I met my first Sri Lankan Buddha in Colombo opposite the BMICH exhibition building .. when I made my accidental journey to the island in 1982 - while studying at the Indian Commonwealth Centre we were allocated a third country visit - mine was to Sri Lanka. This is a modern copy of the ancient 43 feet Avukana statue in the north of the island.
The most serene image on the island calmly sits in the foyer of the National
Museum in Colombo and began life in a Polonnaruwa temple 800 years ago.
Inside the Museum one of the most graceful representations of a human being anywhere in the world is this gilt bronze image of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara..energetic but at peace.
My friend Aira heard village gossip that today was the day to help paint the new buddha at the nearby temple. Neither of us wanted to miss the opportunity to add a brush load of orange to his robe, as painting a buddha statue in this life ensures one of a beautiful complexion in the next.
Rather glad we did our duty at the village temple, because as we passed this giant new statue in Mahiyanganaya we saw that some of the volunteer painters in white saris at the top of the flimsy scaffold were ladies in their seventies.
This recent and slightly ungainly buddha statue may well mark a mountain top Gautama narrowly missed on his first flight to the island from the deer park in North India. The stupa marking the site of his first public community work after his enlightenment is deep in the valley below.
The earliness of this visit - to settle a dispute between two warring indigenous tribes - has given rise to a recent academic dispute publicised in a nation-wide newspaper.... Was Gautama really a local boy? Was he born in Sri Lanka among the psychicallly gifted Dravadian people and only transmuted by Indian legend into a North Indian prince. The debate that raged back and forth in a week of letters to the editor was fun but not very convincing.
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