Poverty. It was all around us in Bodh Gaya. And it was very much in evidence at the school where we volunteered, and the neighborhood around it. People living in squalid tenements that looked like gutted, abandoned buildings. Children attending our school, which itself looked like the remains of an abandoned building. Peasants hard at work in the nearby rice paddies, from pre-dawn to post-sunset, with just midday off to escape the merciless heat. A woman who sat beside a building in a little alleyway that turns toward our school and picked up cow patties with her bare hands to plaster them onto a wall for drying.
Poverty, however, does not seem to have affected the school director or his family, whose house we stayed in. They live quite comfortably, even luxuriously compared to most of their neighbors, and the director’s kids do not attend his own school.
Speaking of the director and his school, he seemed to want us to focus on teaching the kids yoga, tai chi and martial arts, which we didn’t mind doing as a sideline, but it wasn’t really what we came for. It was almost as if he wasn’t even aware that we, um, taught English.
The birthplace of Buddhism
On the morning of Friday, Aug. 19, 2022 we had big plans. Finishing our school stint early, we were going to head into town to do the tourism thing. But our plans got sidetracked for about 3 hours because the sky broke open and dumped a deluge on our landscape. But by mid-afternoon it had abated, and so we were able to make good on our plans to visit the Mahabodhi Temple Complex, the birthplace of Buddhism.
According to tradition, backed up by what appears to be some fairly reliable real-time notes, Buddhism got off the ground here sometime around 500-ish BCE (some accounts pin it down to the year 589), when the itinerant ascetic Gautama Siddhartha (now known at The Buddha) attained enlightenment, whatever exactly that entails. Whereupon he continued his travels to spread his message to India and the world. It’s reported that after his enlightenment, he could walk not only on water, but also on air. So there. (Siddhartha was a prince with a wife and newborn son, whom he abandoned in his quest for enlightenment — though he apparently returned to them after 6 years or so. Learning this prompted Dennis to write a little poem.)
In the ensuing centuries, the site of his epiphany has become hallowed ground for Buddhists, and a complex has sprung up around it. And it’s open to the public. That’s us.
Making our way there, we had to plow through the customary gauntlet of pilgrims, tourists, tour guides, vendors and beggars. There were even more of the latter than in most other places in town, because packs of them tend to hang out near the temples on the theory that generous souls will be passing by. Additionally, we again encountered a couple of the suspiciously congenial and ubiquitous guys who supposedly represent a blind school, and are devoted to charity work, but nonetheless seem to have all the time in the world to lie in wait and approach light-skinned foreigners to invite to the school.
At the entrance, we had to check all of our electronic gear — yep, including phones. Fortunately, however, we were allowed to take our camera inside. Once past the gate, we had yet another gauntlet of tour guides to surmount, and these were rather aggressive — perhaps because they’d invested an admission fee to recoup. Their tactic is that after you decline their services, they will follow you and start narrating about what you’re seeing anyway, in the hopes that you will just give in and go ahead and pay them. But once we got past this annoyance, it was a pleasant and awe-inspiring little excursion.
The legend says that The Buddha had his big eureka moment after he sat under a Bodhi tree right here in Bodh Gaya and meditated for a long, long, LONG spell until “poof”, the magic happened. The tree is long turned to termite fodder, but there’s another tree, supposedly in the exact same spot, that’s supposedly an offshoot of the original. They really mean it when they say that Buddhism has its roots here.
Adjacent to the tree is the truly stupendous piece de resistance, the Mahabodhi Temple, which was refurbished in the 19th Century, but originally built about 1300 years earlier — or even before that. It’s hard to know for certain, but this temple does incorporate elements of an even older temple that originally stood here; The first Buddhist temple on this site seems to have been constructed in the second or third century BCE.
Inside the temple is a shrine to the Buddha, which many visitors understandably approach with the utmost reverence. At the rear is what is called the Diamond Throne, though it’s made of stone with zero diamonds attached, and it looks much more like an altar than a throne. Anyway, it was also built around the same time as the first temple, and placed to mark the spot where the Buddha sat during his meditation — since then, however, it’s been relocated a time or two or three.
Naturally, there were monks milling about the property — actually more like taking up residence than milling. And there were apprentice monks, or whatever the term was, in the form of young boys, who had their heads shaved just like their elder counterparts. There were flower petal offerings and votive lamps — even a place on the property where you could make your own votive lamp (for a fee of course). And there were plastic bottles of water left in offering at certain locations.
Several plaques designate the exact spots where the Buddha reportedly spent time during various stages of his transformation, over the course of several weeks, from prince to quasi-divinity. It may sound a bit dubious that anyone would actually know these locations with such certainty, of small actions by one person taken 2500 years ago. But on the other hand, it appears that his assistant kept some rather meticulous notes of his experiences there, so who knows.
The inside of the stone wall surrounding the complex was inscribed with a fascinating expanse of figures and inscriptions chronicling Buddhist legends and lore. We took the time to examine some of them, but the entirety would have taken at least a day, and that was more time that we had. But we left delighted to have added this impressive attraction to the growing list of UNESCO World Heritage sites that we have visited.
And as if our eyes already hadn’t been saturated enough by wondrous sights, on the way home we encountered a parade bombarding us with an explosion of color and culture unique to this particular place on earth. This community might be plagued by poverty, but it still can put on quite a show. Sorry, rainstorm, but you did not in any way douse our grand plans for this day.
This Week’s Backyard Bird Sightings
world travel with a theatrical flair 