Anuradhapura

Anuradhapura was first settled by Anuradha, a follower of Prince Vijaya the founder of the Sinhala race. Later, it was made the Capital by King Pandukabhaya about 380 B.C.According to the Mahavamsa, the epic of Sinhala History, King Pandukabhaya's city was a model of planning. Precincts were set aside for huntsmen, for scavengers and for heretics as well as for foreigners. There were hostels and hospitals, at least one Jain chapel, and cemeteries for high and low castes. A water supply was assured by the construction of tanks, artificial reservoirs, of which the one called after himself exists to this day under the altered name of Baswakkulam.

It was in the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa (250 - 210 B.C.) that the Arahat Mahinda, son of the great Buddhist Emperor Asoka, led a group of missionaries from North India to Sri Lanka. With his followers he settled in a hermitage of caves on the hill of Mihintale - whose name derives from Mahinda's own.

The new religion swept over the land in a wave. The King himself gave for a great monastery in the very heart of the city his own Royal Park - the beautiful Mahamegha Gardens.

The Buddhist principality had had but a century to flourish when it was temporarily overthrown by an invader from the Chola Kingdom of South India. The religion, however, received no set-back.
At this time far away on the southeast coast, was growing up the prince who was to become the paladin of Sinhala nationalism: Dutugamunu (161 - 137 B.C)

For all his martial prowess, King Duttha Gamini must have been a man of singular sensibility. He built MIRISAVETI DAGOBA, and the mighty Brazen Palace, nine stories high he presented to Mahasanga (order of monks). But, the RUWANVELI DAGOBA, his most magnificent gift he did not live to see actually completed.

Two more, at least, of the Anuradhapura Kings must be mentioned - if only because some of the greater monuments are indisputably attributable to them.

The earlier of these was Vattagamani Abhaya (Valagamba) (103 & 89-77 B.C.) in the first year of whose reign Chola invaders again appeared and drove him temporarily into hiding. For fourteen years, while five Tamil Kings occupied his throne, he wandered often sheltering in jungle caves. It is recorded that as in his flight he passed an ancient Jain hermitage, an ascetic, Gin called and taunted him. "The great black lion is fleeing!" Throughout his exile the gibe rankled. Winning the Kingdom back at last, he razed Giri's hermitage to the ground building, there the ABHAYAGIRI Monastery. The name is a wry cant on his own name and the tactless hermit's as well as (meaning mountain of fearlessness) a disclaimer of his cowardice!

Next came the heretic king Mahasena (274 - 301 A.D) who built the Sri Lanka's largest Dagoba JETAWANARAMA (World Heritage Site) much complicated irrigation system and 16 vast reservoirs (tank) like MINNERIYA, even today which irrigate thousands of acres of paddy land.

Anuradhapura was to continue for six hundred years longer the national capital. But as the protecting wilderness round it diminished with prosperity and internecine struggles for the royal succession grew, it became more and more vulnerable to the pressures of South Indian expansion; and the city was finally abandoned and the Capital withdrawn to more secluded fastnesses.

But the monuments of its heyday survive, surrounded by such beauties as become the past: the solemn umbrage of trees, the silence of cold stone, and the serenity of the sheltering sky.