Joseph Szostak's Articles on Lions Roar

The great pilgrimage sites marking major events in the Buddha’s life have gone from ruin to renewal, but problems remain and their future is not secure. Joseph Szostak reports from India on the history of Buddhist pilgrimage and the challenges and benefits of this ancient practice. From the archives of Buddhadharma. A few days into my first pilgrimage, I was traveling on an old Mazda bus, rolling on six bald tires along some of the worst roads in India, if not the world, in the unfortunate region of Bihar. The Indians have a saying, “The good, the bad, and the Bihar.” It is the poorest, most corrupt state in all of India. The potholes are the size of craters, and the highway is two converging lines of Tonka trucks, tourist buses, white ambassador taxis, and motorbikes, all honking their horns ferociously while spewing foul-smelling exhaust into the air. From our bus window, my fellow pilgrims and I observed scenes not much altered from the Buddha’s time: villages of clay huts with straw roofs, women in colorful saris working the earth with hoes, men in white dhotis. We were traveling from Sarnath to Bodhgaya, along a corridor often walked by the Buddha himself. During the Buddha’s life, this region in the central part of the Ganges (Ganga) Valley was one of the great cradles of human civilization, known as the Majjhimadesa, the Middle Land. It’s the region where Siddhartha, or Shakyamuni Buddha, was born and spent his life. The Middle Land nurtured Buddhism through its first crucial centuries, and today, even though Buddhism is no longer the religion of the land, it remains its spiritual home. Buddhist pilgrims throughout the centuries have been inspired to overcome enormous obstacles and even risk their lives to visit the sacred sites here and receive their blessings. While Hindus have always been avid pilgrims, for Buddhists it has been a different story. Today Buddhist sacred sites in India seem vibrant, filled with eager pilgrims from traditionally Buddhist countries and increasingly from Western countries. They display glorious temples and monuments and have spawned a vast market for Buddhist paraphernalia. But it hasn’t always been like this. For many centuries, Buddhists in search of the sources of Buddhism had nowhere to go. The places of the Buddha, like Buddhism itself, had been wiped from the face of India. How the sites went from oblivion to this robust resurgence is a remarkable story, one that is still unfolding. For behind some apparent successes, many important issues remain unresolved. The Four Great Wonders. It was the Buddha himself who enshrined pilgrimage as an important act in the life of a practitioner. Speaking shortly before his death to his chief attendant, Ananda, and referring to himself as the Tathagata, the Enlightened One, the Buddha said: Ananda, there are four places the sight of which should arouse a sense of urgency in the faithful. Which are they? “Here the Tathagata was born” is the first. “Here the Tathagata attained supreme enlightenment” is the second. “Here the Tathagata set in motion the wheel of the dharma” is the third. “Here the Tathagata attained parinirvana without remainder” is the fourth. And, Ananda, the faithful,…while making the pilgrimage to these shrines with a devout heart, will, at the breaking up of the body after death, be reborn in a heavenly world. —Mahaparinirvana Sutra, Chapter V The four places that are linked to key events in the Buddha’s life are Lumbini, where he was born in the fifth or sixth century BCE; Bodhgaya, where he attained enlightenment at the age of thirty-one; Sarnath, where he first turned the wheel of dharma; and Kushinagar, where at the age of eighty he passed from this world. There are other important sites as well, such as those where the Buddha performed his great miracles and those where he and the sangha held their rain retreats. But the “Four Great Wonders,” as they are known, remain the primary places of Buddhist pilgrimage.[1] Ancient cultures seemed to understand the importance of grounding their spiritual life in the rock and stone of a specific place; they knew that place carries not just its own physicality, but also the energy of human and spiritual unfolding. Place is a container of story and legend. This makes place an authentic book of history and pilgrimage one’s attempt to read that book. This is especially true for Buddhists, because the Buddha’s life story is the map of the Buddhist path. The sight of the holy shrines, say the texts on pilgrimage, should not arouse craving, nor the pleasure and excitement of sightseeing, but rather the awakening of virtuous potential in our mindstream. