It was formed in 1958 from the Vidyodaya Pirivena, a Buddhist educational centre which was founded in 1873 by Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thera.

[3] In 1956, the new prime minister Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike wanted to promote national languages and culture; it was decided to confer university status on the Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara pirivenas.

At the time, future President of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa chaired the campus' United Corporations and Mercantile Union local.

The university's revitalization continued until the 1971 JVP insurrection, when the political atmosphere heavily affected its students' education.

After the insurrection, the university was converted into a detention camp for suspected insurgents in 1971 and 1972;[3] lectures were delivered at other locations.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) defines the World Class University Project (WCUP) as "The implementation of a series of activities on par with international standards and to formulate and implement specific strategies to move up in the internal ranking indexes and become 'world-class' in order to achieve global excellence".

The project focuses on encouraging local fields which support innovation leading to national development by prioritizing interdisciplinary studies which combine the basic sciences and the humanities.

The project, directed by Ranil De Silva, was established to encourage world-class scholars and researchers to develop academic programmes and departments at the university.

One of Sri Lanka's eight postgraduate institutes, it is the only public higher-education body which is ISO 9000:2008 and is a member of the Association of Advanced Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

[14][failed verification] The English Language Teaching Department (ELTD), part of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and renamed in 2017 by the University Grants Commission, aims to improve student proficiency in English and introduced a credit course in 2013 for first-year students.

The unit has also established a career-skills-development society which hosts an annual job fair, J’pura employability awards ceremony, OBT Camp, a Donate Happiness cancer-hospital project and an Arunella career-guidance seminar for schoolchildren.