Great Buddha Gym for All Mens and Womens Read online

  The lines were segregated by gender. A tiny old Tibetan nun pushed past me, taking cuts. Men walked through a metal detector, and women passed one by one into a curtained room where a female soldier searched our bags and ran a handheld metal detector over our clothes. Then we all stood in another line to do it again: another set of metal detectors, another search.

  An upper walkway encircled the hollow. We turned clockwise; both Buddhist and Hindu circumambulation is traditionally done clockwise, and almost everyone walked in that direction, to the south. We passed Muchilinda Lake, where a large statue of Buddha sits in the center of the water, commemorating the dragon king who rose and protected the Buddha as he meditated. The scummy water was thick with bread crumbs, and now and then a large carp rolled up to feed. Past the lake was the Butter Lamp House, a row of bare rooms filled with many hundreds of flickering lamps, the warmth radiating through the oily glass. Nearby, groups of Hindus of different sects sat in rows on the ground, being talked through various rituals; they looked a bit bedraggled under the hectoring of the young men in charge. Here and there on the grass sat sadhus, ascetics with tangled hair and long beards.

  The west side looked down into a sea of ochre and red, hundreds of robed Tibetan monks and nuns, listening with fine concentration to the special lectures of the Karmapa, now and then chanting together in a buzzing drone that reached down into the viscera. On the north side of the complex, the inner fence contained a long row of large prayer wheels spinning almost without cease, started again and again by the endless line of circling pilgrims.

  We took off our shoes near the main stairs, the landing a fantasy of footwear lined up and tossed and piled high and hidden behind fence posts and tucked into the fence openings and jammed into corners. There were marigolds everywhere: every wall lined with marigolds in Dixie cups and little paper espresso cups and shiny silver cups, rows of orange and yellow marigolds on railings and stairs, marigolds in hundreds of garlands hung on gates and posts or laid in careful patterns on the ground, marigolds in piles on altars already overflowing with bowls of rice, candles, tins of butter biscuits, and piles of candy bars and fruit.

  The great pyramidal temple of stone that rises from the center of the hollow is 171 feet high, intricately carved and rising by levels, with intriguing doors and rows of niches at different heights containing statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas and arhats, to a gold-plated spire. This is no single building but layers and layers of building and rebuilding for centuries, for eons, the stone darkened in places by the sheer weight of time. Inside the ancient temple is a small sanctuary. A half-dozen people at a time could sit in meditation along the walls, while an endless, undisciplined crowd shoved past the serene golden Buddha. A few people left donations of fruit and biscuits and scarves. One large Indian family lined up in front of the Buddha, blocking the way. They laughed and chattered near the “Silence Please” sign and took several photographs just past the “No Photography” sign.

  Dozens of barefoot people walked continuously around the tower on cold marble paths, sun to shadow to sun. Several circled by bowing: a middle-aged Nepalese man in sweater and slacks, an old Tibetan woman with two long braids, a young Thai man. A young Chinese woman held a single marigold blossom in her fingertips; she stretched her arms to the sky, went down to her knees, slid out to lie face down on the marble walk, and dropped the marigold at the far extent of her reach. Then she stood up and walked the few steps to the marigold, picked it up, and did it again. A white-haired Tibetan man began to rise and stopped suddenly to shoo a tiny insect out of the way of the pilgrims.

  Thomas and I sat on one of the little lawns for a while, eating sandwiches so bad that even a stray dog declined the leftovers. A curious group of young Indian men joined us, shaking hands, smiling, asking for photos.

  “Are you from America?” one asked, just as another said, “Why do you come here?” We sat in a circle on the grass, in the shade of a spreading sal tree. Small groups of Tibetan women, young monks, and Indian families were scattered across the lawn. The young men, glancing at each other quickly for support, murmuring in Hindi to each other as we answered, asked about Thomas’s career. They wondered why America is more prosperous than India, then explained patiently that the Buddha is actually an incarnation of Vishnu. “So we have great respect for him, and that is why we come here,” one said to me.

  They looked from Thomas to me and back. We hadn’t planned how to explain ourselves as a pair. The hotel clerk had been surprised we wanted separate rooms. Thomas and I looked at each other, then back to the group.

  “We’re just friends,” he said. The young men all began to chatter, shaking their heads, no, that’s not possible. How can that be? Men and women can’t be just friends. Explaining that Thomas is gay was not an option; the Indian government had just passed a law criminalizing homosexuality.

