Kandy: Face to Face with the Tooth Of The Buddha.

Now that the civil war between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka has come to an end, I was encouraged to revisit my travel diaries from my visit to Sri Lanka in October 2003.


Is it bad karma of me to see something funny in the fact that Buddha's tooth fell out in Kandy?

Kandy looked initially promising. One minute you are driving through the countryside and the next you find yourself by a green lake, next to a well cared for temple and lawn. The town looked clean and the area around the temple looked well cared for. There was almost something Alpine in the promise of the location.

The typical Sri Lanka street scene was soon discovered however as I turned a corner from the Temple area into litter strewn streets, complete with un-cared for shops, wild dogs and pollution belching buses.

Kandy is home to the main temple of Buddhism in the country. The temple claims to be home to Buddhas one remaining tooth. I won’t detail the history of theft and fire that dogs this particular icon. Whether it is the real thing or not was something of an irrelevance to me anyway as the urn that the tooth is kept in wasn’t even on display and my spiritual quest for Nirvana never went any further than Nevermind.

What was on regular display in the temple though was a disturbing amount of greed: tourists being led onto the altar to place flowers they were forced to buy, and then being berated for not leaving a large enough donation; donations being pocketed by the ‘helpful’ guides who had enticed people onto the altar in the first place.

Also there were a lot of people loitering around pointing out details and then aggressively demanding cash for saying something like “that is a picture of buddha”.

The overall feeling of tacky exploitation was not helped when I realised that the ‘gold buddhas’, as pointed out by some of those unscrupulous ‘guides’, were actually made of plastic. It all added to the feeling of the temple being something it wasn’t. It all left a nasty taste in the mouth and I feel sorry for any Westerners genuinely interested in Buddhism who go there expecting any sort of spiritual experience.

The botanical gardens in Kandy were nice, but someone tried to charge me after telling me to sniff a chocolate scented orchid (pictured).