Bodh Gaya and Surrounding Areas

The Buddha was known for sitting motionless in meditation for long periods of time, especially in and around the current city of Bodh Gaya, which is home to the bodhi tree under which Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment and thenceforth became known as the Buddha.

Unlike the Buddha, I am not gifted in the art of sitting still for long periods of time; so spending most of the past week in one place has been a bit of a challenge. I did, however, make it to a couple of pilgrimage sites well off the beaten path; practiced more yoga than I have in quite some time; overcame a bout of stomach illness from eating street food; re-connected with a couple of soul brothers; and binged watched She-Hulk and Marvel’s holiday specials on Disney+ during my stay. (I’m not sure if that last accomplishment will get me any closer to enlightenment, however.)

Transit

Setting out from Vaishali, I originally intended to go to Patna and then navigate directly to Rajgir and Nalanda, but some bad decision making and a really pushy baggage handler at the bus station in Patna caused those plans to go awry.

Basically, I ended up on a bus direct to Gaya instead of finding something along the course to Rajgir. I am pretty sure I could have found a bus from Patna or possibly a train if this guy who grabbed up my bag and hustled me onto a Gaya bus had not been involved. So I ended up in Gaya and instead of doing the sensible thing there and transferring on immediately to Rajgir, I ended up sharing a tuk-tuk with a Nepali pilgrim to Bodh Gaya.

I arrived in Bodh Gaya two days earlier than planned but I had not seen Rajgir and Nalanda yet. I would have to double back to Gaya later in the week to do this, along with a side trip I was not aware of to a sacred mountain called Gurpa. All that travel was accomplished via local buses and tuk-tuks to and from Gaya.

Pinnacle of Poverty

One thing it is important to note about Bodh Gaya is that no matter where you go, you will be accosted by people trying to get you to give them money. From the countless beggars on the street to guides with motorcycles trying to sell you rides to the surrounding sites to people trying to get you to visit their schools for poor or handicapped children, the number of people in need is entirely overwhelming.

Bihar is considered India’s poorest state and it is very evident in Bodh Gaya.

I ended up giving some rupees to one of the motorcycle guides on my first night in town and he would not stop trying to get me to give him more the entire time I was in town. He said he had a medical condition and wanted me to foot the bill for his treatment.

Regarding guides, if you have read the history of the sites on the internet or in books – as most people who are doing pilgrimage treks tend to do – you already know the extent of the history these guides are going to give you. They just end up being distractions in your experience of the sites that you have to pay money to. I understand that these are all just people trying to earn money, but it does feel very much like they target foreign tourists – especially fair-skinned ones – and the relentless hounding gets to be rather frustrating. I try to be compassionate, but it can be very difficult at times.

Then there are the children or the elderly or deformed people. It is hard to walk past rows of these people who are clearly suffering and not be able to help. Even if I gave them each 10 rupees, it would be a drop in a bucket. A pack of biscuits for each of them would do little to end the suffering these people endure.

Prior to going into the Sujata site, one of the men getting donations for a nearby school approached me and imposed himself on my time at Sujata. I ended up going with him to his school where he showed me the classes of students being taught there. They were clearly the poor children and the mission of the school is to end begging by educating children. It seemed worthy so I ended up giving him 1,000 rupees and taking a receipt. I think next year when it is time to buy school supplies, I will try to send the school some supplies via Amazon.in.

As I move forward from this journey, I do hope to find some meaningful way I can help these people in need.

Before the He Was the Buddha

I checked into the Root Institute, which is a Tibetan Buddhist center maintained by the Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition, that runs Tushita, where I practiced meditation at Dharamshala, and the Kopan Monastery at Kathmandu, which I unfortunately did not get a chance to visit. I had signed up for a weekend yoga retreat at Root but had a couple of extra days to explore before the classes began.

I woke up early on the first full day and headed out for the main pilgrimage sites. Before visiting the Mahabodhi Temple, which is the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, I wanted to see the places he spent his final years as Siddhartha Gautama before proceeding.

So I walked down to the Phalgu (Niranjana) River and crossed the bridge to view the Sujata Stupa, which is the site where the young woman, Sujata, gave the emaciated sage (who she may have thought to be the spirit of a tree she had been praying to) a bowl of purified rice pudding. Eating this kheer, which is a symbolic act of all the buddhas, marks a renunciation of the ascetic path in favor of a path of moderation – the Middle Path, as the Buddha called it.

The man I mentioned previously from the school near Sujata loaned me a bicycle to ride onward to Dungeshwari Cave, which is where Siddhartha Gautama spent the six years of his life living as an ascetic, eating as little as a single grain of rice a day.

I rode the bicycle, which was a little awkward for my 6-foot-3-inch frame, the approximately 6 to 7 kilometers from the school to the cave. I actually had to walk it across half the Phalgu River, which is very low as it has not rained here in weeks. I made the bumpy ride east along the sparsely used road, smiling at the quizzical looks of the locals who were amused to see a tall white guy riding a local bicycle down this dusty road.

