Place · palace city · Nepal
Kapilavastu (Tilaurakot)
The Shakya capital where Siddhartha Gautama grew up and left in his great renunciation at twenty-nine. The identification is disputed between Tilaurakot in Nepal and Piprahwa in Uttar Pradesh — a dispute live in Buddhist archaeology for over a century. Tilaurakot has the complete 400-metre palace foundations and the eastern gate from which the chariot is said to have departed; Piprahwa, 15 kilometres south, has the inscribed relic casket. Both are now treated as parts of a single pre-Buddhist Shakya kingdom straddling the modern border, with Tilaurakot the royal capital and Piprahwa a necropolis.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Tradition
- Pali canon; archaeological survey
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
- Location
- 27.576, 83.053
Connections (1)
- Life routeLumbinī
Lumbini is where the Buddha was born and Kapilavastu the Shakya capital where he grew up and which he left at twenty-nine — a few days' walk apart in the terai, and the first two stages of the route the eight great places trace. Kapilavastu's location is genuinely disputed between Tilaurakot in Nepal and Piprahwa in India, with excavation and national feeling on both sides, which makes it a live case of how archaeology and sacred geography disagree.
On these journeys
Sources
Tilaurakot / Piprahwa identification debate
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