Some years ago, in a village temple in the Kandyan hills, I asked the incumbent whether anything old from his teacher had been kept. He thought about it, found a key, and opened an almirah in a side room. Inside were brass lamps, a silver betel box, a folded length of cloth that had clearly once been fine, and a small reliquary that I would guess, though only guess, to be 19th century.
I asked who had given them. He said his teacher would have known. His teacher had died in the early 1990s. There was no list. There had never been a list, because for most of the temple’s history there had been no need for one.
I have spent nearly six years of my working life reconstructing the biographies of Sri Lankan objects now held in European collections, and the irony of that afternoon has stayed with me.
A Kandyan object in a Dutch or German store will almost always have a card attached to it: thin, frequently wrong, written by somebody who did not understand what they were describing, but there. An object of far greater significance in a temple here may have nothing at all, because we entrusted its history to memory. Memory is an excellent custodian for one generation and an unreliable one for three.
The new golden casket
The discussion now taking place around the Karanduwa of the Sri Dalada Maligawa raises exactly these questions: who determines the value of such an object, what custodianship means as distinct from ownership, and what those who inherit these things may expect.
A new golden casket was formally offered on 8 September. According to a report certified by the National Gem and Jewellery Authority, it weighs 86.04 kg in total: 65.224 kg of gold, 1.480 kg of gemstones, and 20.822 kg of supporting materials used in soldering. It was created with the approval of the necessary parties, funded entirely by a lay donor with his relatives and well-wishers, and offered to reaffirm the devotion accorded to the Sacred Tooth Relic.
The earlier vessel is a gold-plated silver casket begun under King Vimaladharmasuriya II and completed under King Kirti Sri Rajasinha, and the temple authorities have said steps are being taken to preserve it securely within the Dalada Maligawa.
If value is assessed purely by monetary worth, then nothing matters other than money. An object close to three centuries old carries historical and artistic value, and must be treated as a heritage artefact and preserved. Certain matters remain under official review and nothing here depends on their outcome. The questions worth our attention are structural, and would be worth asking even if every party had acted impeccably, which here I shall assume they have.
Three kinds of value
An object of this nature carries at least three distinct kinds of value, and much of the present confusion comes from treating them as one.
The first is devotional value. It is not conferred by specialists and cannot be measured by any instrument. It is constituted by the practice of a community over time and adjudicated within the religious tradition itself. On this, the Mahanayaka Theras and the sangha hold an authority that no archaeologist, museum professional, or journalist possesses or should wish to possess.
The second is material value. Gold has a price and gemstones have a price, and this is the most precisely measurable of the three and by far the least interesting.
The third is heritage value, which is historical, artistic, and evidential: the capacity of an object to tell us what we could not otherwise know about workshop practice in the Kandyan court, about alloys and gilding, about the relationship between a king and the institution he patronised. It is determined by evidence and method, and like devotional value it is held on behalf of people who are not in the room, including those not yet born.
These three are not in competition, and one object can carry all of them at full strength. The difficulty is that each is adjudicated by a different community using different procedures, and trouble begins when one authority is asked to settle a question belonging to another. An archaeologist cannot rule on what is religiously fitting. A valuer cannot rule on what is historically significant. And no custodian, however devout, should be expected to make a sound heritage judgement where no procedure exists for making one.
Custodianship and authenticity
Sri Lankan law is unusually explicit here. The temple authorities have themselves cited the ordinance of 1853 in stating that responsibility for the protection of the Sacred Tooth Relic, the performance of its rituals, and all related custodial rights rests with the Mahanayaka Theras of the two chapters and the Diyawadana Nilame.
The Buddhist temporalities framework that followed is a trusteeship arrangement, not a proprietary one. The Diyawadana Nilame holds an elected office; the Mahanayaka Theras hold office within the sangha. Neither is an owner in the ordinary sense, and nobody has claimed otherwise. In Buddhist terms the logic is older still, since property offered to the sangha passes out of personal ownership altogether.
Which brings me to the point I most want to make. Custodianship rarely slides towards ownership through anybody’s negligence. It slides through the absence of procedure. Where no protocol specifies what must be recorded before a change is made, who should be notified, and what documentation should outlive the people involved, a decision taken in good faith becomes, viewed from outside, indistinguishable from one taken without accountability.
The custodian is then obliged to defend his integrity when he should only have had to produce a file. That is a governance gap, not a moral failing, and the remedy is a procedure, not an accusation.
To those who feel instinctively that any change to such an object is a desecration, the tradition itself offers a corrective. The history of the Karanduwa is one of accretion. John Davy, writing in 1817, described the relic as enclosed in five caskets of diminishing size; today there are understood to be seven.
