# Winter India/Chapter 9
### CHAPTER IX MAHABODHI, THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE

OT Jerusalem nor even Mecca is held in greater reverence by the millions of Christians and Mohammedans than is Buddha-Gaya by many more millions of Buddhists, who, inhabiting every part of Asia save India, look upon the temple at Mahabodhi as their greatest shrine, to the Sacred Bo-tree beside it as their most holy relic and living symbol, the most venerated, if not strictly the most venerable, tree on earth—Bodhi-druma, the Tree of Knowledge, beneath which Gautama became the Buddha, the Awakened, the Enlightened.
The so-called Buddhist Holy Land, the ancient Magadha, lies east of Benares and south of the Ganges River, within a radius of one hundred and fifty miles from Buddha-Gaya. The birthplace of the Nepalese prince Siddhartha, and the original burial-place of Gautama Buddha, so recently identified and excavated, are two hundred miles north of Buddha-Gaya, near the Nepal frontier. Every place associated with the life of the Great Teacher was marked by an inscribed column or a votive stupa by the emperor Asoka 250 b.c.; and from the abun​dant Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese accounts, every place has been exactly determined, the recent finding of the very bones of the body of Buddha in the inscribed casket which his family had deposited beneath the great mound at Piprawah adding the last historic link in the chain, and leaving the life of Gautama Buddha an open book.
Very evidently no other place in India has such historical importance, and yet no place is so seldom visited by the legion of winter tourists, as this Buddha-Gaya of modern Behar, the Uruwela of ancient Magadha, the birthplace of one of the world's greatest religions. Until Lord Elgin's visit in 1895, no viceroy had sought this most ancient and historic spot in the empire. Outward India and the life of the people have changed so little that one easily pictures the scenes occurring twenty-five centuries ago in the same setting—when the Great Knight, Siddhartha, the Rajput, having made the Great Renunciation, left family and home and high estate on the full-moon night of July, and, with his five disciples, journeyed southward from his capital at Kapilavastu to Rajagriha, and finally along the river bank to the jungles of Uruwela, where, for six years, he practised the most rigorous penance, self-torture, and mortification. When he had reduced himself to living on one grain of rice a day, he fell as in death; and then, convinced of the uselessness of such a life of extreme bodily penance, he partook of food. His disciples forsook this starved ascetic for so basely yielding to the body, and the monk Gautama wandered to the river ​bank, where Sujata, a villager's daughter, gave him a bowl of milk and honey which he consumed in the shade of a bo-tree. Still sitting there, facing eastward, he attained full and perfect wisdom, the supreme knowledge, in four meditations. For seven times seven days and nights he continued his vigils, assailed by all temptations and evils, say the legends. For one space he paced to and fro beyond the Bo-tree—a path immortalized and literally made the Jeweled Cloister. For another space he regarded the tree day and night, without removing his eyes, the great Nagas, or cobra kings, protecting him with their outspread hoods from the chilling rain, and the snails covering his head with their cool, moist bodies from the scorching sun. He could then have entered into Nirvana, but upon further meditation he determined to share his treasure of wisdom with his fellow-men. Resuming his staff and begging-bowl, he walked on to Benares and there converted his lost disciples and ultimately the world, Gautama Buddha being first to preach universal equality and the brotherhood of man; enjoining pity, love, and charity for all; protesting against caste distinctions, against propitiation by sacrifices, penances, and offerings; and teaching that man must attain divine favor and perfect wisdom by his moral qualities and pure life alone, and thus reach the peace of Nirvana, the calm that follows upon self-victory, the extinction of anger, lust, and ignorance.
At the end of six months he sent his sixty disciples forth to preach the new wisdom, and himself returned to the foot of this Bo-tree at Uruwela, and, ​there converting the three fire-worshiping Brahman hermits who lived in that solitude, he gained Kasyapa, best-bcloved disciple after his cousin Ananda. As a mendicant, begging from door to door, he revisited Kapilavastu and saw again his aged father and his widowed wife, Yasodhara, who adopted the religious life and became the first Buddhist nun. His son, Rahula, demanding his inheritance, was endowed with some of the wisdom acquired by the Buddha beneath the Bo-tree and admitted to the order, and Gautama's half-brother also assumed the mendicant's robe and bowl. For forty-four years after the great struggle beneath the Bo-tree, Buddha taught in the Deer Park at Benares, beneath this sacred Bo-tree at Uruwela, or in the Bamboo Grove at Rajagriha during the rainy season; and for the rest of the year wandered through Magadha, preaching the religion that has held sway over a great part of Asia for twenty-five centuries, and in corrupt form now holds more adherents than any other faith. Preaching the equality of men, he yet attracted disciples of high birth and station; and with no praises or reverence for women, voicing only the bitterest accusations and charges against the whole sex, women flocked to his teachings, and he established unwillingly, after much hesitation, the crowded orders of female mendicants.
