Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 2

Pardon the interruption. I didn't mean to intrude upon your time with a tale of pissing off yet another third-rate country's armed forces, but so it goes. We return now to our scheduled blog programming, specifically our discussion of piles of ancient Sri Lankan bricks, and the shapes thereof. I can't promise you any particularly compelling geometry, like say, a brick dodecahedron, but I do have some arcane and potentially amusing old Sri Lankan chronicles to relate, which involve mangoes, urinals, and other fascinating things.

So, before Anuradhapura became my week-long cultural prison, Anuradhapura was a place I was deeply interested in. As I recounted in Pt. 1, Anuradhapura was the center of Sinhalese civilization, and one of the world's great nexuses of Buddhist learning, for well over a thousand years. It was a truly enormous city for its time, considering that it was home to over 20,000 monks alone. Now of course this means that it is a truly massive expanse of land to go wandering around in, with some of its ruined monasteries covering hundreds of acres, and damn near nothing being more interesting to see than the infinite supply of two-foot-high brick walls. The exception to this rule, and the only thing that makes Anuradhapura really worth visiting, are the dagobas. The dagobas are giant Buddhist stupas, many of them over 2000 years old and painstakingly restored to their former shining glory by archaeologists backed by the Buddhist clergy and Sinhalese nationalist governments after a millennium buried in the jungle. You have to see these things to believe them. Even in their damaged states, mostly missing their pinnacles, they still stand hundreds of feet high, and (as will be recounted to the visitor at every possible juncture) were the largest structures in the ancient world after the pyramids at Giza. There actually is something compelling about schlepping through several miles of ruined bricks to get to the heart of the old sacred precinct, to find hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims visiting a massive, whitewashed dome that has been sitting there since before the rise of Rome.

There are also several good archaeological museums in the city displaying the various treasures that have been dug up, but I found I was far more interested by the demonstrations of the infrastructure of the city, by which I mean sewage management. It seems the ancient Sinhalese were much concerned with urban cleanliness, and therefore devised a sophisticated urinal consisting of a series of large pots filled with filtering stones buried in stacks underground to a depth of around eight feet. This explains a lot about the Sri Lankan national character, and illustrates the profound gap in cleanliness between this island and India. Whereas Sri Lanka apparently had proper underground sewers by the 3rd century B.C., to this day -the year 2010- seven out of ten people in India don't have any sort of toilet whatsoever and just do it in the fields or in a city drain. Now, bear in mind, "seven out of ten people in India" is a total roughly equivalent to the combined population of the Western Hemisphere. Not that the Sinhalese paid so much attention to their plumbing for purely pragmatic reasons. It is also recorded (and I love this) that many of the country's more purist monasteries, which renounced wealth and looked down contemptuously upon the monastic fat cats in the main, royally-sponsored establishments, nevertheless received fine and expensive donations that they had no philosophically justifiable use for. They solved their problem by taking their hoards of jewels and gold leaf and having these encrusted upon their urinal stones, so that they might literally piss upon gold and worldly wealth during their rigors, no doubt with a deep and smug satisfaction spelled across their faces.

Aside from the monasteries, which are now just collections of bricks, the remains of the rest of Anuradhapura are even less impressive and more pathetically bricky. The "royal palace", for instance, could just as well be the foundation of a smithy, save for the strange little carvings of incredibly obese dwarfs flanking its only surviving step. The kings of Anuradhapura (there being almost 200 of them) included some rather interesting characters. My favorite royal story by far concerns one King Yasalalakatissa, who ruled in the 1st century. Bear in mind that historians think this story is actually likely to be true. Mr. Yasalalakatissa was apparently something of an ass and liked to play pranks on the nobility. One supposes that with command of an entire kingdom at his fingertips, he had a rather dangerous imagination. Anyways, one day it was brought to his attention that a man called Subha, who was his gatekeeper, bore a remarkable resemblance to the royal personage. King Y..whatever, never letting a chance for mischief slip by, had his gatekeeper switch places with him and apparently greatly enjoyed the spectacle of his various nobles deferring to a commoner by mistake. Ha! Ha.... I guess. There really is no accounting for the humor of the aristocracy. This was apparently so riotously funny to the king that he had did the whole thing again. Except this time Subha the gatekeeper had a fantastic idea and had his "gatekeeper" executed for treason. The ministers who had unwittingly been made fools of  had a good laugh listening to some ridiculous royal guard protesting that he should not be killed because he was, in fact, the king. Now here's my favorite part: after the passage of some time, the absurd events came to light and Subha was revealed for who he was, except by this time he was firmly installed in the seat of power and nobody wanted to fuck with him, so they just let Subha be king.

I also visited the nearby town of Mihintale, which is revered by Buddhists as the place where Emperor Ashoka's son Mahindu brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka by converting the king. Basically, it's more of the same: numerous heaps of bricks and one gleaming white dagoba, except on a hill. According to legend, the king of Lanka successfully answered Mahindu's riddle concerning mango trees to prove he was smart enough to be a Buddhist. I really feel it is too inane to repeat here, but if you want to look up the "Mango Tree Riddle" you will have no problem finding it and presumably solving it. I did however relish the opportunity to piss off a Buddhist monk by playing a little Buddha logic of my own. You see, Sri Lankan Buddhists maintain the ridiculous belief that not only did the Buddha himself visited Sri Lanka, which is unlikely, but that he visited it three times, which is downright preposterous. I noted, however, that it took the efforts of Prince Mahindu some centuries later to bring Buddhism to the isle. "So," I offered the monk "if Lord Buddha actually did come here three times, how come he didn't bother to convert anyone to Buddhism?"

The monk gave me a long, cold stare, then raised a finger in a perfect gesture of the highest pedantry and replied "Lord Buddha did teach the dharma in Lanka. He came to climb the mountains and preach to the gods." With this he was very satisfied. "Strange...." I added, "strange that Lord Buddha, who was born in the Nepal, should need to come to Lanka to find mountains... particularly when the Indian gods all are living on top of the Himalaya, which are bigger and closer." This drew a uniquely icy form of clerical spite. "Our mountains are special" he said. And that was that. Special, indeed. We shall see about that. I'll be up in Sri Lanka's mountains in a few days and then the GhostVerdict on Lankan mountains shall be delivered.

Somehow I seem to have made Sri Lanka's cultural attractions sound more boring than they actually are. So, take my criticisms with a grain of salt and...nah, whatever. If they wanted me to treat this dump gently they shouldn't have had the whole island conspire to throw strange and miserable obstacles at me from day one. Then I might have started with "Oh! The dagobas are so fabulous!" rather than interposing qualified statements like "The dagobas, which are indeed impressive, are the only things for a hundred miles that don't suck." Them and Lion beer, the only things in Sri Lanka that don't suck. Well, OK, Lion beer sucks, but it's no worse than Indian Kingfisher. Now if you will excuse me I have to apply a figurative fire extinguisher to a strange little pseudo-romance I seem to have become trapped in. I don't predict any more such episodes after this one because now I have to walk seven miles back to my hotel past dozens of Sri Lankan Army bunkers and hundreds of thousands of dead fish, and I fully expect to arrive in my bedroom suffering from permanent psychosomatic impotence. Such are the perils of the adventurer's life. You have been warned.