Lumbini and the Buddhist Circuit

Lumbini is where the Buddha was born, in about the sixth century BCE, and it is one of the four principal Buddhist pilgrimage sites. It is also a three-mile-long landscaped park in the Nepali plains with monasteries built by twenty-odd countries in twenty-odd national styles, laid out on a master plan drawn by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in 1978 and still not finished.

Both of those things are true at once, which is what makes it unlike anywhere else. Visitors expecting a small ancient site are surprised by the scale; visitors expecting a theme park are surprised by how quiet most of it is.

The Sacred Garden

The oldest part, at the southern end.

The Maya Devi Temple is a plain modern shelter built over the excavation. Inside, on a walkway above the brick foundations, is a marker stone identified as the exact spot of the birth, and a worn sandstone relief showing Maya Devi holding a tree branch. Photography is not allowed and the queue moves slowly. It is dark, low and completely unlike the exterior.

The Ashokan pillar stands beside it. The Emperor Ashoka came here in 249 BCE and had a pillar erected with an inscription recording the visit and naming the place as the Buddha’s birthplace. That inscription, rediscovered in 1896, is why anyone knows where Lumbini is. It is a broken column with a fence round it and it is the single most important object on the site.

Puskarini, the pond beside the temple, is where Maya Devi is said to have bathed before the birth.

Around all of this: a large bodhi tree hung with prayer flags, monks under it, and groups of pilgrims chanting in a dozen languages at once.

The monastic zone

North of the garden, a canal runs a mile up the middle of the park with a monastery zone either side, Theravada countries to the east, Mahayana and Vajrayana to the west. Each country built its own, in its own style, on its own plot.

Walking or cycling this is the strange pleasure of Lumbini: a Thai monastery in white marble, then Myanmar’s golden stupa, then a German-funded stupa with a painted interior worth going inside for, then Korea, China, Vietnam, Cambodia. Some are magnificent and some are half-built and short of money.

At the north end, the World Peace Pagoda, and beside it the crane sanctuary. The wetlands here hold sarus cranes, which are the tallest flying birds in the world.

How to get around

The park is more than three miles end to end and walking it in the heat is a mistake. Hire a bicycle, or take one of the electric rickshaws that wait at the gate. A cycle rickshaw for a half day is inexpensive and the driver will know which monasteries are open.

Go into the Sacred Garden at dawn, before the coaches. The gate opens early, the light is good, and the chanting under the bodhi tree at that hour is the thing people remember.

The other Shakya sites

Lumbini is the birth. The rest of the story is scattered across the district and almost nobody visits it.

Tilaurakot, 27 kilometres west, is the most likely location of Kapilvastu. The Shakya capital where Siddhartha grew up and which he left at twenty-nine. It is an excavated mound with foundations, gateways and a moat, under mango trees, with a small museum. There is no shrine and usually nobody there. For a lot of people it is more affecting than the main site.

Ramagrama, to the east, is a grass-covered stupa believed to be the only original relic stupa never opened.

Kudan, Gotihawa and Niglihawa are further ruins and Ashokan pillar fragments within an hour’s drive.

Practical things

• The heat is the main planning constraint. This is the Terai at 100 metres above sea level. December and January mornings can also be thick with fog, which grounds flights at Bhairahawa.
• Accommodation ranges from monastery guesthouses inside the park, which are basic and atmospheric, to hotels in Lumbini bazaar and Bhairahawa.
• Alcohol and meat are not sold within the park.
• The Indian border at Sunauli is 25 kilometres away, which makes this a sensible entry or exit point rather than a detour.