Mahabodhi Temple

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mahabodhi Temple stands in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India, on the ground where Siddhartha Gautama is said to have ended suffering itself. Not his own suffering alone. All suffering. Around 589 BCE, a young prince reached the forested banks of the Phalgu river, sat beneath a peepul tree, and after three days and three nights, attained enlightenment. What grew from that moment is one of the longest continuously visited sacred sites on earth, drawing Buddhist pilgrims for over two thousand years.

  The structure visible today is built largely of brick. Brick covered in stucco. Materials far less durable than stone, and yet the main temple has survived Muslim invasions, centuries of abandonment, and a bombing in 2013. Its central tower rises 55 metres into the Bihar sky. Some of the oldest elements on the site date to the reign of Emperor Ashoka, who died around 232 BCE.

  How did a brick temple outlast empires? Who fought to possess it, and who fought to recover it? And what does it mean that the holiest site in Buddhism spent centuries in the hands of a Shaiva Hindu priest?

• 2. Seven Weeks, Seven Spots

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  After attaining enlightenment beneath the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha did not immediately leave. He spent the following seven weeks at seven distinct locations within the surrounding area, meditating on what he had experienced.

  The first week he remained under the Bodhi Tree itself. During the second week, he stood and gazed at the tree without blinking, without interruption. The spot where he stood is now marked by the Animeshlocha Stupa, the unblinking stupa, to the northeast of the main temple complex. A statue there shows the Buddha with his eyes fixed toward the Bodhi Tree.

  Between the Animeshlocha Stupa and the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha is said to have walked back and forth. According to legend, lotus flowers appeared along his path. That route is now called Ratnachakrama, the jewel walk. The fourth week was spent near Ratnagar Chaitya, to the northeast. The sixth week was spent beside the Lotus pond. The seventh week passed beneath the Rajyatna tree.

  The current temple complex preserves spatial references to these traditions, which means the site is not merely a monument but a map of those seven weeks, readable in stone and landscape alike.

• 3. The Bodhi Tree's Weight

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  Buddhist mythology assigns the Bodhimaṇḍa, the ground surrounding the Bodhi Tree, a cosmic significance that goes well beyond horticulture. According to the Jatakas, the navel of the earth lies at this spot. No other place, the texts insist, could support the weight of the Buddha's attainment.

  The tradition holds that when the world is destroyed at the end of a kalpa, the Bodhimaṇḍa is the last spot to disappear from existence. When the world re-emerges, it is the first to reappear. If a Buddha is born in a new kalpa, lotus flowers bloom there in a number corresponding to how many Buddhas are expected to arise.

  The Bodhi tree currently growing at Bodh Gaya is believed to be a direct descendant of the original tree under which Siddhartha Gautama meditated. The temple was built directly to the east of that tree. And one tradition holds that on the very day Gautama Buddha was born, a Bodhi tree sprang up at this exact location, as if the site had marked him long before he arrived.

  These traditions explain why the tree itself has been both protected and endangered across the site's long history, drawing both devoted guardians and those who would sell its branches.

• 4. Ashoka to the Guptas

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  Emperor Ashoka visited Bodh Gaya in approximately 250 BCE, roughly two centuries after the Buddha's enlightenment, to establish a monastery and shrine. That original monastery has since disappeared, but the Diamond Throne, which Ashoka placed at the foot of the Bodhi Tree, survives. Known also as the Vajrasana, it was built between 250 and 233 BCE, and is still an active site of worship and festivity.

  Representations of an early temple structure appear at Sanchi on the toranas of Stupa I, dated from around 25 BCE, and on a railing relief carving from Bharhut from the early Shunga period, roughly 185 to 73 BCE. The Sungas also contributed columns with pot-shaped bases around the Diamond Throne, dated to the 1st century BCE. The sandstone railings encircling the temple complex trace to about 150 BCE, and carry carved panels and medallions comparable in style to those at Bharhut and Sanchi.

  A plaque from Kumrahar, dated by its Kharoshthi inscriptions and accompanying Huvishka coins to roughly 150-200 CE, shows the Mahabodhi Temple already in its present pyramidal shape. By the 5th-6th century CE, under the Gupta Empire, the current structure was consolidated. The Gupta builders drew on an architectural tradition from Gandhara: a succession of stepped terraces with niches containing Buddha images, alternating with Greco-Roman pillars, crowned by a hemispherical stupa. UNESCO describes this completed Gupta-period temple as one of the earliest and most imposing structures built entirely in brick from that era. The design moved Buddhist architecture from the aniconic stupa, which housed relics, toward a temple dense with images of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, a shift that filtered into later Hindu temple architecture as well.

• 5. Patronage Across Borders

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  Faxian, writing in the 5th century, recorded three monasteries around the temple complex, each with monks sustained by local lay donors who provided food and other necessities. What Faxian observed was already an international site.

