Buddhist Circuits — India's Buddhist Heritage

Buddhist circuits of India

The four places the Buddha named, and the hundreds built around them

The Buddha named the places worth seeing in the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sutta: Lumbinī (his birth), Bodh Gayā (his awakening), Sarnath (his first sermon) and Kuśinagara (his parinirvāṇa) — four sites that anchor every Buddhist pilgrimage network. Indian practice has built a great deal more on them. The main "destination" circuits run from Bodh Gayā in Bihar to Sarnath near Varanasi and Kuśinagara in Uttar Pradesh; the Buddhist circuit of the Gangetic plain adds Sāvatthī (Śrāvastī), Rājagṛha and the Mahābodhi sites; the Sanchi–Amarāvatī–Nāgārjunakonda line in central and southern India follows the stūpa-and-vihāra geography of the early schools; the Ajanta–Ellora circuit in Maharashtra is the rock-cut one; and the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan circuit — Kye, Tabo, Alchi, Lamayuru, Thikse, Hemis, Diskit in Ladakh, Rumtek in Sikkim, Tawang and Pemayangtse in Arunachal — follows the Vajrayāna settlement. The Mahāvibhaṣa gives a canonised set of eight great sites (aṭṭha mahābhūmi) which is a different grouping again and should not be merged with the four.

What a visitor actually meets at each site varies enormously in kind. Sanchi is Ashokan: a brick-and-stone stūpa with four gates in early Gandharan relief, one of the best-preserved ancient Buddhist monuments in the world. Sarnath is a multi-period archaeological park of stūpa foundations, a chaitya hall, the Dhameka stūpa and the Ashokan lion capital. Bodh Gayā holds the Mahābodhi temple, a brick structure of the Gupta period standing on the site of Ashoka's enclosure, with the descendant of the bodhi tree, and it is administered by a management committee rather than by any single community. Kuśinagara holds the Mahāparinirvāṇa stūpa and the brick Mahābodhi? — the Śrī Mahābodhi? — a modest site of great emotional weight. Ajanta and Ellora are monastic caves, with Ajanta's paintings the single most important body of ancient Buddhist art in India; several sites in these lists — Nālanda, Vikramaśīla, Pāṭaliputra, Sarnath, Nāgārjunakonda, Lumbini, Mahābodhi, Sanchi, Ajanta, Ellora — are UNESCO World Heritage sites, and the conservation obligations that go with them are part of the picture.

Sources and what is still unverified

• The Mahāparinirvāṇa Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 16) and the Mahāvibhaṣa — for the four and the eight; cited at work level.
• Ananda K. Coomaraswamy? Rather: the standard works on Indian Buddhist architecture and on the excavated sites — a specific title and author must be supplied by a guardian; none is on file here.
• The Archaeological Survey of India's site reports and the UNESCO nomination dossiers for each listed site — real and public; they should be cited directly.
• Unverified: the frontmatter's "6th c. BCE" start date, its Ashokan dating, and any festival or visit date given.