Thai Airways leads the way to sacred Buddha sites in India and NepalPrepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International
Thai Airways is leading the way to sacred Buddha sites in India and Nepal. Another of THAI’s firsts! In India these most revered sites are Bodhgaya, where the Lord Buddha gained enlightenment, Deer Park in Sarnath, where he preached his first sermon and Kushinagar, where he died and attained nirvana. In neighbouring Nepal it’s Lumpini, where Lord Buddha was born.
Three years ago in November, Royal Orchid led the first THAI charter to the sites in India, with a full compliment of 120 passengers, to study the feasibility of scheduled tours. It was a great success and now the route is routine with THAI. I just made my second trip and enjoyed it equally as much as I did the first time.
After both trips, the question that many people asked upon my return is if one is not a devout follower of Buddha, what could be so interesting about the trip for those who are not Buddhists? I could only answer by saying I have lived in a Buddhist environment most of my adult life, and I have read and studied about the teaching of Buddha, and I thought I knew something about Buddhism. This trip was more revealing than I ever imagined it could be. The path to Indian and Nepal for non-Buddhists can be just as rewarding as it is for followers of Buddha. If for no other reason, it is an education. Let me tell readers about that journey.
It is an easy flight from Bangkok to Varanarsi in India, a three and a half hour journey across the Andaman Sea and halfway across the Indian subcontinent. I was eagerly looking to what lay ahead, Lord Buddha’s place of enlightenment and where he died and was cremated. I was not quite certain of what I might find. Nevertheless, the flight gave me time to study our itinerary and my guidebook.
We arrived at the Varanasi Airport at 0830. Customs and immigration were simple and we began our tour immediately. Five coaches were waiting to carry us to our first site, Sarnath, a half-hour drive. Generally, ROH package tours are quite small but with Itthichart Marnalert, a jolly Shakespearean Falstaff character, and the managing director of the Confidence Group, we were well tended to. Itthichart has been conducting tours on the Buddhist circuit for nearly two decades and could answer questions at will.
We made a brief stop at Humayun Stupa and then continued on to Sarnath. In some guidebooks the stupa is referred to as Jhawghandhi Stupa. Unfortunately, one of the confusions of travel in India is that the government has changed many place names, and further confusion stems form the variations of spellings that travellers must contend with. I generalized by using the Insight Guides India, which, by the way, is an excellent guidebook not only for travel in India but also for its information about the religions of India, including Buddhism.
Sarnath is the place where Buddha gave his first sermon. It was then called Isipatana. But before telling readers about this holy site, let me mention briefly why it is so important to followers of Buddha. Briefly, before Buddha became “the enlightened one” he was a prince, Prince Gateman Siddhartha, the son of the king of the Shakya tribe. When he was born sages prophesied that he would become either a powerful king or, renouncing his royal life, an enlightened being and religious leader. The king, wanting his son to follow in his own footsteps, and fearing the later, insulated him from religious and philosophical concerns by surrounding him with a life of ease and plenty. Imprisoned within palace walls, the prince grew to manhood and fatherhood never having seen old age, sickness, poverty, or death.
The most touching part of the story, in my opinion, is what happened next. One day, unescorted, Prince Siddhartha ventured beyond the castle walls, and he was stunned by the human sufferings he saw. Why did man have to suffer? Why did he have to grow old? And why did he have to die? He came to the conviction that he must seek answers to these questions and learn the great truths of life. Thus at the age of twenty-nine, he let go the constraints of family and worldly responsibility to tread the path of self-discovery.
The reason Sarnath is so important is that it was here that Buddha found enlightenment, and it is here that pilgrims today can stand on the very same spot where the Lord Buddha once stood. The experience can be very emotional for all Buddhists.
As history tells us, before coming to Sarnath, the young prince sought out spiritual guidance from teachers and gurus wherever he could find them. Inquiring of their knowledge, he diligently practiced various yogas and meditations. Seven years passed, the last three in extreme asceticism, and still he had not achieved his goal of enlightenment. Finally recognizing that such practices had served him well but were no longer appropriate, he journeyed toward the ancient sacred forests of Uruvela (modern Gaya) with the intention of finally and completely realizing the infinite. He sat beneath the Bodhi Tree. Three days and nights passed and his intention was realized. Siddhartha became the Buddha, the "Enlightened One," and here began one of the world's great religions and pilgrimage of tradition.
For our group never was a morning so filled with places to see and thoughts to dwell upon. Most impressive was the Dhammeklia Stupa, favoured by most visitors. It was constructed by King Ashoa in 300 BC, at the very spot where Buddha gave his first sermon. King Ashoa ruled over an empire that covered most of north India, but the sight of the battlefield littered with dead bodies so shocked the emperor that he asked himself what was the result of worldly ambition? The answer was one that he had found in the teaching of Lord Buddha. He became a convert and spread Buddha’s teachings, and became known for his carvings of Buddha’s teachings on pillars around his empire.
