingly in Śri Lanka, other aspects of the State ritual were also given a Buddhist touch. For example, in the ritual of royal consecration which was based on the Sanskritic pattern, the clay for pots containing regalia were selected from Buddhist sites. In an analogous instance, the clay for the mṛt snāna ceremony of the Hindu abhiṣeka (consecration), with which the new king was ritually daubed, was selected from sites of an anthropomorphised earth. This recalls the generation of the universe by Puruṣa, associating the king’s body with the earth, just as Puruṣa’s body is associated with the universe, thereby repeating the macrocosm-microcosm theme.
9 Daily rituals are described in detail in Hocart 1931, and both types, daily and cyclical, are described in Seneviratne 1978.
Auteur
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