The Center of the Buddhist World: Bodh Gaya

Dhr. Seven, Crystal Quintero, Seth Auberon, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Asian Art Museum, Pasadena (asianart.org); kathmanduandbeyond.com (photo); iloveindia.com

Great Enlightenment Temple (Maha Bodhi Cetiya), Bodhgaya, India (kathmandubeyond.com)

 

BODH GAYA, India - The wandering ascetic Siddhartha searched for a suitable tree to strive under. He chose one but was so weak from self-starvation and severe austerities that were it not for a maiden who mistook him for a dryad, a tree spirit manifesting in human form, he would have failed.

The maid ran to tell the mistress who daily made offerings at the tree. They prepared a rich meal of rice, milk, creme de la creme, and sweet treacle (coconut tree syrup).

Go back, be rich, prince! - Mara, I see you.

They approached the emaciated ascetic offered it. He was so weak they had to revive him, which disgusted the Five Ascetics, Siddhartha's fellow mendicants who abandoned him for accepting anything from a woman's hand. After all their help restoring him to health, Siddhartha realized the body was necessary for the quest. It was not the obstacle to be overcome, but rather it was the heart/mind. He left in search of a suitable place to strive, bathing in the river Neranjara, convinced that success was near.

Under Bodhi tree ("Enlightenment Tree") at the platform seat (Glenn Losack M.D./flickr)

 

Mara makes obstacles, kills, distracts.

He came to an awe inspiring grove and chose a tree that legend says was born the same day he was, which would have made it 34-years-old. Under its delightful shade he made a seat and determined not to give up until he realized the answer to, Why do we suffer?

But rather than striving with vigor, he realized that that had been fruitless and brought him to the verge of death.

Instead, he wondered why he had been avoiding the happy meditative absorptions (that go from supersensual bliss, joy, rapture all the way to very subtle unbiased equanimity) available to him. He realized, he would later say, that immersed in and obsessed by his austerities, he feared pleasure -- but why fear pleasure not tangled up with sensuality?

How to gain enlightenment


Siddhartha the ascetic wondered if this might be the way to enlightenment -- these pleasant absorptions -- and a certainty came upon him.
 
(In many past lives as a wandering ascetic he had developed, enjoyed, and benefited from the absorptions, which lead to spiritual bliss, supernormal powers, and enhanced consciousness, so at some level of subtle awareness he felt certain that they could help him now).
 

Relax, you've got plenty of time.

But many ascetics develop the meditative absorptions -- the zens, dhyanas, jhanas, chans -- and find that they are not enough. They can serve as an excellent basis for practicing successful insight meditation, contemplative practices in the temporary purity of mind/heart provided by immersing oneself in the absorptions, emerging, and immediately practicing for insight (vipassana).
 
Entering the first four jhanas successively and emerging, Siddhartha then asked himself the all-important question: What is this suffering due to? He realized that this was conditioned by that, but that was conditioned by something else. And he went back and back through 12 causal links (called Dependent Origination) to realize how things arise, how this present suffering arises, how it is he had come to be through an unfathomable past.

Moreover, he realized that there was a weak link in this chain, a point in the cyclical process which he could do something about: craving. Part of the chain depended on desiring, craving, and clinging to sensuality, to views, to continued becoming in superior states of existence.

Inside the main shrine of the Maha Bodhi ("Great Enlightenment") Temple in Bodh Gaya ("Enlightenment Grove"), Bihar (vihara) state, India (bharat), there is a golden statue under glass (Simon Maddison/maddison_simon/flickr)

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Sensual craving, clinging to views
While he could not will himself not to desire, not to crave, there was a way to bring about the cessation of craving: One could look at things just as they really are. For example, whatever one lusts, why does one lust after it?

WARNING: Don't look!

Partly, it is because it is pleasing, appealing, beautiful, and alluring -- until we keep looking and start to notice that it is flawed, falling away, aging, based on things completely unlike it. Say we find a body appealing, its beautiful skin and proportionality, its alluring fragrance and softness. If we look and keep looking, it will not be but a few hours before we notice impurities, offensive odors, "soil" coming out of all its openings -- mucus, ear wax, spittle, feces, urine, sweat, fat, gas.
 

