According to the Sri Lankan chronicle tradition, preserved in the Dathavamsa and the Mahavamsa, the tooth was taken from the Buddha's funeral pyre and kept for centuries in India, at Kalinga. In the 4th century CE, as war threatened the relic, it was carried to the island of Lanka, the accounts say concealed in the hair of the princess Hemamala, who travelled with the prince Dantha, and presented to King Kirti Sri Meghavarna of Anuradhapura, who enshrined it in his capital. From then on the relic was inseparable from Sinhalese kingship. As successive dynasties shifted their seat, the tooth went with them, housed in turn at Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambadeniya, Yapahuwa, Kurunegala, Gampola and Kotte; the ruins of its shrines mark those former capitals.
In the late 16th century the relic came to Kandy under King Vimaladharmasuriya I, who built a two-storey shrine for it beside his palace; the present Sri Dalada Maligawa stands on that site and was much expanded under later Kandyan kings. During the European colonial period the Portuguese claimed to have seized a tooth relic and destroyed it publicly at Goa, but Sinhalese tradition holds that the object taken was a substitute and that the true relic remained safe in the interior. After the British deposed the last king of Kandy in 1815, custody of the relic passed to the temple's lay and monastic guardians, and it has remained a national and religious symbol through independence and into the present, surviving even a 1998 bombing of the temple.