Bodh Gaya

• 1. Introduction

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  Bodh Gaya is a city in the Gaya district of the Indian state of Bihar, and it holds a distinction that no other place on earth can claim: it is where Gautama Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. Not in a palace, not in a great city, but beside a river, under a tree, after six years of searching. That moment, if the tradition holds, changed the course of human history. And the place where it happened has drawn pilgrims ever since.

  The site sits in a region the Buddha would have known as Uruvelā, by the bank of the Lilājan River. Today it is home to the Mahabodhi Temple complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002, and a surrounding landscape dotted with temples built by communities from Tibet to Thailand, Japan to Myanmar. What brought all of them here? What does the place itself look like, and what has happened to it across the centuries? And why, in the summer of 2013, did someone plant bombs inside one of Buddhism's most sacred compounds at five in the morning?

• 2. The Moment Under the Tree

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  Siddhartha Gautama, by the traditional account, renounced his family at the age of 29 in 534 BCE and began years of wandering and meditation. For six of those years he practised extreme self-mortification at Uruvela, the place that would later be called Bodh Gaya. He ate almost nothing. He pushed his body toward its limits. And by his own account, it brought him no closer to the truth he was seeking.

  When he finally gave up that practice, the five companions who had been travelling with him were unimpressed. They looked at his well-nourished appearance and said, according to the account preserved in the source, "Here comes the mendicant Gautama, who has turned away from asceticism. He is certainly not worth our respect." The Buddha's reply is one of the clearest statements of what he had discovered. "Austerities only confuse the mind," he told them. "In the exhaustion and mental stupor to which they lead, one can no longer understand the ordinary things of life, still less the truth that lies beyond the senses. I have given up extremes of either luxury or asceticism. I have discovered the Middle Way."

  The Middle Way, as it is explained, is the path that avoids both his former life as a rich prince and the severe self-denial he had just abandoned. Hearing him speak, the five ascetics changed their minds. They became the Buddha's first disciples, not at Bodh Gaya itself, but at Deer Park in Sarnath, 13 km northeast of Varanasi.

  The moment of enlightenment itself is described as complete freedom from three things: lust, known in Pali as Rāga; hatred, or Dvesha; and delusion, Mohā. These are called the Three Poisons. The day on which it happened became known as Buddha Purnima, and the tree under which it occurred became the Bodhi Tree. Gautama's disciples began visiting the spot each year during the full moon in the month of Vaisakh, which falls in April or May by the Hindu calendar.

• 3. Ashoka and the First Temple

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  Approximately 200 years passed between the Buddha's enlightenment and the first deliberate act of commemoration at the site. In approximately 250 BCE, Maurya Emperor Ashoka visited Bodh Gaya and established a monastery and shrine there. Ashoka was also the ruler who had the site's name recorded in a different form: his Major Rock Edict No. 8 refers to the place as Sambodhi, a Sanskrit compound meaning "Complete Enlightenment."

  Ashoka's temple no longer stands in its original form, but images of it survived. Representations of the early structure appear at Sanchi, carved onto the toraṇas of Stupa I, which date from around 25 BCE. Another depiction survives in a relief carving from the stupa railing at Bhārhut, from the early Shunga period, around 185 BCE. Those stone carvings are among the earliest evidence we have of how people imagined the sacred site.

  Archaeological finds, including sculptures, confirm that Buddhists were present at the site from the Maurya period onward. The main monastery at the site was once called the Bodhimanda-vihāra in Pali. It is now known as the Mahabodhi Temple. The complex stands about 110 km from Patna and contains both the temple itself and the Vajrasana, or "diamond throne," the name given to the spot where the Buddha sat. The Bodhi Tree on the grounds today is not the original. It grew from a sapling of the Sri Maha Bodhi tree in Sri Lanka, which was itself said to have been grown from a cutting of the original tree.

• 4. Conquerors and Chieftains

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  Bodh Gaya spent centuries at the heart of a living Buddhist civilisation before outside forces began to change it. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian visited in the 5th century and left a written account. Xuanzang followed in the 7th century and also recorded what he saw, including descriptions of a Sanghārāma, a monastic complex, that had been built near the Mahabodhi Temple by Kittisirimegha of Sri Lanka with the permission of the Gupta ruler Samudragupta. That Sanghārāma was built primarily for Sri Lankan monks who came to worship the Bodhi Tree.

  Xuanzang's account also mentions a figure named Buddhaghosa, who is said to have met the Elder Revata at that same monastery, an encounter that persuaded him to travel to Ceylon. These small details reveal how the site functioned as a hub of Buddhist scholarship and movement across South and Southeast Asia.

  From the 11th to the 13th centuries, the region came under the control of local rulers called the Pithipatis of Magadha. One of their rulers, Acarya Buddhasena, made a recorded grant to Sri Lankan monks near the Mahabodhi Temple. Then, in the 12th century, Muslim Turk armies led by Qutb al-Din Aibak and Bakhtiyar Khilji of the Delhi Sultanate invaded and destroyed Bodh Gaya and the surrounding regions. The Buddhist civilisation that had flourished there for centuries did not survive the conquest. The place name "Bodh Gaya" itself, under that particular spelling, only came into common use in the 18th century.

• 5. A Landscape of Many Nations

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  Walk the grounds around the Mahabodhi Temple today and you are moving through a concentrated map of Buddhist Asia. Temples and monasteries built by communities from Tibet, Mongolia, Nepal, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Sikkim, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Bhutan, and China surround the central complex, each reflecting the architecture and decorative traditions of its home country.

  Japan's Nippon temple is shaped like a pagoda. The Myanmar temple is also pagoda-shaped and is described as reminiscent of Bagan, the ancient city of temples in central Myanmar. The Thai temple has a sloping, curved roof covered with golden tiles and contains a massive bronze statue of the Buddha. Standing next to it is a 25 m statue of the Buddha set within a garden that has existed for over 100 years.

  Inside the Chinese temple, a statue of the Buddha is 200 years old and was brought from China. Across the Phalgu River, in the village of Bakraur, stands the Sujata Stupa, built in the 2nd century BCE and confirmed by finds of black polished wares and punch-marked coins. It commemorates the milkmaid Sujata, who is said to have offered the Buddha milk and rice while he sat under a Banyan tree, ending his long fast and giving him the strength to pursue the Middle Way.

  The Great Buddha Statue, standing 80 feet tall, was unveiled and consecrated on the 18th of November 1989. The 14th Dalai Lama attended the ceremony and blessed the statue. The organisation behind it, Daijokyo, worked under the slogan "Spread Buddha's rays to the Whole World" and spent seven years on the construction, mobilising 120,000 masons.

• 6. The 2013 Bombings

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  On the 7th of July 2013, at around 5:15 in the morning, a low-intensity bomb blast struck the Mahabodhi Temple complex. It was not an isolated event. A series of nine low-intensity blasts followed. Two monks were injured, one Tibetan and one Burmese. Police discovered and defused two additional bombs, one placed under the Buddha statue and one near the Karmapa Temple.

  The blasts were carried out by the Islamist terrorist organisation Indian Mujahideen. The attack on one of Buddhism's most sacred sites drew international attention and prompted a major investigation. On the 1st of June 2018, a special court of the National Investigation Agency in Patna sentenced five suspects in the case to life imprisonment.