Pollonnaruwa Ruins

This shows the ruins of the Nissanka Lata Mandapaya, a temple devoted to the lotus (one of the symbols of enlightenment, and a symbol of Buddhism.  The pillars here are carved to look like lotus stems, and and the tops like opening lotus buds (these pillars would likely have supported a wooden roof.  

The information here is taken from Benjamin Rowland's The Artt and Architecture of India, Penguin Books, 1981.

This picture shows another set of ruins, this time of one of the palaces.  You can see the ornate stairway with the guardian figures on each side.  At the bottom of the last step is the medallion shown below.

This shows the threshold of the stairway above, and was one of the nicest pieces there.  The semi-circular medallion shows concentric rings of swans, elephants, and horses.  I'm not sure about the figures inside of those..

This was one of a line of elephants carved into a freize about chest-high (you can see another one to the right of this figure).  This wasn't a very big figure, maybe eight by ten inches, but I really liked the naturalistic way in which it was portrayed.