Sixteen places,
one island.

Mahiyaṅgana Rāja Mahā Vihāra

The first visit — nine months after the enlightenment

On the bank of the Mahaweli in Uva, this is where the Buddha is held to have first set foot on the island, to a gathering of yakkhas, and where the deity Sumana — Saman, of Sumanakūṭa — received a handful of hair relics. The stūpa that grew over them has been enlarged many times and is now bright white and very large. It is a busy, unpretentious, entirely local place of worship, and almost no foreign visitors ever come.

Nāgadīpa Purāna Vihāra, Nainativu

The second visit — five years after the enlightenment

An island off the Jaffna peninsula, reached by a short ferry from Kurikadduwan, where the Buddha is said to have come to prevent a war between two nāga kings, uncle and nephew, over a gem-encrusted throne. The present vihāra is modern and silver-blue, rebuilt after the civil war. The crossing, the wind, and the Hindu Nagapooshani Amman temple a few hundred metres away make this the most unusual of the sixteen.

Kelaniya Rāja Mahā Vihāra

The third visit — eight years after the enlightenment

Eleven kilometres from Colombo on the Kelani river, at the invitation of the nāga king Maṇiakkhika. The temple is famous for two things beyond its antiquity: the extraordinary twentieth-century mural cycle by Solias Mendis, which deliberately drew on Ajanta and on Sinhalese sources to make a self-consciously national Buddhist art, and the Duruthu Perahera in January. Because it is close to the airport, it is usually the first or last of the sixteen you will see.

Śrī Pāda — Adam's Peak

Samanaḷa Kanda · 2,243 m

A hollow in the rock at the summit, about a metre and a half long, venerated by Buddhists as the Buddha's footprint, by Hindus as Śiva's, and by Muslims and some Christians as Adam's. Pilgrims climb roughly 5,500 steps through the night in the season between Unduvap Poya (December) and Vesak Poya (May), when the stairway is lit and lined with tea stalls. At dawn, when the air is clear, the peak throws a perfect triangular shadow onto the cloud to the west.

Divāguhāwa — Batatotalena

The cave of the day-stay

A cave temple near Kuruwita, on the old Ratnapura approach to the peak, where the Buddha is held to have spent a day in meditation on the journey to Śrī Pāda — hence the name, "day cave". It is a working village temple in a cave mouth with a reclining Buddha and a few monks, and it is the least visited of the sixteen after Dīghavāpi. Archaeologically the same cave has produced prehistoric human remains.

Dīghavāpi

The long tank

In Ampara district in the east, where the Buddha is held to have meditated on his third visit, and where a stūpa was raised in the second century BCE — the chronicles associate the Dīghavāpi district with Prince Saddhātissa. It is the quietest and most rural of the sixteen — a low dāgaba among paddy and scrub, with none of the infrastructure of the famous sites. Pilgrims who complete the Solosmasthāna often say this is the one they remember, precisely because there is nothing there but the place itself.

Muthiyaṅgana Rāja Mahā Vihāra, Badulla

The pearl-sand stūpa

In the middle of Badulla town, up in the hills at 680 metres, where the Buddha is held to have preached on the return from Mahiyaṅgana at the request of the local ruler Indaka. The name refers to the pearl-like sand said to have appeared at the spot. It is an active town temple with a large white stūpa, and the hill-country setting is a complete change from the dry-zone sites.

Tissamahārāma Rāja Mahā Vihāra

Rohana · the southern kingdom

The great dāgaba of the old southern capital of Rohana, founded in the third century BCE by King Mahānāga and said to enshrine a forehead bone relic. Tissamahārāma was one of the earliest and most important monastic centres on the island — the Mahāvihāra of the south — and the tank beside it is full of birds at dusk. It is the natural base for the deep south and for Kataragama.

Anurādhapura — six of the sixteen, and all eight of the Aṭamasthāna

Capital of the island for thirteen centuries

Six of the Solosmasthāna stand inside the sacred precinct of Anurādhapura, and the same precinct holds the Aṭamasthāna — the eight sacred places — as a pilgrimage in its own right. The city was the capital from the fourth century BCE to the eleventh century CE and was the largest monastic settlement in the Buddhist world.

• 09 · Jaya Sri Mahā Bodhi — grown from a cutting of the Bodh Gayā tree, brought by the bhikkhunī Saṅghamittā in the third century BCE and tended continuously since. The oldest human-planted tree on earth with a recorded planting date.
• 10 · Mirisawetiya — raised by Duṭugämuṇu in expiation for eating a chilli curry without first offering a share to the Saṅgha.
• 11 · Ruwanwelisāya — the Mahā Thūpa, Duṭugämuṇu's great dome, its terrace ringed with hundreds of carved elephants.
• 12 · Thūpārāmaya — the first stūpa built in Sri Lanka, enshrining the right collarbone relic, still surrounded by the slender pillars of its vanished vaulted house.
• 13 · Abhayagiri — the great northern monastery, five thousand monks at its height, with the Samādhi Buddha, the twin ponds of Kuttam Pokuna and the finest sandakaḍa pahaṇa moonstone on the island.
• 14 · Jetavanārāmaya — a brick dome that on completion was the third tallest structure anywhere on earth.

The remaining Aṭamasthāna are Lovāmahāpāya, the Brazen Palace, whose sixteen hundred stone columns supported a nine-storey monastic residence, and Lankārāmaya, a small quiet stūpa that most visitors never reach. Nearby: Isurumuniya, cut into rock beside a bathing tank and holding the island's most famous carved panel.

Mihintale — the Sela Cetiya

Missaka Pabbata · c. 247 BCE

The hill where Arahant Mahinda, son of the emperor Asoka, met King Devānampiya Tissa while the king was hunting, tested his capacity for inference with a series of questions about a mango tree, and then taught him the Dhamma. It is the founding site of Sri Lankan Buddhism. The chronicles place the mission 236 years after the Buddha's parinibbāna, which is about 247 BCE. The ascent is 1,840 broad granite steps past the Ambasthala Dāgaba, built where the meeting took place, the Mahinda Guhāva cave, and the Sela Cetiya on the summit rock. The lower terraces hold the Kaludiya Pokuna forest monastery and the ruins of what is often called the world's oldest hospital, with its stone medicinal immersion trough.

Kirivehera, Kataragama

The milk-white stūpa

The last of the numbered sixteen, in the deep south-east, said to have been built by King Mahāsena on the spot where the Buddha preached. Kataragama is one of the most extraordinary religious sites in South Asia: Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and the indigenous Vedda all worship within the same precinct, pilgrims wash in the Menik Ganga before entering, and the Esala festival in July and August brings fire-walking and kavadi. Kirivehera itself, a few hundred metres from the crowded Ruhunu Maha Kataragama devālaya, is calm and white and usually quiet.