Raja De Silva commenting on Gananāth Obēyesēkere: The Buddha in Srī Lankā. Histories and Stories. London: Routledge. 2019 336 pp.
The author [GO], an eminent anthropologist, has rejected the evidence (archaeological and literary) that I depended on in my interpretation (de Silva, Raja 2002., 155 pp) of the meaning of Sīgiriya and its paintings: that the site was a monastic complex and the paintings were representations of the goddess Tara. He has criticized my thesis (1) by resorting to assertions, several untrue and the rest of no merit and (2) by asking rhetorical questions. He has mentioned without criticism the interpretation of Sīgiriya by Siri Gunasinghe (SG) (2008), his friendly colleague of the Peradeniya University.
