Buddhism in India began with the life of Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-483 B.C.), a prince from the small Shakya Kingdom located in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. Brought up in luxury, the prince abandoned his home and wandered forth as a religious beggar, searching for the meaning of existence.
The stories of his search presuppose the Jain tradition, as Gautama was for a time a practitioner of intense austerity, at one point almost starving himself to death. He decided, however, that self-torture weakened his mind and therefore turned to a milder style of renunciation and concentrated on advanced meditation techniques.
Eventually, under a tree in the forests of Gaya (in modern Bihar), he resolved to stir no farther until he had solved the mystery of existence. Breaking through the final barriers, he achieved the knowledge that he later expressed as the Four Noble Truths: all of life is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire; the end of desire leads to the end of suffering; and the means to end desire is a path of discipline and meditation. Gautama was now the Buddha, or the awakened one, and he spent the remainder of his life travelling about northeast India, converting large numbers of people.
At the age of eighty, the Buddha achieved his final passing away (parinirvana) and died, leaving a thriving monastic order and a dedicated community to continue his work. By the third century B.C., the still-young religion based on the Buddha’s teachings was being spread throughout South Asia through the agency of the Mauryan Empire. By the seventh century A.D, having spread throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, Buddhism probably had the largest religious following in the world.
Map of Buddhism
The most important places of pilgrimage in Buddhism are located in the Gangetic plains of Northern India and Southern Nepal, in the area between New Delhi and Rajgir.
This is the area where Gautama Buddha lived and taught, and the main sites connected to his life are now important places of pilgrimage for both Buddhists and Hindus.
However, many countries that are or were predominantly Buddhist have shrines and places which can be visited as a pilgrimage.
Four main pilgrimage sites
Gautama Buddha is said to have identified four sites most worthy of pilgrimage for his followers. These are:
Lumbini: The birth place (in Nepal)
Prince Siddhartha was born in a lovely garden called Lumbini. The main things to see in Lumbini today are the Asokan pillar with its inscription mentioning that “here the Buddha was born”, the nearby ruins that are presently undergoing restoration and the modern temples.
Lumbini is just a few kilometres inside Nepal but getting there requires all the formalities of crossing an international border.
Bodh Gaya: The place of Enlightenment (in the current Mahabodhi Temple)
This small town, known at the Buddha’s time as Uruvela, is the place where all Buddhas, past and future, had and will have enlightenment; it is the centre of the Buddhist universe, the Navel of the Earth. In the middle of the town is the Mahabodhi Temple with the Bodhi Tree behind it and the surrounding shrines marking the Buddha’s seven weeks in Bodh Gaya. Sit in the gardens or walk through the town and you will see pilgrims from Thailand and Tibet, Bhutan and Burma, Singapore, Sri Lanka and a dozen other nations.
Go to the great tank just south of the Temple and admire the hundreds of pink water lilies in bloom. Stroll through the museum and look at the sculptures and other antiquities or rise before dawn and watch the lamas in the Tibetan temple doing their puja.
Sarnath: The place of his first teaching (formally Isipathana)
Just 13 kilometres from Varanasi is Isipathana, now called Sarnath, the deer park where the Buddha first proclaimed the Dhamma to the world. He taught two discourses here, the Dhammacakkhapavathana Sutta and the profound Anattalakhana Sutta. Both discourses are in the booklet Three Cardinal Discourses of the Buddha, Wheel No 17. Set in well maintained gardens, Sarnath’s ruins are a pleasant place to stroll amongst or meditate in. The main things to see are Asoka’s pillar, the ruins of the Mulagandhakuti and the huge Dharmek Stupa. Further to the east is the modern Mulagandhakuti Vihara with its beautiful wall paintings and behind it the Deer Park.
The Sarnath Museum houses some of the greatest treasures of Indian Buddhist art and should not be missed. Asoka’s lion capital and the beautiful Teaching Buddha are amongst the most beautiful sculptures ever made.
Kusinara: The place of his death (Parinirvana, now Kusinagar, India)
In his eightieth year, the Buddha and a group of monks arrived in this small place. Exhausted and sick, the Buddha was unable to go on and he laid down to rest between two sal trees.
His final hours and events are movingly described in the last part of the Mahaparinibbana Sutta which you will find in the Long Discourses.
The Nirvana Temple and stupa, later built over the site of the parinivana as well as the ruins of several monasteries, are set in attractive and well maintained gardens.
The tall slender trees on the right of the path as you enter are sal trees. In the later commentarial tradition, four other sites are also raised to a special status because Buddha had performed a certain miracle there.
These four places, partly through the inclusion in this list of commentarial origin, became important Buddhist pilgrimage sites in ancient India, as the Attha-mahathanani (Pali for ‘The Eight Great Places’).