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122 TRINCOMALEE (THE HOLY HILL OF SIVA) Trincomalee is known to the modern world as one of the finest natural harbours in the world; but the origin of its name and its fame from pre-historic times is associated with the sacred and ancient shrine dedicated by the early Tamils to Siva. The antiquity of the worship of Siva has been amply attested to by scholars and archaeologists “Among the many revelations that Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa have had in store for us”, says Sir John Marshall, “none perhaps is more remarkable than the discovery that Saivaism has a history going back to the Paleolithic age or even further still, and it thus takes its place as the most ancient faith in the world”. In ‘The History of Philosophy EASTERN AND WESTERN’ (published by the MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, GOVERNMENT OF INDIA) we read, “Nearly all the SAIVITE gods of Hinduism are non-Vedic and are recognised as DRAVIDIAN”. ‘TRINCOMALEE’ is the Europeanised form of the Tamil TIRU-KONA-MA-MALAI or TIRU-KONA-MALAI, ‘the Holy Hill of LORD SIVA’. The hill and the shrine are known by several Tamil names. TIRU-KONA-MA-MALAI TIRU-KONA-MALAI TIRU-KUNRU-MALAI TIRU-MALAI KONESWARAM KONESAR-KOVIL SWAMY-MALAI There are
other similar shrines dedicated to Siva in TAMIL tradition has it that the wife of the mythical king of LANKA, RAVANA who was a devotee of Siva, worshipped at the Koneswaram shrine. 123 The earliest reference in the Pali Chronicles of Ceylon to the SAIVA SHRINE at TRINCOMALEE is found in the MAHAVAMSA (Ch. XXXVII, vv. 40-44). It states that MAHASEN ‘built also the Manivihara and founded three viharas destroying the temple of the gods the Gokanna, Erukavilla, and another in the village of the Brahman Kalanda’. In a note below Geiger the official translator of the Mahavamsa, states, “according to the Tika, the Gokanna Vihara is situated on the coast of the Eastern sea, the two other Viharas in Ruhuna…. the Tika also adds everywhere in the Island of Lanka he established the doctrine of the Buddha having destroyed the temples of the unbelievers, i.e. having abolished the Phallic symbols of Siva and so forth”. If what
the Tika says is to be accepted, Ruhuna and the Eastern coast would appear to have been
early homes of Saivaism, the Tamil religion par
excellence. The authors of the Pali Chronicles and the monk author of the later XIII
century Tika were Buddhist priests – at that time,
the bitterest opponents of Saivaism and those who
supported it in What
appears to be the truth is that Mahasen, the one
time heretic, in his new formed zeal for Buddhism had ordered the destruction
of all the temples of the earlier religion (Saivaism),
including that at Trincomalee and those in Ruhuna. Ruhuna, from this and other evidences, appears to have
been the stronghold of Pandyan Saivite
sub-kings who were the rulers of the district. This is one of the strongest testimonies to
Siva worship and its wide-spread influence in early Suntharamoorthy Swamy (seventh century A.D.) and Tirugnanasambanthar, (eighth century A.D.) two Tamil Saiva saints have left a number of THEVARAMS (‘garlands of verses to god’) of imperishable beauty celebrating these shrines. For a full text of these poems and commentaries the reader is referred to Mr. V. K. P. Nathan’s ‘THEVARATH-THIRUPA-THIKAM’, 1954. That the Cholas and the Pandyans, two of the 124 ancient historic Tamil kingdoms,
had colonised the Northern, Eastern and
South-Eastern districts of In the Journal of the R. A. S. (Ceylon Branch), Vol. XXX, we are told, “According
to the KALVETTU (a Tamil stone inscription referred to by Codrington),
the De Queyroz, the Portuguese author of the ‘Conquest of Ceylon’ gives the name of the king as MANU-RAJAH. ‘VENTHAN’ in Tamil is another word for KING or RAJAH. VOGEL says, “POLONNARUWA may have been an earlier Dravidian settlement. For it is only natural that the Dravidians entered Ceylon by the excellent port of the East Coast – Trincomalee, which as the name TIRU-KUNRU-MALAI indicates, is an early Tamil settlement. From there their ships could have reached the interior of Mahavaliganga” (Vogels’ letter ‘Journal of Science’, Vol. II, Part 1, pp. 231-232, quoted by Dr. Paranavitane.) ‘KUNRU’
in Tamil means a ‘rock’ or ‘hill’.
