Place · Buddha descent town · India
Sānkāshya / Sankisa
The town in Farrukhabad district of Uttar Pradesh where tradition places the Buddha's descent from the Trayastrimsa heaven after preaching the Abhidhamma to his mother for three months, climbing down a triple-staircase of jewels. The Ashokan elephant capital on the site, carved around 240 BCE, is the oldest surviving life-sized stone sculpture in India. Fa Xian and Xuanzang both describe the staircase shrine in detail. Sankisa is the least-visited of the eight 'miracle' sites — overshadowed by the four core sites — but has one of the longest continuous testimonies.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Tradition
- Pali commentaries; Ashokan pillar
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.330, 79.270
Connections (3)
- Site adjacencySisupalgarh
Sisupalgarh is a precisely square fortified city with eight gateways near Bhubaneswar, planned urbanism in Kalinga standing a few kilometres from Dhauli where Ashoka's Kalinga edicts are cut. It is the kind of place the war was fought over — a real early-historic city of some size — and it is a useful corrective to reading the conquest only through the emperor's own account of his remorse.
- Mythic sequenceShrāvastī
Shrāvastī holds the twin miracle and Sānkāshya the descent that followed it — he is said to have gone up to teach his mother and come down on a triple ladder. The two sites complete the four miracle places that turn the four life-events into a circuit of eight. Sānkāshya is the least excavated of the eight and the least visited; an Ashokan elephant capital on a mound is most of what stands there.
- Mythic sequenceVaishālī
Sānkāshya and Vaishālī are the westernmost and easternmost of the eight great places apart from Shrāvastī, about four hundred kilometres apart. The whole circuit fits inside the middle Ganges plain, which is the single most striking fact about the geography of the Buddha's life. Everything the tradition records of his forty-five years of teaching therefore happened within about four hundred kilometres of the middle Ganges, in a country he could walk across.
On these journeys
- Eight Great Places (Buddhist)
- Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
- Xuanzang — sixteen years overland (629–645)
Sources
Sankissa — Eight Great Places
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