Vulture Peak- Buddhist LocationLocation · Landmark"Mountain of the Sacred Teachings"

The Mountain

Vulture Peak rises near the ancient city of Rajagriha in Magadha, a rocky hill whose summit looks like a vulture with folded wings. The Buddha returned to it again and again during his years of teaching. It was high enough for solitude, close enough to the capital for crowds.

King Bimbisara of Magadha, one of the Buddha's earliest royal patrons, had a stone pathway built up the hillside so he could climb from the city to hear the dharma. Faxian, the Chinese pilgrim who visited in the fifth century, walked the same path and found two natural caves near the top: one where the Buddha had meditated, another where Ananda had sat nearby. Xuanzang came two centuries later and recorded the great granite outcrop at the summit, the vulture-shaped rock that gave the hill its name.

The Teachings on the Summit

The Heart Sutra is set here. The Buddha sat in deep meditation on Vulture Peak, surrounded by monks and bodhisattvas, and while he sat in silence, Avalokiteshvara spoke. He told the monk Shariputra that form is emptiness and emptiness is form, that there is no birth, no death, no suffering, no path, no attainment. The Buddha emerged from meditation and approved what had been said.

The Lotus Sutra opens with the same mountain. "At one time the Buddha was in Rajagriha, staying on Mount Gridhrakuta." Five thousand monks, nuns, and bodhisattvas sat before him. In the sutra's sixteenth chapter, the Buddha reveals that Vulture Peak is his own pure land, that he has been teaching here since before anyone can remember, and that the mountain itself is a place outside ordinary time.