In the Footsteps of the Buddha
It is a magnificent tree, twisted and tired with age, with
streams of faded prayer flags tied to its branches, the tree
under which the Buddha was miraculously born two and a half
thousand years ago. The Buddha's mother, it is said, bathed
in the pool at the foot of the tree, before delivering him
from her right side and watching him take seven steps in
each direction. The pool is still here, its waters brown and
unmoving between the damp brick steps which have been built
to contain it. But the lotus flowers which sprang up to
bless each of those infant footprints are no more.
This is ancient Lumbini, in the Terai of Nepal, not far from
the border with India. There is no city, not even a village,
hardly even a place to buy a postcard. But an airport, and
some expensive hotels, are planned, so that future pilgrims
can more easily reach this holy place. Until then there is
just the tree and the pool, a pillar of King Ashoka, dated
to 245 BCE, and the excavated remains of ancient stupas and
temples in small red bricks.
When the airport is built what will happen to the tree? It
is not yet, unlike the three other places of pilgrimage
instituted by the Buddha, quite in the forefront of
international Buddhist consciousness. But it will be, and
then the rich pilgrims from the Far East may want to move
the Hindu priest who ministers to a small image at the
tree's base. Hindus worship the Buddha, like Lord Rama, as
an incarnation of Vishnu, but purer Buddhists will prefer
that this bare earth is swept, and the fallen leaves
collected, by a priest whose loyalty is more singly focused
upon Prince Siddharta Gautama, later Lord Buddha.
I had come here on a long bus ride from Kathmandu, the
capital of Nepal. All day it had taken, climbing slowly out
of the Kathmandu valley, and then careering along beside the
white water Rapti river and through Nepal's rich forests, to
reach Bhairahawa, the nearest town to Lumbini.
That evening I sat at a busy roundabout in Bhairahawa,
summoning the confidence to approach the betel-chewing
drivers of the jeeps that looked as though they were for
hire. I picked on one slightly less battered than the
others, and perhaps slightly less recently used for
transporting livestock, and agreed a price for the next
day's journey.
This was the beginning of my journey in the footsteps of the
Buddha. Just before he died, in about 400 BCE, the Buddha
spoke to his chief disciple, Ananda, about the making of his
life story into a sacred geography. Those who wanted to
follow the Buddha's way should visit those four places where
geography had been most sanctified by history, the places of
his birth, his enlightenment, his first sermon, and his
death or mahaparinirvana.
Three of these are now in north India, and I negotiated the
border by cycle rickshaw, stopping at the required offices
for the quizzical stamping of passports.
The Buddha attained enlightenment sitting under another
tree, at what is now the town of Bodhgaya, in the Indian
state of Bihar. In Bihar the roads are bad, and a full day's
delay on the laughably named Grand Trunk Road is a common
occurrence. So I arrived under the Bodhi tree with less
equanimity than I imagined to be ideal in preparation for
enlightenment.
This tree, fifth generation of the original under which the
Buddha sat, is pressed sideways by the Mahabodhi temple
which has been built hard up against it. Its great branches
are filled deafeningly with starlings, so that the chants of
the prostrating Tibetan nuns, circumambulating tree and
temple together, can hardly to heard.
Bodhgaya is a place of refugees. Onto the edge of an
otherwise ordinary Indian town have come Buddhist temples
from all over South Asia. Here is a Tibetan structure, with
rich maroons and golds decorating its dark interior, and two
rows of swaying monks chanting in an almost unison
contra-basso. A novice hands round a crate of Coca-Cola to
keep them going.
Here is a Japanese temple, light and elegant inside, with
stylised flowers either side of a golden image. Outside, an
eighty-foot statue of the Buddha has recently been erected
in blocks of (surely not?) concrete, his compassionate gaze
cast down over the town, over a Disneyland of buildings from
Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nepal and China.
