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 Pilgrimage has long been a part of global Buddhist practice
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    City of Screams Paid Member

    By Rob Schultheis
    In February 2001, Mullah Omer, leader of the Taliban, issued his infamous decree: all pre-Islamic art in Afghanistan was to be destroyed, including the two great Buddhas carved into the sandstone cliffs of Bamiyan. When Rob Schultheis began this article—a history of the ancient monument and the people who built it—the Buddhas were still standing. More »
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    Where It All Began Paid Member

    By Allan Hunt Badiner
    In what was greater India more than twenty-five hundred years ago, a young, pregnant noblewoman named Maya Devi was traveling home beneath a full moon, when she came upon a fragrant grove of sal trees. As she strolled through the grove, smelling the flowers and listening to the birds, labor pains unexpectedly came upon her, and in the garden of Lumbini that evening she gave birth to a boy, Siddhartha Gautama, heir to the Shakya clan. Not long after childbirth, Maya Devi and the newborn aristocrat continued on their homeward journey to Kapilavastu. Because it is considered the birthplace of the Buddha, and certainly not because it ranks high on anyone’s list of vacation spots, Lumbini, located within the borders of present-day Nepal, is an essential stop on any Buddhist pilgrimage in Asia. More »
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    Practical Pilgrim: Spinning the Wheel at Sarnath Paid Member

    By Allan Badiner
    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.More »
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    The Roots of Enlightenment Paid Member

    By Allan Hunt Badiner
    A traveller's guide to Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha's AwakeningBODH GAYA IS Buddhism's Mecca, Vatican, and Wailing Wall. Among the eight great Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India, Bodh Gaya is the most visited. But unlike the holy places of those other faiths, the great center of the Buddhist world revolves around not a building or a shrine but a single living tree. For six years the seeker Gautama, hoping to find a way out of suffering, had practiced and painful austerities along the nearby Niranjana River. But finally realizing this was not the path to ultimate happiness, he wrapped himself in a yellow shroud taken off a corpse marked for cremation and accepted a bowl of rice milk from a young village girl named Sujata. This strengthened him. Taking fresh green grass for a mat, he then sat facing east under a local pipal tree and vowed not to rise until he had attained enlightenment. More »
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    Practical Pilgrim: The Roots of Enlightenment Paid Member

    By Allan Hunt Badiner
      BODH GAYA IS Buddhism’s Mecca, Vatican, and Wailing Wall. Among the eight great Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India, Bodh Gaya is the most visited. But unlike the holy places of those other faiths, the great center of the Buddhist world revolves around not a building or a shrine but a single living tree.   For six years the seeker Gautama, hoping to find a way out of suffering, had practiced and painful austerities along the nearby Niranjana River. But finally realizing this was not the path to ultimate happiness, he wrapped himself in a yellow shroud taken off a corpse marked for cremation and accepted a bowl of rice milk from a young village girl named Sujata. This strengthened him. Taking fresh green grass for a mat, he then sat facing east under a local pipal tree and vowed not to rise until he had attained enlightenment.   More »
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    Kapilavastu: A Tale of Two (Competing) Cities Paid Member

    By Allan Hunt Badiner
    We know where the Buddha was born, where he became enlightened, and where he died. We can even say where he gave his first sermon. But no one can say for sure where he spent his childhood, or where he married and fathered a child, for the precise location of Kapilavastu—the city-state his father governed as leader of the Shakya clan—remains a mystery. More »