The cave itself – also known as the Mahakala Cave – is up on the side of a small mountain range that rises up out of the otherwise flat terrain. There is a pathway up to it, which is lined with people begging or selling packets of biscuits you can feed to monkeys, along with incense and souvenirs of the trip.

In addition to a large sculpture of the emaciated Siddhartha, the cave doubles as a Hindu shrine and there were two Hindu men inside who were supposedly overseeing the shrine. They would offer prasad, or holy food to anyone who makes a cash offering at the shrine. Instead of doing anything resembling a spiritual practice, however, both men were watching movies on their mobile phones at competing high volumes. It was very distracting from the spiritual nature of the place and then when I got up to leave, one of them tried to pressure me into giving a donation to their shrine, which I imagined they would just pocket at the end of the day.

Maybe this is just the cynic in me, but I don’t really understand the practice of leaving cash at shrines featuring idols, especially when I don’t even know why I am doing it. Is it just because other people are doing it that I am to do it? Is it in the spirit of personal sacrifice that I leave my hard-earned cash behind? Or is it for maintenance of the temple? (But oftentimes there are other boxes for temple maintenance.) And most importantly, who is it that I am asking for a blessing from? I don’t really understand the pantheon of Hindu deities, but what I know of some of them I am not certain I want their blessings.

With these two sites out of the way, I rode back to the Sujata stupa and returned the bicycle before making my way to the Mahabodhi Temple.

Sitting on Hallowed Ground

One of the nice things about the Mahabodhi site is that cell phones are strictly prohibited (except in rare cases where passes are issued). This meant no selfies with Zoomers and very few big groups stopping to have their group photos made in front of every possible site.

In fact, compared to the other pilgrimage sites, there are very few 20-somethings running around inside Mahabodhi. Maybe it is because they can’t part with their cell phones long enough to endure a trip there or maybe it just isn’t the thing for the newest generation of youths. I won’t try to explain it further, but the crowd inside the temple grounds is typically a more serious adult. There are a lot of Southeast Asian pilgrims, both monastic and lay, as well as dedicated monks from all corners of the world who live in and around the Bodh Gaya area. There are also a considerably larger number of western pilgrims at Bodh Gaya than I saw at any other site I have visited so far.

Chanting of prayers and seeing people in meditation or performing prostrations across the temple grounds lends an air of solemnity to the experience. There was a sort of indescribably peace that descended as I sat just a few meters from the exact spot where Siddhartha Gautama became the fully enlightened Buddha.

I don’t know how long I spent there that first afternoon, but I would return several more times before my week in Bodh Gaya was up. It is certainly a very spiritual place and, although I still have a few places left on this pilgrimage, it marks a culmination of this monthlong leg of my trip. I am not certain if or when I might make it back. While I do feel a spiritual connection with the place, I won’t say Bodh Gaya has been my favorite place on the pilgrimage either. It actually pales in comparison to the experiences I had at Lumbini and Shravasti, but every individual takes away their own lessons from these places. I am sure as I look back on this time in coming months or later in life, I will understand the experiences and lessons more clearly.

Yakking and Yoga

The morning I was scheduled to start the yoga weekend workshop, I woke up puking horribly and had to spend the whole Saturday in bed. Bihar reportedly has exceptionally dirty water and I had been somewhat careless with my consumption of street food, so I guess that was my karma working itself outside.

By Sunday, however, I felt sufficiently recovered from the ailment to practice yoga with Annie, a 77-year-old Australian firecracker who has been practicing yoga and Buddhism longer than I’ve been in this body. We did roughly four hours of yoga that day and at least three hours on Monday. I had not really practiced any yoga since the daily sadhanas Sulav and I did in Lumbini, so it was definitely a welcome relief from the travel grind.

I toured the Mahabodhi museum on Tuesday and laid plans to go to Rajgir and Nalanda via Gaya on the following day.

A Place of Learning

The most famous location at Rajgir is called Vulture’s Peak, which is where the Buddha delivered some of the most famous lessons, such as the Lotus Sutra, the Heart Sutra and the Immeasurable Life sutras were delivered to the bhikshus. Nalanda, which dates back to the 5th Century, was the home of the first Buddhist university and boasted having more than 10,000 students spread across a massive campus.

In addition to being the physical place I visited, which is basically a platform on the peak of an approximately 300-meter mountain, Vulture’s Peak is also the metaphysical place outside space and time where the eternal Buddha continues to preach the Dhamma to the 12,000 bhikshus.

Regardless, atop three peaks of the mountains now, there is the Vulture’s Peak platform itself, along with the remains of a few rooms used by monks ascetics during the ensuing centuries; a Japanese Peace Pagoda, which I believe was the fifth of those I have visited; and an Ashoka Stupa on top of a crumbled pile of rubble on the third.

Of all of these little places, I enjoyed the Ashoka Stupa most as no one else went out of their way to visit it. I could hear the chanting of the monks and pilgrims who swarmed at Vulture’s Peak and see off in the distance the Peace Pagoda and the ridge on which several Jain mandirs sit.

Also of note, along the road to Vulture’s Peak is a place called Bimbisar’s Jail, where the king of the land, who was a devout Buddhist, was imprisoned by his own son, along with the ruins of an old mango grove.

