Just outside the municipal limits of Colombo, in the city of Kelaniya, the university has two major institutions and seven faculties.

The University of Kelaniya has its origin in the historic Vidyalankara Pirivena, founded in 1875 by Ratmalane Sri Dharmaloka Thera as a centre of learning for Buddhist monks.

The motto of the institution, "Pannaya Parisujjhati" ("Self-purification is by insight"), is a quotation from the Alavaka-sutta of the Samyutta Nikaya, given in Sinhala characters in the same band.

The middle band containing a creeper design encloses the innermost, which shows a full-blown lotus, signifying purity.

The science faculty was the first among the Sri Lankan universities to initiate the changeover from the traditional three subject (General) degree with end of year examinations to a more flexible course unit system, i.e., a modularized credit-based system in a two-semester academic year with the end of semester examinations.

It offers a variety of course pathways designed to provide flexibility in the choice of subjects.

The first batch of students, of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya completed their five-year course and graduated MBBS in September 1996.

This number includes international students, mainly from other South Asian countries, who have been admitted on a fee-levying basis.

Students from medical schools in Europe, USA and Australia have spent their elective periods with the university.

The faculty includes disciplines associated with Buddhist and Asian cultures, such as Pali and Buddhist Studies, Sinhala, Tamil, Sanskrit, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese and Korean ( One and only sri lankan University that has a 4 years of Korean Language Degree) while teaching courses in modern European languages such as English, French, German and Russian.

Presently, the library owns a collection of over 245,000 books and monographs relevant to various study programmes and research activities in the university.

Furthermore, the library has subscribed to EBSCO HOST, JSTOR, Emerald, Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis databases with access facilities for more than 20,000 academic e-journals and more than 100,000 e-books.

On-the-job training in the IT arena is provided for the young people just out of the university who work in the ICT Centre.