Victory Sacred Fig Tree
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The Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura is venerated as the descendant of the tree beneath which the Buddha attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya. The tradition of a living line is continuous rather than legendary: a sapling was brought from India by the monk Mahinda during his mission to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, and the tree at Anuradhapura is held to be its living continuation, with the propagation of the lineage accounted for in the Sinhala chronicles. The worship is therefore the worship of a specific place — the trunk of the tree is enclosed within a shrine, and devotees circumambulate it, which is why the structure is described as an abbey rather than a temple.
The claim to be the oldest continuously worshipped tree in Sri Lanka is repeated widely, and the annual Sabbatha celebration draws pilgrims. The tree's planting is dated in the tradition to the third century BCE, though botanical and archaeological estimates for the age of the tree differ, and the corpus's specific date of 288 BCE should be treated as a chronicle-derived figure rather than a measurement.
The relationship between this tree and the other sacred trees of Anuradhapura — the Ruwanaelisaya tree associated with the Buddha's visit to the rock — is a question the local tradition handles differently from the popular summaries. The Sri Maha Bodhi is inside the Mahavihara precinct, which has its own history of rivalry with Abhayagiri and Jetavana, and the temple around the tree is administered separately.
The chronicles, and the Sri Lankan histories for the institutional and political history.
Outstanding for a named guardian, ideally a Sinhala speaker: the tree's age as stated in modern botanical research, which should not be replaced with the chronicle date; the sequence of damage, repair and replanting of the tree, which has been affected by storms; and the present rules of access, which have restricted entry to the precinct.
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