Festival Of The Tooth #1 (From Eric Beheim)

Tooth-1, a photo by bucklesw1 on Flickr. The Festival of the Tooth is a Buddhist festival that takes place in Kandy, Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) in July or August. The “tooth relic” is supposedly the left canine tooth of Lord Buddha, retrieved from his funeral pyre. Many wars were fought in India for possession of the relic. About 800 years after Buddha’s death, the tooth was smuggled to Ceylon, which Buddha once declared as the place where his religion would be safe for 5000 years. The king of Ceylon was so overjoyed that he had a special palace built within the royal palace complex to enshrine the tooth. He also ordered that an annual festival be held in honor of the sacred relic. Whenever Ceylon was threatened with war or invasion, the seat of the kingdom was moved and a new palace built to enshrine the relic. On several occasions, the tooth was, in fact, carried off and had be ransomed back. (Once the ransom paid was two billion rupees!) Finally it ended up in Kandy, where it is at present. In his 1935 book FANG AND CLAW, Frank Buck devotes as entire chapter to the Festival of the Tooth and to “The Bearer of the Tooth,” the elephant that carries it during processions. Here is how Buck described the parade: “It was gorgeous from first to last-jewels flashing in the sun light, natives in rainbow costumes of vivid reds and greens and yellow, plumed feather fans stirring the hot air, weird Indian instruments blaring shrilly over the heady, steady beating of great drums. And through it all, from first to last, marched painted elephants-big elephants, little elephants, elephants from all over Ceylon-their trapping dazzling, gold and blue and purple, their feet shaking the street in a regular rhythm over the drums.”