Dambulla cave temple
— — the dark where the Buddhas keep their gold.
Not only on a wall.
“Five caves cut high into a single granite rock, two hours north of Kandy. Inside, more than a hundred and fifty Buddha figures and two thousand square metres of painted ceiling — ochre and red against the cool dark of the stone. Pilgrims climb the steps barefoot. The caves have been a place of refuge and quiet practice for two thousand years.
Dambulla cave temple, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Dambulla cave temple complex sits on a granite massif rising about 160 metres above the plain of Sri Lanka's Central Province, roughly 72 kilometres north of Kandy. Five caves hold 153 Buddha statues, three statues of Sri Lankan kings, and four of Hindu deities. The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1991 and has been a working monastery for more than two millennia, tracing its founding to King Valagamba in the first century BCE.
The whole complex is carved into and beneath a single dome of Precambrian gneiss. The cave ceilings — about 2,100 square metres in all — are painted in mineral ochres, lampblack and vermilion, with patterns that follow every dip and rise of the natural rock. The largest cave, Maharaja Lena, holds a 14-metre reclining Buddha cut directly from the living stone. The murals were renovated under King Kirti Sri Rajasinha in the 18th century, in the late Kandyan style still visible today.
The temple sits above the town of Dambulla in Matale District, signposted off the A9 highway between Kandy and Anuradhapura. Visitors leave shoes and hats at the base, climb roughly 350 stone steps past macaques and frangipani trees, and enter the caves through low whitewashed doorways. The site is open daily from early morning to evening. Modest dress is required — shoulders and knees covered — and photography of the murals is permitted without flash.