After visiting these sites, I attempted to walk along the ridge from the Peace Pagoda to the Jain mandirs, but the jungle environment of the area prohibited me from doing so. I took a tuk-tuk back toward town and he dropped me at the entrance to the hot springs, which is also the lead up to the Saptapani Cave and ruins where the Buddha’s disciples convened after his paranirvana in order to determine how to best disseminate his teachings.

The climb up to the cave is steep and moderately strenuous and includes several Jain temples as well as the two Buddhist sites. The first is the ruins of a monastery that has very well preserved statues of the Buddha intact in the niches. The cave is a little further up the path and provides a very nice overlook of the city of Rajgir.

After descending from Saptapani, I went ahead and took a tuk-tuk all the way to Nalanda. In retrospect, I should have just taken the tuk-tuk to the Rajgir bus stand and waited for the next bus to Nalanda, which go by every 15 minutes or so and are much cheaper. Regardless, I got there and the driver dropped me right at the gate, instead of the highway which is about a kilometer from the site.

I paid the hefty 600 rupee entrance fee and made my way into the grounds. I was immediately accosted by the local guides who insisted that I would not be able to understand the site without their help. I eventually succumbed to the pressure of one guide and let him explain. In the half hour or so he explained the ruins, he offered a few tidbits of information I would not have gotten from the guidebooks or internet resources I was using – such as pointing out the room where Xuanzang (aka Hiuen Tsan), the famous Chinese explorer of the Buddhist pilgrimage path, stayed during his time at the university.

In addition to the dozen or so dormitories, which are arranged around a central courtyard with their own kitchens, the Nalanda site, which is estimated to have covered 50-square-kilometers at its peak, also features several temples and a large and ornate stupa build by Emperor Ashoka in honor of the Buddha’s wisest disciple, Sariputra.

I spend over an hour at the excavated grounds before visiting the museum just across the street from the site, which was mere 5 rupees to enter. There were lots of statues and bronze work done by the artisans who studied and perfected their skills at the university.

Getting back to Rajgir was very easy via a shared tuk-tuk that rolled by and a bus that showed up 5 to 10 minutes after I got to the highway.

Gurpa Mountain

I left Rajgir the following morning via the first available bus for Gaya. Unlike the trip there, however, the bus went on a route further south and I realized I was much closer to a place called Gurpa Mountain I wanted to visit, so I jumped off in a town called Wazirganj. I got a tuk-tuk there and I would end up spending the entire day with the driver, who dropped me back at Bodh Gaya after climbing the mountain with me. There may be other ways to get there and back without paying upwards of 2,000 rupees to a personal driver, but I didn’t see any public buses and the train station at Gaya said the passenger trains that pass through do not stop in Gurpa.

Regardless, the driver (whose Indian name I could not commit to memory) and I climbed the nearly 1,700 steps from the village at the base all the way to the top. The only people we saw during the entire trip were a few impoverished villagers and Annie’s group from the Root Institute that I knew were also hiking there that day.

I’m not really sure if this site, also known as Kukkutapada or Gurupadaka, is actually a placed visited by the Buddha, but one of his most revered disciples, Mahakashyapa, was swallowed by the mountain and still waits in meditation for the future Buddha, Maitreya, to arrive in the world so he can present him with Shakyamuni’s robe.

The path of is quite steep and one must traverse a very narrow staircase between two large rock walls to reach the apex. My companion, who smoked and used tobacco, had to stop quite frequently for breathers on the hike up to the top.

The view from the top is spectacular and the crevices are neat to explore. Although legend has it that they lead into the heart of the mountain where Mahakashyapa waits, I would not recommend trying to get there.

Fortunately, the descent back down is much easier and we were back in Bodh Gaya by 3 p.m.

Another Farewell

I spent a few more days in Bodh Gaya, along with my friend and occasional travel companion, Benjamin, who had arrived in town about the same time as I had and did part of the yoga retreat as well.

We met for the first time on the bus to Dharamshala and spent that first day exploring the Dalai Lama’s temple together. Like me he is in recovery from alcohol and drug abuse and we had the opportunity to celebrate his four year anniversary with a slice of cake while we were in Bodh Gaya (which reminds me that today is my own nine-year anniversary).

If you’ve followed this whole blog to this point, you will also recall that Benjamin showed up in Pokhara, Nepal, while I was on the Annapurna Circuit and joined Ella and I for a few days of hiking starting at Tatopani.

We said our final farewells on my final evening in Bodh Gaya following a a tour of the Sakya Buddhist Temple and an interesting chesse-based dish called Datsi, served in a Bhutanese tent pop-up restaurant outside the temple.

I guess I should mention that this was also Thanksgiving week and I remember spending the evening of Thanksgiving texting with my parents and sister via WhatsApp as I watched Marvel’s holiday specials. I also figured out that I can binge about an hour worth of Disney+ per night on my 1.5-gigabyte cellular plan.

I’m not sure if that will get me any closer to enlightenment, but I think my stop in Bodh Gaya overall will have a lasting impression that will reverberate well beyond this lifetime.