Walking corpses (femen.org)

The realization is so shocking, so real, that the mind/heart shrinks back. One becomes dispassionate, disillusioned, and there is a moment of freedom, seeing things as they really are.
 
We are quickly re-illusioned; we run to it as our only safety and comfort in a harsh world, and we die still firmly in the grip of delusion, craving, and aversion (to all that is repugnant).
 
The heart/mind will not stand for the painful and disappointing truth. But, Siddhartha wondered, we were to stay with it? It allows an opening for systematic insight exercises, and one can break through to a realization that this has gone on not only in this life, this existence, but in countless past lives, past existences, past states of consciousness, past homes, past births, past states of becoming. And something more shocking is true: It is not only the gross impurities that are repulsive, there is a very subtle illusion going on:

That thing, that thing

Sid broke through (Songkhram_Ahuwari)

That thing, that composite-heap, is not one thing but countless parts, each of which is constantly falling away and being replaced. That thing -- all things -- that seems so stable, so likely to provide pleasure and satisfaction, actually provides a constant illusion and inevitable disappointment.

We never realize this; we cling to it instead as if maybe next time it will satisfy us, fulfill us, grant us lasting happiness and contentment. It fails, and fails, and fails, and yet we keep doing it seeing no other choice than to chase after illusory things. And it is not only sensual pleasures, but intellectual views (speculations, theories, philosophies, opinions, sides, real delusions about ourselves, about the world we think we see, feel, and taste out there).

Stop seeking. Live and die again.

Siddhartha's mind/heart let go, shrank back, pulled away, turned from, abandoned its clinging, its craving for this deception, and he saw things as they really are, profoundly realizing that "all things that come to be are subject to falling away; how could it be otherwise."

In other words, once one sees that things are not what they seem but are instead a painful trap, an mesmerizing illusion, a wheel we have been treading, a process the ancient mystics long ago named samsara -- this endless "continued wandering on." See, death would not be the end, death had never been the end, but just then Death got angry.

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Samsara, the Wheel of Existence, the process of rebirth and redeath, the "continued wandering on" is like my hamster's wheel, a source of endless distraction with no origination point and no end. It does not unravel by itself but will keep going and going endlessly. However, there is a way to get off this useless and painful pursuit. More fun

Mara (Cupid) is beautiful

Mara, the personification of death, would not stand idly by as someone came so close to the answer awakening from this fitful dream, where Death imagines itself the supreme ruler. Mara Namuci the "demon" with an army of ogres (male and female yakkhas) came to unseat the Bodhisat (bodhisattva, bodhisatta, the "buddha-to-be," the being-intent-on-enlightenment).
 
Siddhartha persevered and remembering countless past lives, past conditions, past times when these same things had been true, these lines pursued, never seeing this Dependent Origination of things.

Attack before he realizes the Truth!

He broke through and became the Buddha ("supremely awakened teacher"), a title signifying his perfectly awakened state. One should not cling to this title because the Sage of the Shakyas (his family clan name) has gone by many titles, Mahavira ("Great Hero"), Tathagata (the "Wayfarer or Welcome One and Well Gone One"), Bhagava ("Blessed One"), and so on.

We say the historical Buddha because the former Prince Siddhartha Gautama (Gotama) realized that there had been other Awakened Ones in the distant past and in the future, a precious few who taught, many more who could not, and those striving to accomplish this level of realization and teaching ability.
 

Tibetan monks use wooden planks to do 100,000 prostrations to the Bodhi tree (not shown)

The Navel of the Earth: Buddhist India

Wisdom Quarterly, Ven. Shravasti Dhammika, Navel of the Earth: The History and Significance of Bodh Gaya (Buddha Dhamma Mandala, Singapore), Abbot Karunananda, Ph.D.

Siddhartha on his horse, Kanthaka, with Channa as he renounces household life (Sims)

 

Tonight under the blood moon is New Year's Eve in Long Beach as in Bangladesh (the Vanga Kingdom next to the Magadha Kingdom), formerly regions in ancient Buddhist India. 