  “He’s like my brother,” I said. “My little brother!”

  “My bossy big sister,” said Thomas, nodding at me. This seemed not to satisfy them at all. Finally I excused myself to find a bathroom, leaving Thomas to discuss feminism and cultural norms.

  The temple was a mosaic of color. The Tibetans, both monastic and lay, wore shades of red and rust, maroon and burgundy. Theravadan monks from Sri Lanka and Thailand and Burma wore robes in shades of ochre and saffron. There were Korean nuns in pearl-gray robes and three Cambodian monks in bright yellow. Here we saw a few Europeans, heard scraps of German and Australian-accented English. A tall white man with a shaved head, wearing street clothes, meticulously washed a square foot of marble with a spray bottle and cloth rags before he lay his cushion down. A beefy Frenchman wandered by, chatting to a young disciple at his elbow; the big man wore, surprisingly, a sari, and his bare shoulders and arms were covered in tattoos. His thick gray hair was tied in a big topknot and wrapped in faux leopard fur.

  One memorable taxi ride took us past the big Tibetan monastery, a complex the size of a fairgrounds; it looked as crowded as a livestock auction. The deep droning horns blew for an hour in the evenings, rolling solidly through the sky. At the temple, the constant drone of Tibetan over loudspeakers lay like a blanket over amplified chanting in Chinese from a group of ten nuns. Round and round marched two dozen Theravadan lay followers in long white tunics and skirts, carrying a small altar, singing under the leadership of a young man with a microphone headset. A guide stopped a group of Indian tourists at the corner near the Chinese women and described the scene to them with a handheld microphone. When the Theravadan group came around again, it was devotional bedlam. And now and then all the singsong noise disappeared as though by accident, and for a moment there would be only the faint whisper of the breeze and the murmured recitations of solitary pilgrims like the pleasant hum of insects on a summer afternoon.

  I longed for photographs at times and resented the people who sneaked in iPhones to take surreptitious pictures here and there. The lack buzzed around me, like a pesky fly. I always bring a camera when I travel—except here, except this time, deceived by the modern world of the cloud. Thomas felt it, too. One afternoon we brought our tablets with us, taking photographs along the road, not sure of our plan. We tried to walk around the perimeter of the temple, seeking a good perspective from outside. The north wall, where the main gate is, runs along a busy pedestrian avenue. The east wall is blocked by a teeming shopping street and a maze of alleys leading to dead ends and locked doors. The south wall blocks the lake and the Butter Lamp House, out of view of anything near the tree. The west side is a high, unbroken wall of Pepto-Bismol–pink stucco. We paced back and forth, watching three men park a big pickup truck next to the wall.

  “I could stand on the cab,” said Thomas.

  “Everyone will see you.” A crowd of small Tibetan girls was standing nearby, watching us curiously.

  “I could come back after dark.”

  “No way, you still couldn’t reach.”

  So it was the north wall, where the stucco has a central section of w
rought iron, and one wrought-iron gate shows a partial view of the temple. I wasn’t sure what the rules were here, but it seemed unlikely that climbing over the barrier between shrubs, up onto the wall, and clambering around the wrought iron was an approved activity. We took turns balancing each other on tiptoe as we stuck our ridiculously expensive tablets through holes in the fence to get a vague photograph of the top of a tree hidden among trees. A group of men stopped to watch, grinning, elbowing each other.

  “My turn,” said Thomas, and stuck both hands through the fence, intent, while I turned my back and tried to look casual.

  In medieval times, the king of Burma tried to repair Mahabodhi, by then broken and buried under silt and shrubs, trees growing cockeyed from the stones and rooting in the crumbling brick. The Burmese tried again in the early 1800s, and then again in 1877, with permission of the British, who had begun to excavate. The layering of national, political, ethnic, and religious influence was problematic; more so were the good intentions of the Burmese, who cleaned the site with fervor, razing whole sections, knocking down broken walls and leveling the foundations, mixing and discarding 25 centuries of stones and broken statues until the history could barely be read. The half-ruined place became a home of beggars and con men.

