Temple of The Tooth Relic
You have to go barefoot and bareheaded into temples. Shoulders must be covered, and ladies must wear skirts or trousers long enough to go below the knee. You get your shoes minded for a few rupees by a professional shoe minder. At the Temple of the Tooth Relic we saw the class system in operation.
At the outer gates there is the shoe depository for locals. An embarrassingly long way in is the shoe depository for foreigners. We we embarrassed enough to remove our shoes at the locals’ place and carry them all the way to the foreigners’ place. Go us!
To me this temple, while important, was a bit plastic. But to the locals it is very different. It’s great to see a place of worship being used as a part of the community. In one part, not the most sanctified part, people were sitting in quiet contemplation, or chatting, or little kids were playing, all in a place of great spiritual significance. I loved that. And I also loved the offerings of flowers everywhere. There’s something deeply pleasing about the appearance of Buddhism. I just can’t put my finger on it. [apologies for the lack of focus in the picture. While we were allowed to take pictures we also did not want to intrude, and worked too fast for the camera]
We did see the full story of the Tooth relic, including an attempt to smash it causing it to glow brightly and rise into the sky as a star. I guess resurrection is everywhere. Or is that a chariot of fire? There are about 30 tableaux like this one showing what happened to it.
Upstairs, in the museum, is also an exchange of letters with the then British Governor around 1900 showing that even we Brits saw the importance of protecting the relic and returning it to the Temple. Some fool officer had seized it at some point and it was away form the Temple for ages.
There isn’t a tableau about the stupid British officer.
There’s a huge amount to see. And, if you are lucky, for 100 rupees donation to the temple and 100 rupees donated to the person, windows and doors that are closed will be opened for you to see otherwise unavailable views, like the underside of the golden roof. Ok, it IS through a security grille, but the did have a massive terrorist truck bomb here a few years ago, so a bit of protection is not to be begrudged.
I don’t mind giving rupees to someone who’s done something worthwhile. Who would? But we met someone with a set of lies we hadn’t heard before, next.
We’d left the temple, had a bite of lunch, and were heading for the market. Al wanted fruit. Well, Al wanted a durian fruit, to be precise. And some passion fruits, mangoes, and, if in season (they weren’t) rambutans.
And we met him, or he met us, while we were hesitating about whether we headed for the bus station to plan our next journey leg, or to go straight to the market.