Teldeniya Bambaragala Monastery

Bambaragala Monastery rises on a steep rocky hillside above the village of Henagahawela, in the Dumbara valley between Victoria Reservoir and the Knuckles range, about 22 km from Kandy. A long flight of stone steps climbs to the summit, passing drip-ledged caves, shrine spaces, and a priests' residence partway up. One decorated cave holds a recumbent Buddha statue about five feet long, its walls painted with Jataka scenes.

Six of the drip-ledged caves carry Early Brahmi inscriptions dated to the third and second centuries BCE. Scholars Senarath Paranavitana and Gnanawimala Thero have read them as records of donation: a cave given to the priesthood by a village councillor named Vasabha, and another, named Manopadoshana, after Digha-Sumana, son of the councillor Sona — its inscription running thirteen feet eight inches in six-inch letters, cut fifteen feet above the cave floor.

Most of the built vihara standing today dates from the reign of the Kandyan king Kirthi Sri Rajasingha (1747-1782), who also granted the surrounding lands by a Thamba Sannasa, a royal edict inscribed on copper plate. In 1817 Dr. John Davy, surgeon to the British governor Robert Brownrigg, visited and recorded the reclining Buddha statue. The old approach ran through Henagahuwela; it went under when Victoria Reservoir was built, and the temple is now reached by a different road, via Tennekumbura on the Mahiyangana route.