Nalanda Gedige

A complete stone temple standing near Matale, on ground once reckoned the centre of the island. It is built to the plan of a Hindu temple — a mandapa, an entrance hall that was roofed once, a short passage to a bare cella, and an ambulatory running round the holy centre — and it appears to have been used by Buddhists.

The stonework is Dravidian, in the Pallava manner, and dates somewhere between the eighth and the tenth centuries. The richly carved facade sections were reassembled, piece by piece, in 1975. A few of the original Hindu figures survive; above the sanctuary on the south side sits Kubera, and that particular arrangement is found nowhere else in Sri Lanka.

Scholars have called it Mahayana with Tantric leanings, possibly Vajrayana. A Hindu building plan, South Indian carving, Buddhist use. It refuses to be one thing, and it has been standing there refusing for eleven hundred years.