A Rock Sacred Twice Over

“Few places hold a 2,000-year-old Buddhist cave inscription and a medieval Sufi shrine within a few minutes' walk of each other.

A cave-monastery site 24 km east of Balangoda, where Brahmi inscriptions from around the 2nd century BCE record donations of caves to Buddhist monks. The same rock carries the Dafther Jailany shrine, a Sufi pilgrimage site with medieval Arabic inscriptions.