  By the 11th century, delegations arrived from Tibet, China, Sri Lanka, and Burma. King Kyansittha sent the first Burmese expedition during this period, and three additional Burmese missions followed up to the 14th century. Their purpose was repair work and gift-giving; the gifts reportedly included musical instruments. A 6th-century donative inscription by a Sri Lankan monk named Mahānāman records a temple built at the Bodhimanda, attesting to centuries of Sri Lankan connection. Five Chinese inscriptions found at the complex record gifts from Chinese monks in the 11th century, one of whom stated he was acting on behalf of the Song Emperor.

  Local patronage also shaped the site. The Pithipatis of Magadha, based in Bodh Gaya, contributed to the temple's upkeep, and a 13th-century inscription records the rededication of a Pala-period Buddha image by a Pithipati named Jayasena, whose dedicatory text was placed in the plinth during the 1884 restoration.

  The breadth of this patronage record explains the temple's durability: no single dynasty or polity owned it. When one source of support collapsed, others stepped in, and the pilgrimage network kept the site known across much of the Buddhist world even during its worst periods of physical decline.

• 6. Abandonment and Return

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  After the fall of the Pala Empire, which had sustained Mahayana Buddhism across northeastern India from the 8th to the 12th century, Bodh Gaya and nearby regions were invaded and destroyed by Muslim Turk armies under Delhi Sultanate commanders Qutb al-Din Aibak and Bakhtiyar Khilji. The temple fell into disrepair and was largely abandoned.

  The Tibetan monk Dharmasvamin arrived at Bodh Gaya in late 1234 and left a detailed account of what he found. Monks had blocked off the Buddha images in the sanctum to protect them from "Turushkas," his term for the Turkish forces. Notably, the Vajrasana throne and other objects were left undisturbed, as they apparently held no interest for the invaders. Dharmasvamin also recorded that Sri Lankan monks alone were permitted to sleep in the courtyard and conduct worship, suggesting a continuity of Sri Lankan presence even in the temple's most depleted state.

  The last known abbot before the temple's long dormancy was Śāriputra, who took up the position in the late 14th century, carried out repairs including rebuilding the temple's gandola, which had been destroyed, and then eventually left India for Nepal in the 15th century.

  In the 1880s, the British colonial government began a restoration under Sir Alexander Cunningham and Joseph David Beglar. In 1886, Sir Edwin Arnold visited the site and, guided by Weligama Sri Sumangala, published articles calling attention to the deteriorated condition at Buddhagaya. That visit set in motion a decades-long campaign that would ultimately change who controlled the temple.

• 7. The Battle for Control

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  In 1891, Anagarika Dharmapala arrived at the recently restored Mahabodhi Temple on pilgrimage and found it administered by a Shaiva Hindu priest. The Buddha image had been reworked into a Hindu icon, and Buddhists were barred from worship at their own holiest site. Dharmapala began an agitation movement.

  He founded the Maha Bodhi Society in Colombo that same year, then moved its offices to Calcutta in 1892. One of its central aims was the return of the temple to Buddhist care. Dharmapala filed a lawsuit against the Brahmin priests who had controlled the site for centuries. The case dragged on past Indian independence in 1947 and sixteen years past Dharmapala's own death in 1933. Partial success came in 1949, when control passed from the Hindu mahant to the Bihar state government, which formed the Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee under the Bodh Gaya Temple Act of 1949. By law, a majority of the nine-member committee, including its chairman, were required to be Hindus.

  In 2013, the Bihar government amended the act to allow a non-Hindu to chair the committee. Also in 2013, one thousand Indian Buddhists protested at the site demanding full Buddhist control. Among the leaders were Bhante Anand, president of the Akhil Bharatiya Bhikkhu Mahasangh, and Japanese-born Surai Sasai, who emerged as one of the campaign's prominent figures.

  The question of who rightfully governs the site where Buddhism began remains open, sustained by the same competing claims that Dharmapala first named in 1891.

• 8. Modern Pressures

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  In June 2002, the Mahabodhi Temple was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. All religious artefacts found in the area fall under the protection of the Treasure Trove Act of 1878.

  The temple's head monk, Bhikkhu Bodhipala, resigned in 2007 after being charged with regularly cutting branches from the Mahabodhi tree and selling them to foreign buyers for significant sums. Reports identified wealthy Thai buyers and alleged involvement by senior members of the temple management committee. A criminal charge was filed; conviction would have carried a minimum of ten years' imprisonment.

  In early 2013, Thai organisers launched a fundraising initiative to gild the temple's upper spire with gold. By August of that year, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar confirmed that the Archaeological Survey of India had accepted the proposal under stated conditions. Reports described the gold as coming primarily from Thailand, attributed to both the Thai king and Thai devotees, with amounts widely cited as 289 kg. One report put the total at 280 kg. Only the top 18 feet of the 180-foot-high structure was planned for gold coverage.

  On the 7th of July 2013, ten low-intensity bombs exploded across the temple complex between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning, injuring five people. Three unexploded devices were found and defused. The main temple was undamaged. On the 4th of November 2013, the National Investigation Agency announced that the Islamic terrorist group Indian Mujahideen was responsible. The Intelligence Bureau of India had reportedly alerted state officials to possible threats around fifteen days before the attack.