Bodh Gaya: Where the Buddha Sat Under a Tree and Changed the World

There are four places in the world that every Buddhist hopes to stand in before they die. Three are in the terai plains of India and Nepal — the birth at Lumbini, the first sermon at Sarnath, and the death at Kushinagar. The fourth is Bodh Gaya, where Siddhartha Gautama — a prince who had walked away from a palace, a wife and a newborn son — sat beneath a fig tree for 49 days in 528 BCE and, at the first light of a full moon, understood the cause of all suffering.

The tree that conquered an empire

The Buddha died around 483 BCE. Two centuries later, a warlord-turned-pacifist called Ashoka the Great — emperor of most of the subcontinent — came here in person to renounce war. He built the first brick temple over the Bodhi tree around 260 BCE, and his daughter Sanghamitra carried a sapling of the tree to Sri Lanka. That Sri Lankan tree survived; the original Bodh Gaya tree was cut down three times over the next 2,000 years (once by Ashoka's own jealous queen, twice by invading armies). Each time, the sapling in Sri Lanka was used to regrow it. The fig tree you see in the sanctuary today is thus a direct descendant of Ashoka's tree, returned home in 1880.

The temple itself — the Mahabodhi — is a 6th-century Gupta-era reconstruction, rising 55 metres in carved sandstone. It stood abandoned for almost 700 years after the 12th-century Turkic invasions, while Buddhism slowly disappeared from India. The British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham found it buried in jungle in 1875. A restoration in the 1880s brought pilgrims back; a 2002 UNESCO listing brought the world back. Today, 15 countries have built their own national monasteries around the main temple — each in the architectural style of its origin.

Walking the pilgrim circuit: an afternoon

• The Bodhi Tree — touch its roots, join the thousands of pilgrims prostrating in robes of maroon, saffron, white, grey.
• The Vajrasana — the polished-stone 'diamond throne' where the Buddha sat; placed by Ashoka himself.
• Mucalinda Lake — where the serpent king sheltered the meditating Buddha from a storm.
• The 80-foot Great Buddha Statue — 1989, Japanese-built, a towering modern addition to the old ground.
• The International Monasteries — Thai, Tibetan, Burmese, Bhutanese, Chinese — walk the street and compare.

The Buddhist Circuit: connecting the four sites

Bodh Gaya is the anchor, but the full Buddhist Circuit covers 1,200 km. Ninety kilometres north are the ruins of Nalanda University (5th century, destroyed 1193) where Xuanzang and 10,000 monks once studied. Another 200 km north-west sits Varanasi with Sarnath on its edge — the Buddha's first sermon site. For the living Buddhist tradition, continue to the Himalayan monasteries at Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh or the Ladakhi gompas covered in our Himalayan monasteries post. See all Bihar destinations or browse Pilgrimage sites.