The Chapel at Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka www.trinitycollegelk describes the amazing visionary drive with which this chapel was constructed in the 1920's...at a time when other churches in the island were being built in a more gothic european style>...great trouble was taken to revive the traditional & more Buddhist local architecture in building this beautiful chapel high up on the college hillside...each stone pillar is carved both at the base and near the upper level, as you can see in the detail below...

IN the main chapel there are three large murals by David Paynter...this one behind the pulpit is of the Good Samaritan... the artist had been a student at Trinity College before gaining a scholarship to the Royal Academy school of art, where he studied in the traditional Western style grounded in Classical & Renaissance Art and on returning to his family home in Sri Lanka he decided to use local models for these murals... in fact using students and teachers, together with a well-known and revered Bishop whose receeding back takes on the role of the priest in this Good Samaritan mural...

THis SRi Lankan painting of the Face of Christ is painted by a Buddhist Monk : Bikku Uttarananda... but why?... How did a Buddhist monk come to know about Jesus ? I found this an interesting example of co-operation against the backdrop of the many divisions in SRi Lankan society... a Christian priest, Fr Aloysius Pieris SJ, felt he would like to learn more about Buddhism...particularly Buddhist meditation... accordingly he approached a saintly Buddhist scholar - monk and pleaded with him to take him on, as a Christian, wishing to learn from him the Buddhist way of life... It was agreed that he would be welcomed by the Buddhist Sangha [monks] if in return he would teach them something about Christianity...apparently he decided to share St JOhn's Gospel with them... and so followed years of in depth sharing between several Buddhist monks and this Christian monk, one of the results being Bikku Uttarananda's painting and various sculptures through which this artist wished to communicate between BUddhists and Christians, who otherwise tended to have very separate identities<... If you wish to read more about this, see the book :Christ for all people, edited by Ron Ogrady : WCC publication