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 otherwisenowhere 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 tothe 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