THE TEMPLE OF THE TOOTH & THE LAST PALACE

These two places, though part of the same complex, are easily mixed up, a confusion that makes clear the unremitting opacity of the line between religion and state has always existed in the country.

To most Sri Lankans, the Temple is holier even than St Peter’s is to Catholics and at least as sacred as the Kaaba’s Black Stone is to Muslims. Even so, it is merely the last and latest temple to give a home to the relic that makes it so important. The relic - said to be Lord Buddha’s left upper canine tooth - arrived on the island around 371 CE, hidden in the hair ornamentation of an Indian princess.

Almost immediately, it became the island's most precious possession, legitimising the reign of kings and validating a priestly theocracy. Often on the move to escape war, capture, thieves, frenzied Catholics, rival warlords, or Tamil invaders, it lived in almost a dozen other temples in Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, and Dambadeniya, and in Yapahuwa, Gampola, Avissawella, and Kotte, before coming to rest in Kandy.

As a relic, it has plenty of competition. Scores of alternative artefacts assert a connection to Lord Buddha – including bowls, hairs, and bones. But the tooth is considered the most important because it touched the words he uttered in prayer.

Across the world, thirty-two other places claim ownership of Buddha’s teeth. If all are credible, it would account for the teacher’s entire set of eight incisors, four canines, eight premolars, and twelve molars. But somehow, by dint of custom, history, worship, faith and record, the tooth now in Kandy is by far the most celebrated one.

And as for the tale that the original tooth was pounded to dust by the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa in a fit of excessive evangelical catholic excitement: well, no one really believes that.

The relic’s continuing importance can be measured by the fact that a victorious President or Prime Minister’s first call on winning an election here is to the Temple of the Tooth. There, like hundreds of thousands of devotees, the winning leader receives a monkish blessing.

For much of its existence, the temple has also been a target, destroyed by both the Portuguese and the Dutch; by weather, war, and insurrection; and the temple you visit today is in its fourth or fifth edition (depending on your definition of restoration).

Accessed through an entrance gate over a moat is the main Temple itself, a two-story shrine over which sits a golden canopy. In front of the main shrine is a Drummers' Chamber. Ivory handles open the doors into the main shrine, which gives way to the Handun Kunama - the small chamber in which the actual relic is kept. But, like Russian Dolls, that is only the beginning, for within the chamber are seven gold caskets inlaid with gems – and it is inside the last of these that lies the Tooth.

The building, designed in classic, gracious Kandyan style, has double-peaked tiled roofs underpinned by a panoply of pure gold and is surrounded by a golden fence. Elaborate frescoes adorn its walls. The chamber is richly decorated with elephants, guardian stones, and moonstones restored after LTTE bomb blasts.

Seven caskets studded with gems and shaped like stupas fit one into another, the last holding the relic itself. Rituals are performed three times daily: at dawn, noon, and dusk. Once a week, the tooth is symbolically bathed in water scented with herbs and flowers. And once a year, it is paraded around the city streets in a vast Perehera procession of elephants, priests, fire eaters, dancers, and acrobats.

The palace that surrounds the temple is a poignant shadow of its old self, the British having destroyed half of its buildings. Even so, the ones that remain are outstanding examples of the zen-like elegance of patrician hill country architecture, with wooden pillars, decorative carvings, distinctively pitched roofs, and walls and windows that open out interior spaces with so artful a restraint as to give the resulting light a unique and calming luminosity.

This is most evident in the Royal Audience Hall, a wooden structure built by King Sri Vikrama Rajasinha in 1783. Here it was, in 1815, that the Kandyan Convention was signed, brutally ending the island’s last kingdom.

Unhappily, many of the palace’s buildings have become squats for lucky civil servants, their unbending bureaucratic domicile, twitching with room partitions, plastic furniture, and rusty fans, distorting most of the original architectural features that once made these buildings so exquisite.

The stunningly graceful Ulpange, built in 1806 by King Sri Wickrama Rajasinha as a bathing pavilion for queens, is a police post. The Wadahindina Mandappe Audience Palace is home to the stuffed remains of Rajah, the chief elephant in the Kandy Perahera, who died in 1988, prompting a full day of national mourning. The Royal Armoury, the Ran Ayuda Maduwa, has been annexed as a place of judgement by the District Courts of Kandy. The Pattirippuwa, an immeasurably stylish octagonal pavilion, has been commandeered by a library. Still, in the national consciousness, it plays its part in key events much as the balcony of Buckingham Palace might in the UK.

The King’s Palace, the Raja Wasala, is a Museum. The Queens' Chambers, the Meda Wasala, with its fetching courtyard and veranda, has been commandeered by the Department of Archaeology, and wild horses are not likely to drive them out. But at least the Maha Maluwa, the boundless terrace adjacent to Kandy Lake, has not been encroaching upon, and at one end bears a stone memorial beneath which is buried the skull of Keppetipola Disawe, who led the failed rebellion against the British in 1818.