The region (now a Muslim country) was part of modern India up until 1947 when it was created overnight by the exiting British colonial power's Partition).

The Bangladeshi Theravada Buddhist community has two temples in California, one here and one in Riverside. Long Beach is an industrial port town of Los Angeles -- where the Queen Mary and Spruce Goose are docked, an enormous glass pyramid stands as a beacon to wisdom (CSULB), and where the Dalai Lama used to make annual visits to teach -- as it abuts Orange County.

The area is full of Buddhist temples: Cambodian and Thai Wats, a Japanese pagoda, a Tibetan gompa, a Chinese nunnery dedicated to Kwan Yin (formerly Catholic), and Vietnamese Buddhist temples as well. Gathering to remember the Buddha, the community recited the precepts and the Abbot spoke of Ven. Dhammika's book on the place where Siddhartha gained liberating insight to become the Buddha, the great teacher of the Dharma.

 

Tibetan monastics around the Mahabodhi Temple, Bodh Gaya, India (Shene81/flickr)

 

Going to Sambodhi

Ven. Shravasti Dhammika (Australian, ordained in Sri Lanka, living in Singapore)

I renounce these riches and responsibilities.

Bodh Gaya is a large village in the southern part of the Indian state of Bihar (viharas). The environment around the village is rural, being made up of cultivated areas interspersed with open ground on which grow mango, tamarind, and palm trees. Beside the village flows the wide but shallow Lilajan river.

In Buddhist texts, the river is call Neranjara, a name derived form the words pleasant (nelan) or alternatively blue (nila) and water (jalam). About a mile downstream from Bodh Gaya, the Lilanjan joins the Mohana to form the Phalgu river, which flows past Gaya and is considered sacred to Hindus.

Great clan territories of ancient India

The name Bodh Gaya has been spelled variously as Buddha Gaya, Boodha Gaya, Buddh Gya, Bauddha Gyah, and Bodhi Gaya. In any of its forms, it is not an old name, first occurring in the spurious inscription of Amaradeva, a document of uncertain but recent date (Buddha Gaya: the Great Buddhist Temple, the Hermitage of Sakya Muni, Rajendralala Mitra, 1878, p.201).

At the time of the Buddha, the village was named Uruvela. According to Dharmapala, it was given this name because of a large amount of sand (vela) in the area. He tells a delightful story to explain all the sand:

Siddhartha finds a pleasant riverside grove and sturdy tropical tree for striving.

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[The Sand, all this Sand!]

In the distant past, long before the Buddha, a company of wandering ascetics lived in the area. They could tell who among them had committed an unwholesome bodily or verbal deed but not if they had had an unwholesome thought. So they came to an agreement among themselves that whoever should think an unwholesome thought would bring sand in a leaf basket. Soon the entire area was covered with sand (Udana Atthakatha, p.26).

Other sources say the village was given the name on account of a vilva tree (Aegie marmelas) growing nearby (ASI, 1908-09, p.144). It seems that within two centuries of the Buddha's great awakening, the name Uruvela fell out of use and was replaced by four other names:

1. Sambodhi
2. Bodhimanda
3. Vajrasana
4. Mahabodhi

Great Enlightenment Temple, Bodh Gaya, India

The oldest and now least commonly used of these names was Sambodhi, meaning "complete enlightenment." In the Eighth Rock Edict issued in 256 BCE, Indian Emperor Asoka says he "went to Sambodhi" (ayaya Sambodhi) referring to his pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya four year earlier (The Edicts of King Asoka, Ven. S. Dhammika, 1993, p.12).

Another ancient name, Bodhimanda, refers to the circular area around the Bodhi tree. The Kalingabodhi Jataka describes the Bodhimanda before Siddhartha's enlightenment as being covered with silvery sand without a blade of grass growing on it and with all the surrounding trees and flowering shrubs bending, as if in homage, toward the Bodhi tree (Jataka, Vol. IV, p.233).

The exact place where the Buddha sat when he was enlightened was called Vajrasana meaning the "Diamond  or Adamantine Throne." 

