Authenticity and Scholarship

For the tradition, the relic's authenticity is secured by an unbroken line of custody: the chronicles trace it from the Buddha's cremation through Kalinga to Anuradhapura, and its uninterrupted royal veneration is taken as sufficient warrant. The custodian temple presents it as a genuine left canine of Gautama Buddha, and the surrounding ritual, architecture and statecraft all assume that identity.

Historians and scientists treat the question more cautiously. The relic has never been removed from its caskets for examination, so no anatomical, radiometric or other test has ever been applied to it; its identity therefore cannot be confirmed or refuted by physical evidence. Nineteenth-century European observers who claimed to glimpse it described an object larger than a human tooth, which skeptics take as evidence against the attribution, while defenders answer that the relic is not to be judged by ordinary measure. The documented history is itself layered: the Portuguese destruction narrative and the counter-claim of a substitute mean that even within the historical record there is dispute over whether the present tooth is continuous with the one venerated at Anuradhapura. The consensus position is that the object is authentically the relic that Sri Lankan Buddhists have venerated as the Buddha's tooth since late antiquity, while its literal origin in the body of Gautama Buddha remains a matter of faith rather than demonstrable fact, hence a status of debated.