The Buddha’s tooth relic is brought to Sri Lanka

The Culavamsa, the continuation of the Mahavamsa, says only that a Brahmin woman brought the relic from the Kalinga country. The king received it with honour, laid it in a crystal urn in the Dhammacakka building erected by Devanampiya Tissa, which thenceforth became the temple of the tooth, spent 900,000 (kahapanas) on a festival and decreed that the relic be brought to the Abhayagiri monastery every year with the same ceremonies. The fuller story is told in the Dathavamsa, a Pali poem of the early 13th century that presents itself as a rendering of an older Sinhalese chronicle: the tooth, kept at Dantapura in Kalinga, was taken to the island by Hemamala, daughter of King Guhasiva, and her husband Prince Danta. Tradition adds that she hid it in her hair, and names the Meghagiri monastery (Isurumuniya) as its first shrine.

The date depends on the chronology of the kings of Anuradhapura. By the traditional Sri Lankan reckoning Sirimeghavanna, the son of Mahasena, reigned in 301–328 (or 304–332), which puts the relic’s arrival around 309–313; the modified chronology of Wilhelm Geiger and others places his reign in 352–379 and the arrival around 360, and the date 371 is also found. A Chinese account preserved by the 7th-century envoy Wang Xuance, as retold by V. A. Smith, says that two monks sent by this king, called Meghavarna — one of them said to be his brother — found no fitting lodging at Bodh Gaya, and that the king then sent an embassy with gems and other gifts to the Gupta emperor Samudragupta and obtained leave to build a monastery there for Sri Lankan pilgrims; this makes the two kings contemporaries. At the beginning of the 5th century the Chinese pilgrim Faxian saw the relic in its own shrine in the city and described how, in the middle of the third month, it was carried in procession to the Abhayagiri monastery and worshipped there for ninety days; annual processions in honour of the relic are still held.