The site is marked by a huge circular temple, a mound of brick and stone, many meters high, and in the early morning, when we arrived, it was drenched in mist, giving it the appearance of a mystical shroud. Devotees walked around the temple in prayer, and on the spread of green lawn before the temple they sat on the grass and listened to monks in saffron robes give talks, followed by chanting that all joined in. We followed a group of Japanese pilgrims, or were they Korean, and walked through the grounds, among the stone shapes of ancient monasteries in crumbled ruin. At the far end of a large field we came to high ground, crowned with several ancient Bodhi trees. Here devotees placed flicks of gold paper on to the trunks of the trees. I watched our THAI airhostesses pay their homage by doing the same, and they smiled when they posed for a photograph.
We made other brief stops—the Mulghandliakuti and Yashu Stupa—and lingered for the better part of an hour at the Sarnath Museum. The museum has no intrinsically or historical importance as a site but what it contains is most important to every Buddhist. The State Government built it in Buddhist-architectural style. Ancient archeological discoveries and antiquities are displayed within the building. But photographing is not allowed.
The Hotel Radisson in Varanasi provided us with lunch, and after dining on Indian curry, we had a surprise waiting, a rather usual but rewarding one. A dozen riverboats were moored on the bank of the Ganga River (once called the Ganges) to take us up stream to the burning ghats, the Hindu cremation sites. I do have to admit, it was much different that when I saw the ghats 30 years before. Back then the stone stairways leading down to the river were one continuous burning funeral pyre. The government, I later learned, passed laws authorizing the burning of bodies only in prescribed places.
We were back from the Ganga and the sight of burning bodies in time to depart at 2 PM for the flight from Varanasi Airport to the Gaya Airport, an hour flight.
The afternoon was far too short for what followed. But it was one single word, one single thought that took preference over everything else that afternoon—and that was the Bodhi tree. The Bodhi tree, a pipal tree, or in technical terms, Ficus telisiosa, a member of the fig family. But whatever name we use, it is the tree that plays heavily in Buddhist thought, the tree under which the Buddha attainted enlightenment.
Buddha first meditated in nearby Dungesvari, eating one grain of rice a day for two years, then nothing for four years. Realising that self-mortification did not bring enlightenment, he moved to the Bodhi tree and sat under it to meditate, vowing not to rise until he attained enlightenment. King Ashoka erected a shrine near the Bodhi tree, replaced in the 2nd century by the present Mahabodhi Temple. Inside is a gilded statue of the Buddha, sitting cross-legged, with his right hand touching the ground in acceptance of enlightenment.
Behind the temple are the two most venerated objects in all the Buddhist world, the Bodhi Tree and, beneath it, the Vajrasana, the Diamond Throne, a stone slab marking where the Buddha was sitting when he attained enlightenment. The tree standing today, while not the original, is a descendant of the tree growing in Buddha's time. A cutting of that tree was taken to Sri Lanka in the third century BC, where it still flourishes. A sapling from that tree was later brought back to Bodh Gaya, where it is still growing today.
We visited the temple in the afternoon and returned in the cool of evening. We sat listening to monks chanting, and watched devotes from afar as Tibet and Assam, and from Japan and Korea pass by. Under flickering lights I read in my guide about the great sages who sat here in times past, during some 2,600 years of history.
Along the north side of the Mahabodhi Temple, the Clianka Ramana, a platform built in the 1st century BC marks the place where the Buddha walked in meditation. We walked along the same path. Carved stone lotuses indicate the spots where the lotuses sprung from his feet. South of the temple a statue of the Buddha protected by a cobra stands in the middle of a large lotus pond.
The final important pilgrimage site is Kushinager. Buddha spent the last years of his life travelling around northeastern India teaching and establishing monastic communities for both men and women. He died at the age of eighty in the village of Kushinager, and his death is known as the parinirvana, the "going beyond nirvana". His body was cremated with great ceremony and the cremation relics were placed in an earthern jar. Soon thereafter the relics were divided into eight portions and these, along with the jar that held them and the embers of the cremation fire, were then distributed among the rulers of eight territories in which the Buddha had traveled and taught.
The Ramabhar Stupa, also called a Mukutbandhan-Chaitya, is the cremation place of Buddha. This site is a short distance east of the main Nirvana Temple on the Kushinagar-Deoria Road. This Stupa has a huge circular drum with a diameter of 35 meters on the top and consists of two or more terraces.
A must for pilgrims, and visitors as well, is the main Nirvana Stupa with the 6.10-meter reclining image of Lord Buddha inside the temple. It represents the "Dying Buddha," reclining on his right side with his face towards the west. It is placed on a large brick-pedestal with stone-posts at the corners. There is an inscription datable to the 5th Century A.D. recording that the statue was "the appropriate religious gift of the Mahavihara Swami Haribala".
We were silent at dinner that night at the Royal Residency Hotel. Tired perhaps, but most likely lost in thought. Or maybe it was our coming trip the next day. While the tour group returned to Bangkok on the THAI charter flight, we would be travelling overland to Lumpini in Nepal, the birthplace of Lord Buddha. No one could vouch for the condition of the road, or what would be our reception at the border. For more about that, I will continue with “following the footsteps of Buddha” next week. I am running overtime so for this week I will cut out the Question and Answers. Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROH Weekly Travel (booking@inet.co.th)
Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited. | 