After these forty-four years of active proselytism and conversion, he announced that he was about to die. He was then in his eightieth year; and while begging his way toward Kapilavastu, he ate of some rice and young pork given him in his begging-bowl, ​and died that night beneath a bo-tree in a grove near Kusinagara—543 b.c, if we accept the older Pali or Cingalese records of the southern Buddhists, 400 b.c., or 478 b.c., according to the Sanskrit records. Then all nature mourned, and the Bo-tree, for the only time, shed its leaves. His remains were cremated on the spot where he died, and a great stupa raised by the Sakya clan over the one-eighth portion of the ashes and relics allotted them. The rest of the relics were distributed to seven centers of his doctrinal teachings, where similar monuments were raised. Excavations at Buddha-Gaya, Bhattiprolu, and Piprawah have yielded relic-caskets containing these undoubted fragments of the body of Buddha, accompanied in every instance by stores of pearls and precious stones, gold-leaf ornaments in the form of swastikas, seals, and inscribed tablets. The soapstone, crystal, and beryl vases and cylinders containing these relics are admirable pieces of workmanship, but the only inscriptions dating from Gautama's lifetime now visible are those from the Piprawah mound, housed in the India Museum at Calcutta.
VASES FROM THE SAKYA STUPA AT PIPRAWAH
THE SARCOPHAGUS IN THE CAVE
It was a raw January morning, with the yellow ​dust whirling in clouds, when I reached Gaya station on my pilgrimage to the Tree of Knowledge, and it was a cold, dull, prosaic drive of a mile in a rattling gharry to Gaya town and the dak bangla, where the government provides chill cheer for the few European travelers who ever rest there. One
THE EKKA
elephant passed by on the station road,—a touch of the ancient East, the Hindu India, that did not accord with the background of barbed-wire fences, telegraph poles, and railway tracks, nor with the well-metaled highway of British India that the creature trod upon. A string of dusty brown camels filed across the neutral, dusty distance, and turbaned folk sped by in bullock-carts or gay ekkas, the native cabs, mere curtained canopies hung with balls and bells, and the ponies caparisoned to match, with high, peaked collars and blue bead necklaces.
​Modern Gaya, the Sahibs' market, is an orderly new town with broad thoroughfares and busy bazaars, the whitewashed houses, the tidy streets and drains betraying the infallible signs of model British rule, prosperity, and eternal sanitation. It is distinct from the more ancient Brahm-Gaya, where huddled houses cut by narrow streets crowd around the great Brahman temple of the Vishnupad by the river bank, to which more than one hundred thousand Hindu pilgrims come to bathe and pray each year—a temple crowded with Buddhist sculptures and wreck from older temples.
The dak bangla at Gaya stands in a great shady compound, whichh looks upon a busy part of a main street, a continuous panorama of half-clad and sheeted figures, of absurd ekkas and bullock-carts going by beyond the bangla lawn, as if drawn across a stage for one's delight. There is a well at one side of the compound, to which we watched all the neighbor folk come to fill their brass lotas or heavy, red earthen jars—half-veiled women, who needed help to lift the great weights and poise them on their heads, their slender, feeble figures bending under the weight. Others, balancing these great amphoræ with ease, passed out with the graceful, noble tread of goddesses, the living figures of a Greek frieze. On the bangla's covered portico we were sheltered from the wind and dust, the sun shone warmly, and little parrakeets twittered and shrieked, flying about the lawn. We were so well entertained with this spectacle and play of Hindu life, that we sat for an hour—balanced ourselves, rather, for that ​space—on decrepit chairs which, rocking on uncertain legs, threatened momently to fall beneath us, if the torn and sagging rush seats did not sooner engulf us. "If the dak bangla's chairs were then as they are now, no wonder Buddha sat for six years under the Bo-tree," wrote the one American visitor of six seasons in the visitors' book. In time we ate an early and hurried tiffin—our daily goat-chop, garnished with green peas that rattled upon the plate like so much bird-shot, and the usual cold and sodden Indian rice poured over with a blackish curry mixture diversified by pools of clear grease—the worst-made curry in the world, always served one at Indian hotels, dak banglas, and railway refreshment-rooms. "Chutney? Chutney? No!" came the regular Indian response of surprise when we asked for some palliative, some condiment to make the dish of the country go down protesting throats; but the khansamah boasted that he would be able to produce "a vary splendid dinner, with cauliflower, mem," in the evening.