Bodhgaya has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries, and
the surroundings of the Mahabodhi temple are full of gilded
images, and stupas erected by the anonymous devout. Today's
devout scrabble among them and under the bushes in search of
leaves fallen from the Bodhi tree. Others, under the
direction of their religious leaders, or privately, chant
before banks of candles, stoop to touch the holy footprints
of the Buddha, or prostrate themselves endlessly on polished
wooden boards.
The wheel of the dharma began to turn at the deer park at
Sarnath, when the enlightened Buddha preached his first
sermon. Sarnath is now a suburb of Varanasi, holiest Hindu
bathing site, and modern Indian industrial city. Great
numbers of tourists visit Varanasi, to be pulled out of
their beds before dawn and driven down to the holy Ganges.
They board leaky boats, and row slowly up and down along the
ghats to see the sun rise, and the god Surya greeted before
the day's work begins.
Not so many get to Sarnath. But here there is a magnificent
stupa more than 100 feet high, as well as the ruins of
monasteries and temples. The remains of another pillar
erected by the Buddhist pilgrim king Ashoka are nearby, and
in the small museum is its capitol. This is one of India's
famous images, its four lions facing north, south, east and
west adopted as the symbol of modern India. The carving is
as sharp, and the stone as polished, as it was when it was
made twenty-two centuries ago. No-one knows the process that
has kept it preserved like this.
In the park at Sarnath, the presence of the Buddha seems
almost tangible. This great dome, which once held relics of
his earthly life, is supposed to mark the exact spot of that
first sermon, in which the Buddha enunciated the new
teaching, the dharma which has shaped a quarter of the world
in the last two and a half millennia.
There is one more place to visit. Bemused by the nothingness
of Lumbini, overwhelmed and transported by Bodhgaya and
Sarnath, I prepared to visit the place of departure. At
Kushinagar, another of India's thousands of otherwise
nowhere towns, the Buddha contracted food poisoning and died
at the age of eighty. It seems such a prosaic ending. The
Enlightened One, with knowledge of all worlds, should have
been above such things. Perhaps others have thought that,
too, because Kushinagar is only a little ahead of Lumbini in
beginning to attract pilgrims. The town had long forgotten
its Buddhist history when nineteenth century archaeologists,
guided by the writings of a seventh century Chinese pilgrim,
began to uncover it.
In the 1920s Burmese Buddhists set about restoring the
structures. To house a fabulous reclining Buddha statue that
had been found in the nearby stupa they built something that
looks far too much like a Victorian waterworks. The state
Government has taken some steps to assist today's tourist
pilgrims. They have opened a tourist office, which is
identified solely by a notice in Hindi saying how welcome
you are if you are a tourist. It has no maps, and no guides.
The gardens within which the excavations and the Victorian
waterworks are now set has another helpful notice in Hindi,
advising you that it is not permitted to walk on the lawn or
take pictures.
Inside the waterworks I joined the trickle of pilgrims
coming to touch the Buddha's gilded feet. Even for me, a
non-Buddhist, it was a moment of unexpected reverence. Apart
from the head and the feet the recumbent Buddha was covered
with a cheap cloth. Its only function seemed to be to earn a
few rupees for the shrine's guardian, who required a fee to
remove it so that we could see the statue properly.
I waited there an hour or so, occasionally talking to a
young monk who had come to say his evening prayers.
Originally from the tribal extremities of Northeast India,
he had been settled in Kushinagar in a small monastic
community for ten years, during which his family had seen
him twice.
In the early evening, the sun came through the narrow door
and illuminated the serene face of the Buddha's image. We
made our final obeisance, before the monk took my hand and
led me outside. We walked briskly down the country road to
the mysteriously contoured Ramabhar Stupa, the site of
Buddha's cremation, where our circumambulation was
interrupted by a grazing elephant. As the light faded, the
silence of this inscrutable monument, and the elephant's
unconcern, were the final commentary on the life of the
Buddha, in whose footsteps I had come.
© Kenneth Wilson
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