Japanese Peace Pagoda (Sri Pada)
The Peace Pagoda , also known as Japan Sama Cetiya (Sinhala: ශ්රී පාද ජපන් සාම චෛත්යය) is a Japanese-styled Stupa on the foothills of Sri Pada Mountain in Ratnapura District, Sri Lanka. It is the first of the five Japan Peace Pagodas constructed in the country. A Peace Pagoda is a Buddhist stupa erected to inspire peace and most of the peace pagodas in the world built since World War II (1939-1945), have been built under the guidance of the Japanese Buddhist monk Nichidatsu Fujii (1885-1985), the founder of the Nipponzan-Myōhōji Buddhist Order. He constructed 80 of these pagodas around the world after World War II, including at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (McIntosh et al., 2019). In the 1970s, the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Pelpola Vipassi Thera met Nichidatsu Fujii during his visit to Japan (Abeysekara, 2002). Nichidatsu Fujii proposed to Pelpola Vipassi Thera to build a Peace Pagoda in Sri Lanka and assured him to provide the necessary funding for it (Abeysekara, 2002). Pelpola Vipassi The…