Gal Vihara

Interesting facts

To make room for the figures, the granite was cut back almost 4.5 metres, the only place in Sri Lanka where living rock was excavated this deeply for sculpture.

According to the archaeologist Senarath Paranavithana, the four statues appear to have been covered in gold when they were new.

The reclining Buddha, about 14 metres long, is among the largest sculptures in all of Southeast Asia.

The throne of the large seated Buddha holds four tiny copies of the main figure in small niches, a rare feature thought to reflect Mahayana influence.

In the small cave shrine, the Buddha's halo sits between two four-armed gods that the archaeologist H. C. P. Bell identified as Brahma and Vishnu.

Each figure once had its own image house; only wall bases remain, and sockets cut behind the reclining Buddha show its shrine had a wooden roof.

The sculptors sized every figure to the height of the rock at that point, so as to use as much of the stone face as possible.

The robes are carved with paired parallel lines rather than the single line of earlier Anuradhapura images, a detail traced to the Amaravati school of India.

The chronicle Culavamsa lists Uttararama among about a hundred temples Parakramabahu I built across the island, yet it never mentions the standing figure.

Faint traces of frescoes still survive in the back corners of the little cave shrine, whose walls were once fully painted.

Why it is worth it

Gal Vihara is a single wall of granite gneiss at Polonnaruwa, the medieval capital of Sri Lanka, into which four images of the Buddha were cut in the twelfth century on the orders of King Parakramabahu I. The monastery it belonged to was called Uttararama, the "northern monastery". Rather than building statues and setting them in place, the carvers worked the living rock, cutting back several metres into the outcrop so that the figures stand out from a smoothed backdrop. The veins and bands of the stone run straight through faces and robes, and at certain hours they read almost like brushstrokes.

The four figures are laid out along the rock from left to right. First comes a large seated Buddha in meditation on a lotus throne, around four and a half metres high. Next to it an artificial cave, the Vidyadhara Guha, holds a much smaller seated figure framed by a carved parasol and halo. Then a standing figure close to seven metres tall, arms crossed over the chest in a gesture unusual in Buddhist art; scholars still disagree whether it shows the Buddha himself, perhaps grieving or in the weeks after his enlightenment, or his disciple Ananda mourning his teacher. Last lies the reclining Buddha, about fourteen metres long, entering parinirvana.

The reclining figure is the one people come back to. The head rests on a bolster that the sculptors made look genuinely soft, with a slight hollow pressed in by the weight of the skull, and lotus motifs appear on the end of the pillow and on the soles of the feet. One foot is drawn back very slightly from the other: a small detail read as the sign that this is death and final release, not sleep. The folds of the robe are shallow ripples across the whole body, which gives the figure a calm that photographs rarely catch.

The rock was also a place of law. Parakramabahu convened a council of monks here and had a code of monastic conduct, the katikavata, inscribed on the same stone face, so the sculptures and the rules for the community that tended them sit side by side. Today Gal Vihara is the best-known monument of the ancient city of Polonnaruwa and among the finest works of Sinhalese stone carving. It is still a place of worship, and visitors are expected to treat it as one.

Getting there

Gal Vihara lies in the archaeological park of ancient Polonnaruwa, in Sri Lanka's North Central Province, north of the modern town. Dambulla, with its cave temples, is about 40 km to the west. The nearest airport by distance is China Bay Airport near Trincomalee (TRR), about 66 km away, which handles only limited domestic flights; most international visitors arrive through Bandaranaike International Airport near Colombo (CMB) and continue by road.

From the encyclopaedia

The Gal Vihara, and known originally as the Uttararama, is a rock temple of the Buddha situated in the ancient city Polonnaruwa, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Polonnaruwa, now present-day Polonnaruwa, in North Central Province, Sri Lanka. It was fashioned in the 12th century by King Parakramabahu I. The central feature of the temple is four rock relief statues of the Buddha, which have been carved into the face of a large granite gneiss rock. The images consist of a large seated figure, another smaller seated figure inside an artificial cavern, a standing figure, and a reclining figure. These are considered to be some of the best examples of ancient Sinhalese sculpting and carving arts, and have made the Gal Vihara the most visited monument at Polonnaruwa.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Gal Vihara

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia