Journey
Eight Great Places (Buddhist)
The four places of the Buddha's life — birth, awakening, first teaching, death — and four of his miracles, named as a set in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta itself. It is the oldest pilgrimage circuit in India with a text behind it, and it fits inside four hundred kilometres of the middle Ganges.
Stops (8)
- Lumbinī · Lumbinī — the birth
A grove on the Nepal Tarai where the Shākya queen is said to have stopped on the road to her parents' house. Ashoka came in 249 BCE, raised a pillar and cut on it that the village's taxes were reduced because the Buddha was born here — which is as close to documentary proof of a sacred site as ancient India offers.
- Bodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple · Bodh Gayā — the awakening
The pipal by the Nerañjarā under which he sat and would not get up. The present Mahābodhi temple is Gupta-era on Ashokan foundations; the tree is a descendant several times over, one generation of it regrown from the Anurādhapura cutting taken in the third century BCE. Buddhism's single most contested site in the modern period.
- Sārnāth · Sārnāth — the first teaching
The deer park outside Banāras where he found his five former companions and set out the four truths — the event the tradition calls turning the wheel. Ashoka's lion capital from here is the Indian state emblem, and the wheel beneath it is on the flag.
- Kushinagar · Kushinagar — the death and the division of relics
He died between two sāl trees in a small town, having refused to die anywhere grander, and eight claimants nearly fought over the ashes until a brahmin divided them into eight shares. Those shares are what Ashoka is said to have redistributed into eighty-four thousand stupas — the mechanism by which the religion covered a subcontinent.
- Shrāvastī · Shrāvastī — the rains, and the twin miracle
Kosala's capital, where he spent about twenty-five monsoon retreats at the Jetavana that Anāthapindika bought by covering its ground in gold coins. The twin miracle performed here — fire and water from the body at once — is one of the four that complete the set of eight.
- Rājagriha / Rajgir · Rājagriha — the first council
Magadha's capital under Bimbisāra, where the Vulture's Peak sermons were given and where the five hundred met after the death to recite the teaching into fixed form. The subjugation of the elephant Nālāgiri, sent by Devadatta to kill him, is the miracle this site holds.
- Vaishālī · Vaishālī — the order of nuns, and the second council
The Licchavi republic where he consented, reluctantly and after Ānanda argued for it, to ordain women, and where he announced his coming death. The second council met here a century later and produced the tradition's first schism. The miracle here is the monkey's gift of honey.
- Sānkāshya / Sankisa · Sānkāshya — the descent
Where he is said to have come down from the heaven of the Thirty-Three, having gone there to teach his mother, on a triple ladder. It is the least visited of the eight and the least excavated; an Ashokan elephant capital on a mound is most of what is there.