the same time he
informed the king of Pegu that the tooth destroyed at Goa was not
the real relic and that this still remained in his possession. Bayin
Naung was induced to marry the lady and received the tooth with
appropriate ceremonies. But when the king of Kandy heard of these
doings, he apprized the king of Pegu of the double trick that had been
played on him. He offered him his own daughter, a veritable princess,
in marriage and as her dowry the true tooth which, he said, was
neither that destroyed at Goa nor yet that sent to Pegu, but one in
his own possession. Bayin Naung received the Kandyan embassy politely
but rejected its proposals, thinking no doubt that it would be awkward
to declare the first tooth spurious after it had been solemnly
installed as a sacred relic. The second tooth therefore remained in
Kandy and appears to be that now venerated there. When Vimala Dharma
re-established the original line of kings, about 1592, it was accepted
as authentic.

As to its authenticity, it appears to be beyond doubt that it is a
piece of discoloured bone about two inches long, which could never
have been the tooth of an ordinary human being, so that even the
faithful can only contend that the Buddha was of superhuman stature.
Whether it is the relic which was venerated in Ceylon before the
arrival of the Portuguese is a more difficult question, for it may be
argued with equal plausibility that the Sinhalese had good reasons for
hiding the real tooth and good reasons for duplicating it. The
strongest argument against the authenticity of the relic destroyed by
the Portuguese is that it was found in Jaffna, which had long been a
Tamil town, whereas there is no reason to believe that the real tooth
was at this time in Tamil custody. But, although the native
literature always speaks of it as unique, the Sinhalese appear to have
produced replicas more than once, for we hear of such being sent to
Burma and China.[72] Again, the offer to ransom the tooth came not
from Ceylon but from the king of Pegu, who, as the sequel shows, was
gullible in such matters: the Portuguese clearly thought that they had
acquired a relic of primary importance; on any hypothesis one of the
kings of Ceylon must have deceived the king of Pegu, and finally
Vimala Dharma had the strongest political reasons for accepting as
genuine the relic kept at Kandy, since the possession of the true
tooth went far to substantiate a Sinhalese monarch's right to