Echoes of Sri Lanka's Lion Rock: The Monks, Nuns, and Divine Damsels of the Sigiri Graffiti

Sigiriya, the “Lion Rock” of Sri Lanka’s north-central dry zone, is an elaborate palace complex constructed in the 5th century, prized today as a UNESCO World Heritage site and regarded as an engineering marvel of the ancient world. The impressions of early visitors to the site—enshrined in poems dating to from the 7th to 13th centuries etched onto Sigiriya’s “mirror wall”—offer snapshots into the tradition of storytelling surrounding King Kashyapa and his palace, representing some of our earliest attested vernacular poetry in South Asia. This paper explores selections from the “Sigiri graffiti,” reflecting on the significance of poems autographed by men and women from all walks of social life, as well as on tensions at play in the dueling sentiments of Buddhist monks and nuns as they describe the opulence and sensuality of the location. Examining poems commenting on the character of the voluptuous damsels depicted in the adjacent Sigiriya murals, I contrast verses which draw from canonical Pali literary tropes treating beautiful women as fetters to religious realization with other verses embracing description of sensual form following the conventions of Sanskrit kāvya.