Mahabodhi Temple

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The Mahabodhi Temple is a Buddhist temple at Bodh Gaya, in the present-day Indian state of Bihar, built on the site that tradition identifies as the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Buddhists hold that here Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath a fig tree, vowed not to rise until he had seen through the cause of suffering, and at dawn became the Awakened One. The spot is counted the holiest in the Buddhist world — the navel of the earth, some texts call it, the one place able to bear the weight of that event. The seat itself is the bodhimanda, the seat of awakening; the point of the cosmos on which the world rests, and the place that, when everything else is destroyed, will be the last to go and the first to reappear. The pilgrim-monk Xuanzang, who came through in the seventh century, set down the logic plainly: were this seat not as hard as diamond, no part of the earth could support a being who had entered the stillness of perfect awakening. Geography here is not incidental. The event needed a place strong enough to hold it, and this was the place.

The stratigraphy of the site

The history of the Buddha’s enlightenment-site runs deep beneath the standing building, in layers that can be read downward like strata. The emperor Ashoka, in the third century BCE — by the traditional reckoning some two centuries after the Awakening — is recorded as having come to the tree, venerated it, and raised the first shrine on the ground. A polished sandstone slab survives from roughly his time: the Vajrasana, the “diamond throne,” whose goose-and-palmette ornament in low relief carries the unmistakable signature of Mauryan stonework and places it, by the judgment of art historians, at or near the reign of Ashoka himself. To the centuries that followed belongs a stone railing, the vedika — sandstone posts and crossbars of the Shunga period, around the middle of the second century BCE, later supplemented by coarser granite of the Gupta era — enclosing the sacred precinct. Only fragments of that railing remain in place; much of it has been carried off to museums, and replicas now stand where the originals once did.

The tall brick tower visible today belongs to a later layer again. A steep pyramidal spire — a shikhara of straight, inward-curving sides rising from a square sanctuary, its faces tiered with niches and crowned by an amalaka and finial, the whole flanked by four smaller towers that repeat its shape in miniature at the corners of the base — it is generally dated by scholarship to the Gupta period, around the fifth or sixth century CE. This makes it one of the earliest free-standing temples built wholly in brick to survive in India, and a hinge in the long development of the South Asian tower-temple. When Xuanzang stood before it he recorded a tower beside the tree of some hundred and sixty feet — close to fifty meters, the height the spire still keeps. Yet the present form owes much to a heavy nineteenth-century restoration, so that what the eye reads as ancient is in part a Victorian reconstruction over a Gupta core over an Ashokan foundation. The building is a section through twenty-two centuries.

Decline, custody, and the long recovery

By the medieval period the surrounding region had largely ceased to be Buddhist. The monastic universities of the eastern Gangetic plain were sacked in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; the sangha that had tended Bodh Gaya thinned and went, and the great tower stood through long stretches half-derelict, silted over by the river and the seasons, a ruin known to the country around it. Pilgrims still came from the Buddhist lands beyond India — Burmese and Sri Lankan missions are recorded across the centuries attempting repairs — but the living congregation around the shrine was gone.

Into that vacancy, in 1590, came a Shaiva ascetic named Ghamandi Giri, who settled by the temple, founded a monastery — the Bodh Gaya math — and took the title of mahant. For roughly three hundred years the site passed into the custody of his Giri lineage, who treated it as a Hindu establishment, performed their own rites within and around it, and held it as the property of the math. The recovery of the temple as an international Buddhist center is a story of the colonial and post-colonial era, and it begins with a paradox: the modern shrine was substantially rebuilt by outsiders before it was reclaimed by Buddhists. In the 1870s the Burmese crown, under King Mindon, obtained leave from the British government of India to renovate the temple and sent craftsmen to the work; their efforts were judged archaeologically destructive, and the British administration took the project over. Under the direction of Alexander Cunningham, the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, with his assistant J. D. Beglar and the scholar Rajendralal Mitra, the temple was excavated and reconstructed across the 1880s, with Beglar reportedly working in part from an eleventh-century miniature stone model of the temple that preserved the four-cornered design. Cunningham published his findings in 1892 as Mahâbodhi, or the Great Buddhist Temple under the Bodhi Tree at Buddha-Gaya.

The contest over who the restored shrine belonged to opened in the next decade. In 1891 the Sri Lankan reformer Anagarika Dharmapala visited Bodh Gaya, was stricken by the sight of the holiest place in his tradition in the hands of a Shaiva math, and founded the Maha Bodhi Society to campaign for the return of the temple to Buddhist hands. The dispute went to court. When Dharmapala’s associates attempted in 1895 to install a Japanese Buddha image in the upper chamber, the resulting litigation drew from the Calcutta High Court a finding that set the shape of the problem for a century: the temple was the property of the mahant, but Buddhists, no less than Hindus, held the right to worship there. Two communities, one shrine, neither willing to cede it.

The provisional settlement came with Indian independence. The Bodh Gaya Temple Act of 1949 removed the shrine from the math’s sole control and vested it in a statutory management committee — four members from the Buddhist community, four from the Hindu, with the District Magistrate of Gaya as chairman; the state government empowered to constitute the committee, to dissolve it for mismanagement, and to decide any dispute between the two communities over the use of the temple. The arrangement institutionalized the shared claim rather than resolving it. An amendment in 2013 removed the requirement that the chairing magistrate be Hindu. To this day Buddhist organizations press for exclusive Buddhist administration of the site, on the argument that Hindu temples are governed by Hindus and mosques by Muslims, and that the holiest place of the Buddhist world should be no exception; the counter-claim holds that the math’s centuries of custody and the Hindu rites long performed there are themselves part of the site’s history. The committee endures, and so does the argument. The custodial question is not a relic of the past but a present and unsettled feature of the place — the price, perhaps, of a sanctity that more than one tradition recognizes.