It is believed that when the universe finally disintegrates, this will be the last place to disappear and that it will be the first place to form when the universe ["world-system," possibly simply a galaxy or merely a solar system, sakwala] begins to re-evolve again.

The ascetic Siddhartha (AB)

The Vajrasana was also sometimes called the "Victory Throne or Palanquin of all Buddhas" (Sabbabuddhanam Jayapallankam) or "the Navel of the Earth" (Pathavinabhi) (Jataka, loc. cit; Buddhacarita, XIII, 68).

In later centuries, the name Vajrasana came to be used for the exact location of Prince Siddhartha's enlightenment, for the temple built over it (Vajrasana Gandhakuti) [a kuti being a meditation hut, cell, resort, or small hermitage site], then for the general location.

The most widely used and also the most enduring of Bodh Gaya's names was Maha-Bodhi, meaning "Great Enlightenment." Originally a term for Siddhartha's experience, it later came to be used as the name for the place where that experience had occurred. Alexander Cunningham mentioned that this name was still in vogue in the 19th century (Mahabodhi or the Great Buddhist Temple Under the Bodhi Tree at Buddha Gaya, reprint, undated, p.2).

 

Modern India is no longer tolerant of sexism, discrimination, and rape (aljazeera.com)

 

The Buddha's experience at Uruvela not only resulted in the location changing its name to Bodh Gaya, but it has also meant that this otherwise obscure village has been the focus of attention for million of pilgrims for over two millennia.

It very early became and remains the most important place of Buddhist pilgrimage (Sanskrit yatra). Those who see Buddhism as an entirely rational religion will insist that it has no

place for practices like "pilgrimages."

However, this view is somewhat at odds with what the Buddha is reputed to have said on the subject. Just before his final nirvana, he encouraged all of his followers to visit at least once in their lives four places where pivotal events in his life occurred: birth (Lumbini), enlightenment (Bodh Gaya), teaching (Isipatana), and passing (Kusinara).

"Buddhist Circuit" now visited by train, the Mahaparinirvan Express: official pilgrimage sites in Northern India between Afghanistan (Gandhara/Kamboja) and Bangladesh (Vanga).

 

"Ananda, there are four places the sight of which will arouse strong emotion in those with confidence (saddha, conviction, faith). Where are these four? 'Here the Tathagata [the Wayfarer, the Welcome One, the Well-Gone One, the Buddha] was born' is the first place. 'Here the Tathagata attained enlightenment' is the second place. 'Here the Tathagata set rolling the Wheel of the Dharma' is the third place. 'Here the Tathagata passed into final-nirvana without remainder' is the fourth place. 

 

"The monastic or layperson who has confidence [in the Buddha's enlightenment, the Dharma's ability to lead those who practice in accordance with it to enlightenment, and the noble Sangha's success by having practiced] should visit these places. Anyone who dies while making the pilgrimage to these destinations with a devoted heart will, at the break up of the body, be reborn in [a] heaven" (Digha Nikaya, "Long Discourses of the Buddha," Vol. II, p.147).

(Chandrasekaran arum.../flickr.com)

While it is true that the Buddha had high regard for reason and intellect, he did not underestimate the importance of emotion in all human endeavors, including the quest for enlightenment and liberation.

For the devout person seeing the Buddha or simply recollecting him (Buddhanussati) can evoke a joy which, when channeled and purified, can be transformational.

Going to a place made sacred by the Buddha's presence, or even the process of getting there, can have a similar effect. On the open road, away from mundane preoccupations and familiar surroundings, the pilgrim has time to think about her life and practice of the Dharma.

The arduous, steady progress toward the goal may become analogous to the pilgrim's journey on the Noble Eightfold Path and stimulate the determination to walk the Path with more commitment. On finally reaching the goal, the pilgrim will see places and sights associated with the Buddha, which can arouse intense conviction and provide the opportunity for deep contemplation.

• Where were the original Buddhist pilgrimage sites? (RanajitPal.com)

Bodh Gaya is now the "most amazing Buddhist city in the world," says Wisdom Quarterly, with exemplary temples from every Buddhist country on Earth. This tree-lined walk leads to Big Japanese Buddha ( John Seung-Hwan Shene/Shene81/flickr).