Each represents an offering at a particular moment by a particular donor. Kirti Sri Rajasinha, central to this story, made a golden casket himself. As recently as 2001 the Thai Government and Buddhist community offered a Karanduwa to the Maligawa, marking 250 years since the higher ordination was reconstituted here by monks from Siam. The making and offering of vessels is not an interruption of the tradition. It is the tradition.
This is what the Nara Document on Authenticity of 1994 established, in an argument shaped by Japanese and other Asian contributions to a debate until then dominated by European assumptions about material permanence. Authenticity must be judged within the cultural context to which the heritage belongs, and where continuity is maintained through renewal rather than surviving fabric, the practice itself is the authentic element.
The shrine at Ise has been rebuilt every 20 years for centuries and nobody sensible calls it a replica. The Living Heritage Approach later developed at the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) rests on the same insight.
The importance of a proper record
So the question is not whether a new casket may be offered. It plainly may, and offering one is an entirely coherent religious act. The question is narrower and far more answerable. What becomes of the earlier vessel, and does a record exist of the change?
Here I speak strictly as a provenance researcher. An undocumented object can still be venerated, and veneration is the greater thing. But it cannot testify. It cannot resolve a dispute, support a claim, or correct a false account. When I work on a Kandyan object abroad, the greatest obstacle is almost never hostility. It is silence, the absence of any record made at the moment something changed hands or changed form.
A proper record protects four parties at once. The custodian, because a file answers questions no individual’s word can settle. The donor, whose generosity is preserved accurately rather than in rumour. The researcher, who can then write history rather than conjecture. And the ordinary devotee, entitled to know that what she venerates has been cared for without taking anybody’s word for it. Documentation is not surveillance of the sacred. It is how a community states in advance, calmly and on the record, that it has nothing to conceal.
A standing joint protocol, agreed between the Dalada Maligawa authorities, the two chapters, the Department of Archaeology, and the Department of National Museums, specifying what must be recorded before any alteration, replacement, or conservation of any object held, and who should be present. It must be settled in advance, because a procedure negotiated under public pressure satisfies nobody.
A baseline record of the principal objects: measured drawings, photogrammetry, weights, non-destructive analysis of alloys, and a condition report, all done in situ and without exposing anything the rituals do not permit. Alongside it, a written distinction between the inner reliquary, a religious matter and properly closed, and the outer vessels and regalia, which are documentable heritage. No serious scholar seeks access to the relic itself, and setting that boundary down means it need not be argued afresh each time.
An accession register for temple treasuries generally, maintained by the temple itself, in Sinhala, with the department supplying the format and the training rather than taking possession. The Antiquities Ordinance of 1940 already treats any object over a hundred years old, or possessing historical and cultural value, as an antiquity, and thousands of these sit in temple custody with no inventory at all. The Dalada Maligawa is simply the most visible instance of a near-universal condition.
Conservation capacity, because we have very few trained metals conservators and a gilded silver object of this period needs specialist care rather than a strong room. A short public summary of the record, independently verified, which would extinguish most speculation at source. And a standing advisory group, so that heritage professionals and temple authorities are not meeting for the first time in a moment of controversy.
Who are the heirs to an object of this kind? In one sense the sangha, which has carried the responsibility for centuries under conditions far harder than ours. In another, every citizen, and a wider Buddhist world beyond. But heirship confers duties before entitlements.
The lay public’s legitimate claim is not a right to decide what happens within the Vadahitina Maligawa. It is the modest claim that whatever happens is recorded, and that the record survives. That is achievable, inexpensive, and compatible with the deference such a site deserves. The scholarly community owes a corresponding modesty: we have a method, not a mandate.
I keep returning to that monk and his almirah. He was not careless; he was continuing a system that worked when communities were small and very little moved, and that has not worked for a long time. This discussion can end in one of two ways. It can produce argument and leave us where we were. Or it can produce a procedure, agreed between people who all want the same thing, ensuring that the next time a vessel is offered, in this century or the next, there will be a record of what was given, what was received, and where everything went.
The value of the old casket was never only its gold, and never only its age. It was the unbroken line of people who thought the relic deserved the finest their century could make. That line continues only if each generation leaves an account of what it did.
(The writer is an ethnographer and art historian specialising in material culture, critical museum studies, and participatory research methodologies. As a member of Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era [PPROCE], the Netherlands and Dutch Research Council [NWO] committees, she engages with repatriation and decolonisation debates. She currently holds a NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Research Fellowship in the Netherlands)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)