We were relaxing in our favourite café at Ponte a Moriano on the way back from a visit to the dentist in Lucca. My wife had misplaced a prosthetic tooth which temporarily substituted a missing one to be replaced next month. Desperate searches in our house through everything from carpets to cushions to file leaves failed to locate the precious item, precious because without it the setting of the new tooth could easily fail. My wife’s visit was thus to obtain that provisional replacement.
As we were sipping our caffè macchiato by the increasingly torrid square of this small provincial town, a piazza bordered on one side by a recently restored art-deco theatre looking fresh again in its grey and cream paintwork a thought suddenly flashed into my mind regarding the sacredness of a very special tooth in a South Asian culture, a tooth which too had been lost but found again.
We had visited Sri Lanka in 2020, a visit which unfortunately had to be cut short because of the arrival of the horrors of a pandemic. Even that island of serendipity was now starting to be affected. Indeed, the last visit we could make before being confined to our hotel in Kandy was to the Temple of the Tooth. We walked along a wall flanking the temple and encircling the placid waters of the Bogambara Lake. Was it really to be our last unconfined walk? Were we now to be returning to another quarantined country wearing sanitary masks and having our temperature regularly taken? How long was this threat not, in my imagination, encountered in London since the nineteenth century cholera outbreaks to last for? Britain was now approaching belatedly the time when its own inhabitants would be required to practise social distancing and any walks were to have a strictly utilitarian function like going to the supermarket.
Looking through my posts written at that time and place is sobering. I can hardly believe we had to go through all that in a time when we thought that such like the Black Death and the Plague had long gone by.
Here are some of them for further reading:
But why should there be a temple dedicated to a tooth in the first place and on an island once known under the British Raj as Ceylon? Sri Lankan legend tells that when the Buddha died in 543 BC in India, his body was cremated. Only one of his teeth remained untouched by the flames and was retrieved from the funeral pyre by a disciple who gave it to the King as an object worthy of veneration
The king decided to hide the tooth forever by sending it to a secret place which happened to be the island of Sri Lanka in order to prevent conflict over a relic which was considered to be not only sacred but also politically magical since it was believed that whoever had the tooth possessed the divine right to rule. The sacred relic was smuggled with the help of a princess who hid the tooth in her luxuriant hair.
At this point in my musings a miraculous vision appeared before us: it was a monk wrapped in his dark burgundy coloured kasaya or robe. The appearance signalled for me that he was a Buddhist monk of the Theravada order from Sri Lanka. But how could my thoughts materialize in this wondrous manner? How could this South Asian mirage materialise in the noonday sun of a local Italian square?
The monk and we smiled at each other and immediately a friendly contact was made. His broad grin was utterly welcoming. In clear Italian he said ‘I can see you are interested in who I am. You also recognized that I am a Buddhist monk and that my country of birth is Sri Lanka. Indeed, I was born, brought up and became a monk in Kandy near to the sacred temple sheltering the great Gautama Buddha’s tooth. Would you like to come and visit our temple?’
‘You have a temple here in Ponte a Moriano?’ I asked amazed.
‘Of course we have. It’s only five minutes down the road.’
Although the five minutes turned out to be more like a quarter of an hour and the sun was getting hotter and hotter we appreciatively followed the monk and eventually turned into a yard faced by a yellow-rendered old house.
Eventually a key was produced and the door was unlocked. Inside the house seemed at first like a typical Italian dwelling with kitchen range and table and chairs. Down a corridor, however, one that was flanked by a cupboard with religious items, we turned round the corner into what must have once been the dwelling’s main living room but which now had changed to a different use and housed a changed presence: the Buddha himself. Before our eyes the statue of the Gautama replete with transcendent calm gazed with compassion upon us and blessings from the one who wished to dispel all suffering from this world fell upon us.
Sri Lanka had returned to us. Kandy was once again really sweet!
Our monk enjoined us to share lunch with him. ‘We are not allowed to cook but our local Sri Lankan community brings me food here every day. There is no one else to share it with me so I am privileged to be able to invite you two to share it with me.’
Our lunch was delicious. Perfumed rise with vegetables, soya meat, brinjal and poppadum followed by a delicious desert of mango slices.
After lunch we visited the temple’s garden where a Bodhi tree, under which the Gautama gained enlightenment, grew in a pot.
During our lunch we learned that our host had become a monk when he was fourteen. Now, aged thirty-two, this meant that he had been one for eighteen years. He had also been a monk in Germany and, surprisingly for me, in Russia. He had not been to England yet but in all these languages he was fluent. In Italian too after living in Italy for just two years so far.
‘And what do you think of Italy?’ my wife asked. ‘I like this country very much. There is a good religious sentiment here. I see it in the crosses erected by the roadside, the ringing of bells and the processions I have seen with the statues of the saints. It makes me feel very much at home.’
There is a small but flourishing Sri Lankan community in the Lucchesia and indeed, one of our favourite food stores in Lucca is called the Sri Lanka Bazaar. In Bagni di Lucca until quite recently there used to be a convent of three nuns, two of which were from Sri Lanka, who ran a nursery for children at the head of our valley of Camaione. Sadly because of covid and the consequent decline of subscriptions the nursery closed down.
We were so delighted to enter into an Italian variation of a Theravada Buddhist monastery and share lunch with our friendly monk. In an area certainly not to be described as significantly multicultural it was particularly welcomed. And now a single tooth will gather for me extra significance whether it be both physical and, more essentially, spiritual.