THE GREAT TEMPLE AT BUDDHA-GAYA AND THE SACRED BO-TREE
We turned from the Gaya road to a massive white gateway, where sheeted Brahmans and turbaned folk lay in leisured wait for us, and noble white bullocks rested beside tilted carts that had brought priestly visitors to this Sannyasi or Shivaite college of Buddha-Gaya. A much-marked Brahman, with the sacred white thread across his shoulder, led us off by a sandy path toward the pinnacle of a temple roof just showing beyond some tree-tops, when suddenly all Mahabodhi, the Place of Great Intelligence, was revealed to us. The sunken courtyard of the Sacred Bo-tree lay at our feet, and a great nine-storied, pyramidal temple soared one hundred and sixty feet in air, seemingly perfect in every line, from foundation-stone to the gilded pineapple pinnacle,—precisely the temple built in the second or in the sixth century, as may some time be agreed upon, but certainly the great temple that Hiouen Thsang saw. There was, at the first glance, nothing ruinous or hoary or venerable about the apparently well-preserved monument. The good repair was too disenchantingly obtrusive and conspicuous, and for sen​timent's sake one would almost rather have seen the temple crumbling and vine-grown in a rubbish- choked court, as it was in 1860. There was a chilling neatness and a forbidding order, too, about the crowded monuments, remains of monuments, and foundations of monuments in that flagged area thirty feet below us, which told of the archæologist with his tape-measure, his numbers and labels, the restorer with his healing plaster and illusive cement. The view came so suddenly, there was such silence, with no moving object anywhere in sight, that it was as unreal as if a vast drop-curtain had blocked the path. The silence, too, was befitting the sacred place, the actual scene of the great penance and struggle, the illumining of the Light of Asia, the birthplace of India's noblest religious system, a place hallowed by the traditions and associations of twenty-five centuries of religious life. No other visitors, not a pilgrim nor a worshiper, came to that court for hours. Our melancholy Moslem servant, the big, sheeted Brahman, who knew as little as the Moslem of this treasure-spot, and the languid, lesser Brahman, more brainless still, were the only moving creatures in all that sunny space. The shrieks of little parakeets, as they flew with flashes of emerald light in and out of the niches of the temple and the branches of the Sacred Bo-tree, were the only sounds in the mellow, slumbering air, that same perfect midday atmosphere that belongs to the ideal days of the East Indian winter, as to the sun-ripe days of the American Indian summer. All the world drowsed in that golden calm—it was the ideal Mahabodhi.
​In Hiouen Thsang's time buildings and monuments were crowded together, almost touching for a mile and a half, all round the Sacred Tree. There remain only what one sees in the single glance at the sunken area; save as archæologists, digging here and there, have found the remnants of palace and temple and monastery walls, of cloisters and tanks and towers. Where we stood had been the great entrance of the monastery, where three thousand priests once lived, and treasures incalculable accumulated around an inner arcanum, whose solid gold statue was covered from foot to crown with jewel offerings. Instead of the great tower-capped walls stretching a thousand feet either way, and the throngs of yellow-robed priests, there is a very modern little galvanized iron pavilion sheltering a collection of broken images, sculptured and inscribed stones, salved from the pits and rubbish-heaps around, wreckage gathered after centuries of abandonment and final Mohammedan vandalism. The most valuable and interesting stones have been sent to the Calcutta Museum, and some few to London. The guides, of course, knew next to nothing about these relics. "General Cunningham put them there"—"General Cunningham vary high essteemed them," etc. The Brahman knew nothing of the history of the temple, the tree, or the place, and was perhaps the most aggravatingly disappointing of all his vampire tribe that fasten upon one in the show-places of India. Our gloomy and monosyllabic Mohammedan—may all travelers in India beware of that professional traveling servant, Fog​lou Rahman!—knew far, far less. I had to cross-question, call for and demand to be shown this and that; to poke and pry, push and insist and rack my memory for the very little it held of Fahien's or Hiouen Thsang's travels. "He duss-sunt know-ah. People never ask—just memsahib want to know," sighed the melancholy Moslem.
"Where are the caves in the hills where the Buddha lived? Up there?" I asked, pointing. "Is there a cave there with carvings all over the walls?"
The Brahman could not have looked blanker if I had asked for the Eiffel Tower, It took long consultation and visible guesswork by both Brahman and Foglou Rahman for them to answer: "Maybe there are some holes in the hills over there—but—he duss-sunt know, memsahib." One might hope for better things in the next incarnation of the twice-born Brahman blockhead, the long-descended Aryan decadent and degenerate—but for the Moslem there ought to be all that the wrath of the Prophet has promised to the unworthy. The exasperation of being there, of having eyes, yet almost seeing not, went far toward quelling any deep emotions and dissipating the spell of the place, the somnolent calm, the soothing peace, the atmosphere almost as of Nirvana which brooded there, as we sat on the ancient stones and looked down upon the Place of Great Intelligence, the Veranda of and the veritable Tree of Knowledge.