The Temple of the Tooth

We spent a day in Kandy, which is a famous pilgrimage site in Buddhism as the place where the Buddha's tooth rests. The story goes that after the Buddha died and was cremated, a tooth was found intact. It went on a bit of a road trip of its own, but finally ended up here in Kandy for good. Pilgrims can buy lotus flower arrangements outside the temple to leave inside.


Here's the outside of the temple. The Tigers set off a bomb at the entrance a few years back and killed quite a few people, so they have quite a bit of security going in, and then you have to take off your shoes (not like at the airport, this one's actually for non-security reasons). Ruby thought that was pretty fun. They had one shack where all the locals left their shoes, and another shack just for the foreigners' shoes. As in, "let's find one more way to shake money out of the foreign tourists".


This is a moonstone. Our guide was actually a muslim, and his english wasn't always too clear, so I'm not sure we quite got the whole story, but apparently if you walk on these it brings you good luck, so we went in for a triple dose!


Here is part of the original temple built to hold the tooth.


This statue was a recent gift to the temple from Malaysia


And here is where most of the lotus flower offerings end up. Way in the back at the top of the picture you see a spot of gold - that's the big gold case that holds the actual tooth. We were hustled past it pretty fast - I guess we didn't look much like pilgrims about to unload a lot of cash into the offering box.