MAHAVALI in Tamil is MA-VALI ( I give below extracts from ‘The Reefs of Taprobane’ by ARTHUR C. CLRKE, (HARPER AND BROS, NEW YORK, 1956), “Swamy Rock is one of the most historic spots on the East
coast of “……..We soon became aware that there was something peculiar about the sea bed over which we were swimming. Huge blocks of stone were scattered in every direction, and though 125 all were over-grown with weeds and barnacles many had a curiously artificial appearance. At first we decided that this must be an illusion; the action of the sea can sometimes carve rocks into surprisingly symmetrical patterns. But presently we had unmistakable evidence that beneath us was the work of man, not of nature.” “The capital of a stone doorway, badly eroded but perfectly recognizable (plate 21), lay in the jumbled chaos of rocks. Beside it was a broken column, its square ends bearing on each face a lotus petal design not unlike the Tudor Rose (plates 22 and 23). As our eyes grew more skilled in interpreting what we saw, other regularities began to make themselves apparent. The ruins of some great building had been scattered along the sea-bed, where they lay in hopeless confusion. The water at the foot of the headland was quite shallow; where we were diving it was nowhere more than fifteen feet deep, and most of the broken masonry lay only about five feet below the surface. We continued our swim, often pausing to argue whether some curiously shaped stone was natural or artificial. The fragments were distributed along some two hundred feet of the shore line, and we had covered about half this distance when we came upon debris of a later civilisation.” The “Even
before Buddhism came to * * * “Just
below the highest point of the headland stands a new “On the very highest tip of Swamy Rock there stands a single column, said to be one of the pillars of the original temple. The view from this point, four hundred feet above the sea, is both magnificent and vertiginous. One can look for miles along the coast, and see far down into the water washing at the foot of the rock.” * * * 126 “As soon as we had located a temple attendant who spoke good English, Mike and I described our under-water discoveries and tried to obtain some information about the origin of the ruins. It was not until then that we had any idea of the antiquity of the place. There is evidence that a temple had stood on Swamy Rock for thirty-five hundred years; so it must be one of the oldest sites of continuous worship in the world. “The priests….. in particular were anxious to locate the Lingam – the phallic symbol which is the emblem of Siva Worship which one might reasonably suppose to have been one of the first things the Portuguese iconoclasts threw into the sea….. However, the immense jumble of stone, natural and artificial, covering so many thousands of square feet of the sea bed make any systematic search hopeless. The best that we could do was to photograph the most clearly defined pieces of architecture so that those concerned would know just what was lying in the sea at the foot of the rock. “The battered stone work at the foot of Swamy Rock was probably the most photographyed under-water ruins in the world. (Plate 20). “The destruction
of the temple began on the Hindu New Year’s Day 1624, when the Portuguese
soldiers disguised as Priests mingles with the worshippers and so entered the
sacred precincts. They waited until
the temple was deserted by the New Year’s Day crowds, who followed the
procession down the hill and left only a few Priests on Swamy
Rock. Then plundering started;
probably all those left in the temple were killed, and in a few hours the
accumulated treasure of about two thousand (three) years was looted. The “It must have contained a fortune in gold, pearls and precious stones, and though the Portuguese must have captured most of its wealth, they did not get it all as was demonstrated three hundred years later. “In 1950 some workmen were digging a well in Trincomalee when they came across metal about a yard below the surface. Further excavation revealed the statutes of three Hindu Gods which were handed over to the authorities…… they comprised more than a hundred pounds weight of gold and copper alloy. “The five statues which now stand in the temple are among the finest examples of Hindu bronze sculpture known to exist. In particular, the seated