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, commenting on Buddhist pilgrimage, or dharma yantra, says: The dharma yantra is very important for Buddhists. When we visit these sacred sites, we are reminded of the Master, Lord Buddha. It develops in us a strong sense of compassion. Ideally, one should be a better person when one returns, otherwise it is not useful, a waste of money and time. Herein lies an interesting proposition: the outward act of pilgrimage can, indeed should, lead to an inward change. The pilgrim sets off to a geographic location, yet the pilgrim’s real quest is not for a physical place but rather for an inner destination. The pilgrim can’t just be a tourist. The Early Pilgrims. The early Buddhist pilgrims endured tremendous hardship, and some of them changed the course of history. The first historical record of Buddhist pilgrimage belongs to the great Indian emperor Ashoka, who embarked on his pilgrimage in the third century BCE, approximately two hundred years after the Buddha’s passing. Being emperor and possessing tremendous devotion, he did more than merely visit the sacred sites. He erected the very stupas, temples, and monuments that marked these sacred sites and gave them their grandeur. While there is evidence of pilgrimage before Ashoka, the force of his imperial patronage clearly sanctioned the sacred geography and fostered the practice of Buddhist pilgrimage in India. This tradition was perpetuated by sages such as Faxian (Fa-hsien) in the fifth century and Xuanzang (Hsuan-tsang) in the seventh, who were instrumental in introducing Buddhism to China, and by the eleventh-century Tibetan master Marpa the Translator, who established the Kagyu lineage in Tibet (also known as the New Translation School of Buddhism). This practice of pilgrimage played an important role in the spread of Buddhism across Asia. Xuanzang remains the most renowned pilgrim of all time and one of the most important figures in the history of Buddhism in China. Traveling on horseback, camelback, by elephant, and on foot, he crossed the tallest mountains and harshest deserts of the world. He covered an astonishing ten thousand miles on a pilgrimage that lasted sixteen years. Even today his name is a household word through much of Asia, and his pilgrimage is one of the great adventure stories of all time. The famous Chinese novel Monkey is based on his journey. We current-day Buddhists owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to these early pilgrims. Ashoka created the stupas and monuments that helped mark the sacred Buddhist sites, and Faxian and Xuanzang left detailed records that would provide the map for rediscovering and reestablishing these sacred sites. And they would need to be rediscovered, because in the thirteenth century Buddhism disappeared from the land of its birth, and by the nineteenth century many historians doubted that the Buddha Shakyamuni was anything more than legend and myth. The Buddhist Diaspora. How could Buddhism, conceived in the great Ganges Planes of India, supported by emperors and a prosperous laity and rooted in the very fabric of Indian life, be so vanquished in the land of its birth that virtually all traces of it would disappear? In the early twelfth century, Buddhism was thriving in India. During the reign of the Pala kings (eighth–twelfth centuries), who were followers of Buddhism, the great Buddhist universities of Nalanda, Odantapura, and Vikramasila flourished and attracted as many as ten thousand students from every Buddhist country in the world. Learning and scholarship expanded, and tantra developed. Then from Afghanistan came the Turaskas, fanatical Muslims who systematically destroyed every Buddhist community in their path. Buddhist monks with their shaved heads and their distinctive colored robes were easy targets and were massacred wholesale as idolaters. According to the Persian historian Minhaz, at Nalanda University alone thousands of monks were burned alive and thousands more were beheaded. Nalanda’s great library was set ablaze and burned for several months before all its books and records were devoured. Minhaz reported a similar assault on Odantapura. Chan Khoon San, author of Buddhist Pilgrimage, describes the effects of the disaster: The extermination of Buddhist monks dealt a fatal blow to the organization of the Sangha in India. With the monks gone, no one was left to carry on their work or to lead the demoralized laity who were forcibly converted to Islam or absorbed into Hinduism and Jainism. While India’s Hindus and Jains were also persecuted, their priests and leaders were not so easily recognized and therefore not so easily killed. Enough survived to rebuild their communities. But for Buddhism in India this was the end. The handful of Buddhist monks who survived fled with what holy treasures and scriptures they could gather. They scattered to remote monasteries or to ports from which they sailed to safety in Bangladesh or Burma. Others trekked northward across the Himalayas into Nepal and Tibet. This was the Buddhist diaspora. With the downfall of Buddhism in India, the shrines and monuments of the Buddha lost their meaning. They were plundered and destroyed, converted into Hindu temples, or just ignored and neglected. Chan Khoon San calls this period the saddest era of Buddhism—a...

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