Danno Budun Ge Lyrics by Amaradeva

(Those who know the Buddha’s glorious body of doctrine
keep pure, holding to good virtue without break…//)

(There are many monks who have destroyed the defilements…//)
(Arahants dwell here, in mansions bright as the dawn…//)

(On this earth, it shines like the world of the gods,
this city seen as the home of the Buddha’s teaching…//)
(Of the many arahants passing overhead through the air…//)
(their shadows break the rays of the sun…//)

(Blue water lilies, lotuses and olu blossoms and the rest
are there in the ponds, brimming with clear water…//)

(Fish swim in shoals, row upon row, in plenty…//)
(and now the city of Anuradhapura comes into view…//)

“Danno Budunge” is one of the oldest and most loved Sinhala devotional songs, an old nurti (theatre) piece that paints the ancient holy city of Anuradhapura as a place so pure it looks like a heaven that has come down to rest on the earth. It is not a love song or a personal lament. It is a hymn of reverence, the voice of someone arriving at the sacred capital and seeing it shimmer before them.

The opening sets the moral world of the city. The people here know the Buddha’s “Dharmaskandha,” his great body of teaching, and they live by it, keeping their virtue clean and unbroken. The monks are not ordinary monks; they are the ones who have burned away the “klesha,” the defilements of greed, hatred and delusion that the Buddhist path works to undo. Arahants, the fully awakened ones, are said to live here in shining halls. Already the song is telling you this is no everyday town. It is a city of awakened beings.

Then comes the image that gives the song its quiet wonder. The lyric says that as the many arahants travel through the sky by “iddhi,” their psychic power, their passing shadows fall so thick that they break and dim the rays of the sun. It is a deliberately impossible, dreamlike picture, and that is the point. So many holy beings cross the heavens above Anuradhapura that they darken the daylight like a passing cloud. On earth, this looks like “devlova,” the realm of the gods. The line “bhulo matte me devlo pevase” says it plainly: on this ground, this is the world of the gods made visible.

The closing turns from the sky to the water. The ancient ponds of Anuradhapura are crowded with blue water lilies, lotuses and olu flowers, the very blooms that carry sacredness and purity in Sinhala culture, and the water itself is clear and abundant. Fish move through it in shoals, row upon row, a sign of life and plenty. And then, at last, the city of Anuradhapura itself rises into view. The whole song is built to deliver that final moment of arrival, the pilgrim’s first sight of the holy city, after the listener has already been told, line by line, just how blessed a place it is. What you are left holding is not longing but awe, the feeling of standing before something sacred and ancient and almost too pure to be of this world.