Rising over the Sri Lankan highlands stands a mountain with many names. In English, it is called Adam’s Peak, after the first human Adam, said to have left his footprint on the summit in myths told by medieval Muslim merchants who sailed the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, Buddhists believe the Buddha was the one to imprint his foot on the Peak, and so they often call it Sri Pada, meaning “sacred foot” in Sinhala. Additionally, many in the local Hindu population believe the footprint on the Peak belongs to the god Siva, and so call it Sivanolipadamalai, meaning “Siva’s luminous foot mountain” in Tamil.
With this diversity of traditions, the Peak provides an excellent example of religious pluralism at a shared pilgrimage site. Over the past millennium, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims have ascended the slopes to view the sacred indentation on the summit. Visible from many areas on the island, and even out to sea, the Peak helped draw people to it by acting as a tool of navigation. Its countless pilgrims have ranged from local islanders to far-flung foreigners, and the Peak continues to be climbed by more than a million visitors annually. The mountain therefore stands as a historical marker of human mobility, a single point around which to track the diversity of cultures that have coincidentally met on this island.
Yet the story of the Peak’s pluralism should not be read as pure romanticism. Some speak of the Peak as uniquely harmonious, but in reality it operates like any other human space, with continual negotiations and alliances among groups evolving over time. At present, the Peak is controlled by Buddhists, who make some accommodations for pilgrims of other religions, but still place many restrictions over the summit. Religious tensions can exist, as do divisions between Sinhala and Tamil ethno-linguistic groups. Nevertheless, the mountain can also encourage cooperation. The difficulty of the climb is a source of solidarity among strangers, who may share food and drink to help boost one another to the top. Common ground is also found in the environment, a highly biodiverse rainforest with significance across religions, which can only be maintained in collaboration with all who visit and live upon the mountain.
The Peak therefore poses many productive questions for classroom consideration:
What are the complex realities of religious pluralism, and how do traditions share space without always being in total harmony? How are natural environments used to articulate religious belief, and which features of the Peak make it most amenable to multi-religious mythmaking? Do impressive physical landscapes help create their own fame, affecting how people behave toward them? Do such lines of inquiry prompt further questions about whether the Peak can ever “belong” to a single group?
This teaching module provides several resources that can be shared with students to help generate responses for classroom discussion.
- A virtual pilgrimage for classroom presentation or personal study is provided through Prezi. Photographs from ethnographic fieldwork in 2016 are paired with short explanatory paragraphs to guide students up the mountain on a typical pilgrimage route. Different trail stops focus on rituals performed along the way, the intersections of religion and ecology, as well as sites that signify multi-religious representation and tension at the Peak.
- Notes with minute-by-minute breakdowns of short YouTube videos containing high-quality or rare video footage of the Peak. Two are promotional videos with drone footage shot by the Sri Lankan advertising firm Aerial View.
- An annotated bibliography of scholarly sources highlights books and articles detailing different aspects of the Peak, including its medieval Islamic and Christian significance, its colonial and postcolonial history in Sri Lanka, as well as translations of pre-modern Pali works about the mountain, and modern Sinhala poetry sung on pilgrimages to Sri Pada.
- Also available is a youtube video of a seminar on “The Urban Nature of a Wilderness Reserve: Political Ecology and Pilgrimage at Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka,” which Alex McKinley gave at the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin on October 1, 2020.
