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Practical Pilgrim: Spinning the Wheel at Sarnath

A journey to the site of the Buddha's first sermon: Getting there and where to stayAllan Badiner

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SOON AFTER FINDING ENLIGHTENMENT in Bodh Gaya, Siddhartha walked about two hundred miles northeast to the big city of Banaras in search of his old friends. It was with these five yogis back in Bodh Gaya that Siddhartha had been striving to crack the code of suffering in search of ultimate awareness. After having wasted away from fasting and other ascetic practices, Siddhartha shocked his colleagues by taking food and declining further self-mortification. Determined, yet disheartened, and finally alone, he sat under a bodhi tree, and the rest is Buddhist history. Banaras, also known as Kashi and now Varanasi, is, as Mark Twain once wrote of it, "older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together." Striking and picturesque as it sprawls along a crescent of the sacred river Ganges, it is thought to be the oldest living city on Earth.

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