ABSTRACT
A temple is fundamentally at variance with the Buddhist religion, since they were built to house statues of the Buddha which he himself had expressly forbidden to be made. In the first section of the chapter on the “Lost Cities” it was pointed out that the stupa, which later developed into the dagoba, enshrining relics of the Buddha, was the original object of worship amongst Buddhists. In the second century a.d., however, Buddha images were introduced which needed temples to en-shrine them and, in the course of time as Buddhism became more idolatrous, these temples took the place of dagobas as popular places of worship. In India nemesis overtook this prostitution of the pure Buddhist faith, since by a.d. 700 the country which had given birth to the Buddha and first accepted his tenets had relapsed into the polytheistic Hinduism from which Buddhism had originally sprung. Hinduism had fatally corrupted and thereby destroyed Buddhism, but in return it had absorbed in the process sufficient knowledge of the ethical teaching of that religion as to recognize the Buddha as one of the ten incarnations of Vishnu. Buddhism in Ceylon, however, escaped similar extinction, and there are many temples in the island to-day which bear witness to its virility, impaired as it is by polytheistic accretions. Of these the most famous is the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, but before describing it in detail the history of the Sacred Tooth which it enshrines will be briefly related.