  The poet and journalist Sir Edwin Arnold made a public plea to the English for restoration in 1885, and then, in 1891, inspired by Arnold’s plea, a Sri Lankan named Anagarika Dhammapala arrived. He found vandalized carvings, statues tossed in the mud, carved stone Buddha figures used as weights and stairs, an Ashoka pillar used as a post beam in the Mahant’s kitchen. He vowed to restore Mahabodhi Temple and other Buddhist sites, to make that restoration the work of the remainder of his life. But the Mahant in residence was a native of Bihar, a big landholder and a powerful man, and the government refused to give control to Buddhists. Just before his death in 1933, Dhammapala vowed to return in future lives to continue the effort. It was not until 1949 that the Bodh Gaya Temple Act was passed, creating a “management committee” of Hindus and Buddhists to share control. This continues today—eight Indians, half Buddhists and half Hindus, are in charge of the most important site in Buddhism. The office is near the gate, and I tried to visit several times, curious about the endlessly controversial arrangements, but there was never anyone in.

  The tall temple commands the eye, but the center of the complex, of the entire Buddhist world, is on its west side, behind a stone wall and a painted wooden fence. Here is the tree and Diamond Throne, or Vajrasana, marking the place where the Buddha reached enlightenment. The Diamond Throne rose from the ground when the earth was created, in anticipation of the Buddha; it appeared “in the middle of the great chiliocosm; it goes down to the limits of the golden wheel, and upwards it is flush with the ground. It is composed of diamond.” So wrote the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang, from whom we know as much as we know about what the place looked like once upon a time. A thousand Buddhas have sat on this throne, he wrote. “When the great earth is shaken, this place alone is unmoved.” In relative time, it is a brick base with a stone slab thought to be the oldest object here, about 2,400 years old.

  The seat is covered with a low canopy, a thin fabric seat, and bowls of marigolds and marigold necklaces. Here and there behind the fence are scattered flowers, scarves, coins, a mitten, a shoe—the odd offerings of pilgrims who brave the soldiers watching nearby. The fence is bedecked in flaking gold leaf, streaked and checkerboarded by squares of gold seal pressed against it as an offering; little streamers of gold flutter in the breeze, break off, float away.

  The thick-trunked pipal tree that shades the throne is a kind of fig, known by all as the Bodhi Tree. The Latin name is Ficus religiosa, an acknowledgement of both Buddhist and Hindu reference. Pipal trees are associated with Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, and Hindus forbid harm to them. (If one needs to be cut down, the good Hindu hires a heathen to do the deed.) The trees are supposed to live thousands of years, perhaps forever; as the story goes, this tree shed its leaves only once, when the Buddha died. The one we see is in fact at least the fifth incarnation since the Buddha’s time; a new one is said to have sprung up, more or less spontaneously, after each one succumbs. The doughty Eliza Scidmore, an American journalist who traveled widely and wrote a book about her time in India at the turn of the 20th century, wrote that the tree “with many dead branches and stumps, was blown over in 1876, and the stripling Bo-tree flourishing in its mold was carefully replanted at the level of the earliest tree, and the Diamond Throne, a slab of polished sandstone, replaced in its afternoon shade. There were unusual numbers of pilgrims for a few years, and the pious Burmese covered the stem and branches with so much gold leaf, poured so much milk, perfumery, cologne, oil, incense, tins of sardines, European food and confections around its roots, that it began to droop and die. General Cunningham put in a new tree in 1885, and surrounded it by a brick wall inlaid with old carved stones around the window openings on each side. A marble table or altar was erected by a pious Cingalese to receive the Burmese and Hindu offerings, and that sturdy tree glitters and glows magnificently.” The fine old tree has a thick dove-gray trunk and heavy horizontal branches supported by strong forks. The crown is light and airy, with large heart-shaped leaves on long stems that dance and tremble in the breeze.

  Between the trunk of the tree and the ancient fence are a metal frame and a large stone to keep anyone from touching the tree—from loving it to death. People lined up all day to press their hands, foreheads, scarves, rosaries, statues, and coins against the stone, the closest they could get. Now and then a leaf fell and people leapt to catch it, with happy smiles.

  “This is a sacred place,” Thomas said to me one day as we found our places near the tree.

  “It’s just a tree,” I said. “Nothing is sacred.” Basic Zen approach: don’t create inside and outside, right or wrong. For one thing to be sacred, another must be profane.

  “Yes, it is. Look at it. Look at this,” he answered, turning slowly to take in the scene. There were always a few dozen people meditating near the tree, many with blankets and meditation cushions, settled in for the day. Thomas sat down close to the wall, kneeling, eyes closed. I sat further back, listening to the hum and rustle of a thousand others, to rivers of devotion converging, widening, currents breaking like waves on a cape, falling noisily back into the sea.