figure of Siva, which dates 127 from about the tenth century A.D., is regarded as a masterpiece…… these were found about 500 yards from the temple….. It would be most interesting to go over the rest of Swamy Rock with a metal detector. “After the looting of the temple, the building was destroyed and the masonry either thrown into the sea or used to construct the fort which still guards the foot of the hill. Some of the temple’s original stonework can still be identified in the European building, and by the entrance to the fort is a stone slab containing a curious inscription, which has been translated as follows:- ‘O King! The franks shall later break down the holy edifice built by Kulakoddan in ancient times; and it shall not be rebuilt nor will future kings think of doing so.’ “ “In any event, the men who looted the temple did not long enjoy their gains. Six years later de Sa and his army of three thousand men were enticed into the jungle in the hope of finally conquering the reigning monarch. With the Portuguese were troops of local militia, who had learnt the lesson from the fifth column tactics the Europeans had used to enter and over-throw the temple. The Ceylonese recruits turned on the interlopers and slaughtered them to the last man. “Siva the god of destruction, had worked his revenge. Today, more than hundred years later, he is still worshipped on Swamy Rock, while the men who smashed his temple are forgotten and their empire destroyed.” Dr. Paranavitane, the first Sinhalese Archaeological
Commissioner of Ceylon, in Vol. 1, section C, “ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY”,
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, p. 172, refers to an inscription on the fragment of a
door jamb where it is said that a prince named Codaganga
came to Ceylon in 1223 A.D., and had something to do… As Dr. Paranavitane
was unable to identify Codaganga of the inscription
with any Prince of that name from other historical records of 128 previous centuries. It is not known whether he had consulted any Indian archaeologist on the text of this inscription. He, however, goes on to assume that the shrine referred to is Gokcarna, as a place of that name corresponds to the ‘Sinhalese Gona, in which form it must have been in use among the Sinhalese of the area’, before the Tamils displaced them and adopted the ‘old Sinhalese’ name and pronounced it in their way. Dr. Paranavitane is probably not aware that a famous Siva
shrine by the same name KOKANNAM or KOKARNAM exists in Gokanna is a Pali-ised Tamil word. The Dipavamsa (Ch. XXV, v. 45) tells us that it was a Gokanna which led Tissa to Mahinda. ‘Gokanna’ was no other than Siva in the form of a bull who is alleged to have led one of his devotees to the father of the alleged apostle of Buddhism of Ceylon. The Deva who assumed the form of an animal in order to lead Devanampiya Tissa to Mahinda’s presence was a Gokanna. (VAMSATHA PAKKASINI, Introduction LXVII). It is not a strange coincidence that Panduvasudeva, and later Bhadaccaccana, a daughter of king Pandu landed at Gonagamaka, a village so called probably after the shrine of Siva at Tirukethiswaram in the Mannar district. Dr. Paranavitane and other Sinhalese patriots of our day have a fertile field in Sanskrit and Pali to derive alleged ‘Sinhalese’ words and place names. __________ 129 ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD ‘KO’ (SANSKRIT & PALI ‘GO’) TAMIL DICTIONARIES give the following meaning to ‘KO’ and ‘KON’. (1) KO – (a) KING (b) a man in his prime (c) bull (d) cow (e) hill or mountain. KOVIL = KO + IL = where the ‘king’ or ‘god’ lives. KOKANNAM = KO + KANNAM = ‘KO’ bull (here the emblem of Siva) + KANNAM ‘ear’, ‘cheeks’, also ‘face’. The Sanskritised form of KOKANNAM, KOKANNA is GOKANNA, GOKARNA). (2) (a) KON = ‘King’, ‘master’, ‘lord’, ‘god’. KONESAR – The God of the MOUNTAIN, ‘Siva’. KONESWARAM – The KONA-MA-MALAI – The great hill of Siva.
(b) KON – ‘a shepherd’, ‘a chief’. KONAN – One who belongs to the shepherd community. KONAR – ‘a shepherd’, ‘a chief’. There are a large number names with ‘KON’ as prefix or suffix – KONAR, ALAGAKONAR, WERAKONE, ILANGAIKONE, SINNAKONE etc. HERAS –
(INDO-PROTO-MEDITERRANEAN CULTURE) states that the old Pre-ARYAN name for |
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) i.e. ‘the
great pathway’.
) ‘flood’, or
‘that which overflows’.