Bodh Gaya- Buddhist LocationLocation · Landmark"Seat of Enlightenment"

The Night of Vaishakha

After six years of fasting that had stripped his body to bone, Siddhartha abandoned self-mortification. A woman named Sujata offered him rice pudding on the banks of the Niranjana River. He ate, crossed the river, and came to a grove of peepal trees at Uruvela. He sat beneath one of them facing east and resolved not to rise until he understood the truth of existence.

On the full moon of the month of Vaishakha, he entered deep meditation. During the first watch of the night, he saw all his previous lives. During the second, he saw the arising and passing of beings throughout the cosmos. During the third, he realized the Four Noble Truths and the chain of dependent origination. By dawn, he was the Buddha. The spot where he sat became the Vajrasana, the Diamond Throne: the one point on earth said to be stable enough to bear the force of a buddha's awakening.

Mucalinda's Hood

The Buddha stayed near the tree for seven weeks after his awakening. During the sixth, a great storm rose while he meditated beside Mucalinda Lake. The naga king Mucalinda emerged from the water, coiled his body seven times around the Buddha, and spread his cobra hood overhead against the rain.

The Tree's Lineage

The peepal tree under which the Buddha sat became one of the first objects of Buddhist veneration. Before anyone carved images of the Buddha, they came to worship the tree.

According to the Mahavamsa, Emperor Ashoka's daughter Sanghamitta carried a branch of the Bodhi Tree to Sri Lanka around 236 BCE. King Devanampiya Tissa planted it at Anuradhapura, where it stands today: the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi. The parent tree at Bodh Gaya was less fortunate. Ashoka's queen Tisshyaraksha had it cut down out of jealousy. It regrew from its roots. Later invasions destroyed it again. The present tree descends from a sapling sent back from Anuradhapura in the nineteenth century: the original lineage, returning home after two and a half millennia.

The Diamond Throne

Emperor Ashoka visited Bodh Gaya in the third century BCE and set a carved stone slab at the base of the Bodhi Tree to mark the exact spot where the Buddha had sat. This was the Vajrasana. He raised a shrine and a pillar beside it and founded a monastery.

The temple that stands today, the Mahabodhi, rose in its present form during the Gupta period: a brick pyramid roughly fifty meters high. The Vajrasana remains inside it, in the same position Ashoka placed it.

Those Who Came

The Chinese monk Faxian arrived at Bodh Gaya around 400 CE and found a thriving monastic community. Two centuries later, Xuanzang recorded the temple in detail: the Vajrasana, the colossal Buddha image, the monasteries surrounding it. A thirteenth-century inscription from Pagan in Burma mentions monks returning with seeds and leaves from the Bodhi Tree.

Then the invasions came. The armies of Bakhtiyar Khilji devastated Bihar in the 1190s. The university at Nalanda, nearby, was destroyed. Bodh Gaya fell into decline and passed out of Buddhist hands for centuries.

In 1891, the Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala came on pilgrimage and found Buddhists barred from worshipping at the site. He founded the Maha Bodhi Society and spent decades fighting to restore Buddhist access.