  The Buddha wandered over hundreds of miles of what is now northern India and southern Nepal. One day we hired a driver named Omesh to take us up to Rajgir. Omesh was a patient young man; he drove slowly through the thick traffic out of Bodh Gaya, past the airport into the countryside of mustard and rice and potato fields. All the trucks we followed had “BLOW HORN” painted in bright colors on their tailgates. Hollering bands of children jumped over muddy ditches by the road, drifts of trash piled up on either side. Here and there in the fields were brightly painted stucco houses and rough mandirs, small temples about the size of doghouses for Hindu gods. We passed through densely crowded towns, their market streets crammed with tiny stores and vendors, old men on bicycles, women carrying heavy shopping bags, and young men on motorcycles darting between wandering, confident cows.

  At the time of the Buddha, Rajgir (then called Rajagriha) was something of a metropolis, a busy merchant town with beautiful gardens and a reputation for danger and ascetics. Mystics lived in the caves and the hills along with tigers, bears, and poisonous snakes; their reputations depended on surviving each day. The outer city walls, made of massive stones without mortar, still stand after 2,600 years and run for more than 25 miles, half-ruined stitching that curves and twists up and down and around the famous Rajgir hills.

  Tourists and day-trippers come to Rajgir to ride the chairlift to the pagoda dedicated to world peace on one of the peaks, to admire the grand view and watch the wild vervet monkeys, bathe in the hot springs as crowded as June on Coney Island, and walk around the grand ruins of Nalanda, one of the world’s first residential universities. Thousands of students from the
known world studied not only Buddhist thought at Nalanda but the Vedas, medicine, logic and grammar, and Hindu philosophy.

  We came to see Vulture Peak, or Gridhrakuta, a huge rocky cliff jutting out like the beak and wings of a great bird halfway down the hill below the pagoda. Here the Buddha is said to have spoken the great texts known as the Wisdom Sutras. “Thus have I heard,” said Ananda when he recited the teaching at the First Council after the Buddha’s death—because he had heard this, and he had been entrusted by the Buddha to remember and recite the teaching in spite of his doubts—and so the sutras always begin, because until we know it for ourselves, the truth is only a rumor.

  “Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha was in Rajagriha, staying on Mount Gridhrakuta.” He spoke to thousands of arhats, “whose outflows had come to an end, who had no more earthly desires, who had attained what was to their advantage and had put an end to the bonds of existence, and whose minds had achieved a state of freedom,” and he spoke to tens of thousands of monks and nuns, laypeople, bodhisattvas and mahasattvas, dragon kings and warrior kings, devas and dragons and gods and lesser gods and sons and daughters of gods.

  We rode the slow chairlift to the top, meditating on safety inspections and cotter pins, and then walked down the winding stair-step path said to be the same path the Buddha walked. It was lined with old beggar women spaced out in small territorial sections, and men with coolers selling icy sodas and bottled water. A side path passed a pair of shallow caves known as the Two Houses, where the Buddha and his disciples are said to have stayed. The walls and ceilings of the caves were covered in an unbroken film of bright gold, countless tiny seals pressed by countless hands; dozens of candles burned on the flat rocks at the back of each cave, spilling white wax into the froth of white wax along the floor.

  Past the last cave, a rocky spill draped with dozens of Tibetan prayer flags led to a short stairway and the flat top of Vulture Peak, hanging over the wide valley. An old man guarded the pile of shoes at the top of the stairs. Hundreds of torn and faded prayer flags fluttered on the steep scree slopes below, caught in the branches of spindly trees. The famous view was hidden in a white haze: dust, car exhaust, the smoke of brick factories and cooking fires and cremations. The wind blew continuously, tossing the faint chants of the few visitors away, and the flags rippled and popped, each movement a prayer. On the small flat top of the cliff—the vulture’s beak itself—was a small stone altar behind a low stone wall, piled with folded scarves in white and gold, big fabric lotus flowers filled with coins, piles of fruit, and bowls of flowers. A dozen visitors took turns bowing side by side in the small space before the altar; a few circumambulated the dozen steps around the tiny shrine. A pretty woman with a black ponytail, wearing priest’s robes, busied herself in a corner, bent over an invisible offering.