The three foci of pilgrimage

Three things draw pilgrims, and they are arranged almost in a line. The temple itself houses a gilded image of the seated Buddha touching the earth — the bhumisparsha mudra, the earth-touching gesture by which, in the traditional account, the about-to-be-awakened one called the ground to witness his right to the seat against the armies of Mara. The figure faces east, as the Buddha is said to have faced at the moment of awakening, and the gilding and offerings laid before it mark it as the devotional heart of the building.

Behind the temple, against its western wall, lies the Vajrasana — the diamond throne, a thick slab of polished grey sandstone, its surface worked with geometric and floral bands — set on the ground at the exact seat. This is the oldest object on the site and the most precisely venerated: not a representation of the place of awakening but, in the understanding of the tradition, that place itself, the literal ground the Buddha touched. The sapling rises directly beside it.

For the third focus is the Bodhi tree: a pipal, the sacred fig, held to descend by a long chain of cuttings from the original under which the Buddha sat. The present tree is a successor many times over, and the lineage itself is part of what is venerated, traced through a chain of plantings that crosses and recrosses the sea. The cutting taken to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE — carried, by tradition, by Ashoka’s daughter Sanghamitta and planted at Anuradhapura as the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, where it still stands, the oldest human-planted tree with a recorded date — became in time the reserve from which Bodh Gaya itself was replenished. The Bihar tree was cut, burned, and felled by storm across the centuries; the present specimen was planted by Cunningham in 1881, raised, in the usual account, from the Anuradhapura line that the parent tree had founded. The relation runs in a circle: the daughter-tree preserved the descent the mother-tree lost, and gave it back.

A shared center of a divided tradition

What the temple commemorates is an event, not a deity, and that shapes how it is used. Practitioners come to circumambulate, to prostrate, to recite, and above all to sit — for the place is held to make meditation easier, charged by what once happened on the ground; the meditation done in its shadow is felt to draw on the same ground that bore the original awakening. In the modern period the site has become a shared center for Buddhist communities that otherwise differ sharply. The Theravada lands of Burma, Sri Lanka, and Thailand; the Tibetan schools, who hold the great prayer-gatherings of the Monlam here in winter; the Mahayana traditions of East Asia and the Newar Vajrayana of the nearby Kathmandu Valley — each maintains a temple in the town built in its own national style, and all converge on the single tree. A site that doctrine and practice would otherwise divide is unified by geography: whatever else separates the schools, the seat under the tree is one seat, and they read the same law of act and consequence outward from it. The recitations carried in the Pali canon and the wider Buddhist scriptures return, at Bodh Gaya, to the ground where they began.

The complex was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002 — the temple, the diamond throne, the Bodhi tree, and the cluster of subsidiary shrines and votive stupas within its enclosure — recognized at once for its antiquity, for its place in the history of brick architecture, and for its living centrality to a world religion.

Scholarship and the documentary record

The site’s modern history is unusually well documented because it was recovered under the archaeologist’s trowel and contested in the colonial courts, leaving a dense paper trail. Alexander Cunningham’s Mahâbodhi, or the Great Buddhist Temple under the Bodhi Tree at Buddha-Gaya (London, 1892) is the founding archaeological account of the restoration and remains a primary source for the state of the ruin before and during the 1880s campaign; it is long in the public domain (full text via Zenodo). The colonial phase — the tangle of British surveyors, Hindu abbots, and Burmese missions that produced the present building — is reconstructed in Alan Trevithick, “British Archaeologists, Hindu Abbots, and Burmese Buddhists: The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya, 1811–1877,” Modern Asian Studies 33.3 (1999), the standard study of the pre-Dharmapala custody question (Cambridge Core). The fullest modern treatment of the site as a contested and globalizing sacred place is David Geary, The Rebirth of Bodh Gaya: Buddhism and the Making of a World Heritage Site (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), a historical ethnography of the temple’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century transformation, the politics of the 2002 inscription, and the custody dispute as it lives on today (University of Washington Press). The official basis for the World Heritage listing — the criteria, boundaries, and statement of universal value — is set out in the UNESCO inscription dossier for the Mahabodhi Temple Complex (whc.unesco.org/en/list/1056).

The early descriptions on which all later reconstruction depended are the travel-records of the Chinese pilgrim-monks. Faxian, around 400 CE, found shrines and images marking the stations of the Awakening; Xuanzang, in the 640s, left the most detailed account of the tower, the throne, the railing, and the tree as they stood at the height of the Gupta cult — the description that let nineteenth-century excavators read the ruin against a record written when the building was whole. The Buddhist primary literature behind the site, from the enlightenment narratives outward, is gathered in the canonical collections (the three baskets); among the public-domain English renderings, the Mahayana texts that frame the cosmology of the bodhimanda appear in the Sacred Books of the East (Müller et al., 1894).

The tree has been cut down and has grown again more than once; the shrine has been buried, exhumed, and rebuilt. What is marked is held to be fixed even where the marking is not.

→ In the library: Arnold — The Light of Asia (1879 verse life of the Buddha) · Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (Müller et al., 1894)

→ Related: Burmese Vipassana Revival · Tripitaka · Puja · Buddha · Buddhism · Meditation · Tibetan Buddhism · Mahayana · Hinduism · Karma · Newar Vajrayana