In the Footsteps of the Buddha

Ajanta

The treasures of this extraordinary site, way out in the depths of the dusty countryside of the Indian state of Maharashtra, and some considerable distance from the glittering capital at Mumbai, are universally described and signposted as the Ajanta Caves. This is nowhere near doing them justice. These are Buddhist retreat halls, thirty of them, hand-hewn from solid rock and fashioned into spacious rooms, with slender carved columns and elegant sculptures. They date from both the Hinayana and Mahayana periods of Buddhism in India, the earliest likely to have been started in the first century BCE, and the newest maybe as old as 480 CE, certainly completed no later than the seventh century, by when the site was abandoned, and the jungle took over until it was rediscovered by a British officer in 1819.

If there were nothing more to these retreat halls than the feat of chipping them out from the side of the hill, they would be already a magnificent physical demonstration of the realisation of space and clarity from the seemingly dense and impenetrable; but there is more; there is something awe-inspiringly, breathtakingly beautiful more. For parts of some of the halls are still covered in their original paintings, and kings and courtesans, bodhisattvas and celestial nymphs, fantastical beasts and landscapes out of the Jatakas, the tales of the previous lives of the Buddha, gaze down on us captivated onlookers, their details still sharp, their colours still vibrant and surprisingly barely faded, despite the many intervening centuries.

One can make out the places where the plaster has come off from the stone surface and the rest of the paintings is missing, and it is a startling instant of insight to picture that every square inch of every hall, inside and outside, would have been thus covered. Every detail would have been picked out in vivid hues, just as brightly decorated as Tibetan Buddhist and South Indian temples are today. (And, if we stop to think of it, as the classical buildings of Ancient Greece used to be. It is a disservice to the Parthenon to look at it today in the plainness of its marble cladding and assume that this is what Phidias and Pericles contemplated.)

This was a site I had missed out on during my first trip to India ten years ago, temple fatigue having set in by the time I reached Mumbai at the end of four months of travelling, and which I had dreamt of visiting ever since. It was extremely rewarding, especially in getting my imagination going on what it must have been like when it was regularly occupied.

These halls would have been used by a community of monks gathering together for the traditional monsoon retreat, when the rains made travel impractical, as otherwise the practice inherited from the Buddha was for renunciates to live as solitary mendicant wanderers. The literature on the site classifies the halls into monasteries (viharas), which contain a row of cells on each side of the main space, obviously for the monks to sleep in, and a shrine at the back, displaying invariably a massive stone Buddha; and prayer halls (chaityas), which were devoid of sleeping space, and may therefore have been used exclusively for assemblies of the monks and religious ceremonies.

It turned me immediately to the thought of the happy generations upon generations of monks that must have spent time there, rising early in the morning to their prayers and recitations of the sutras, the ravine along which the halls gently curve echoing with their chanting and the sound of instruments; absorbed in the study of their texts, the testament of their dedication the disfiguration at the top of walls and ceilings from the untold accumulation of soot from so many thousands of lamps fed on oil and ghee; and able, I hoped, at each setting of the sun, to gaze out towards the encircling forests and the river below in peace and quiet and tranquillity and serenity. It made me wish, wistfully, surrounded by hundreds of Marathi sightseers, that it were possible to have these halls resonate like that again, even if only briefly.

Back now in South London, and telling friends and acquaintances at the Kagyu Samye Dzong Buddhist Centre about this splendid experience, in answer to their questions about my recent stay in India, it has surprised me that none of them know of Ajanta. It confirms an impression of mine: that for Buddhists, for Tibetan Buddhists in the West at any rate, Buddhism is first and foremost a living tradition. The places they are interested in going to in India are those where revered masters reside, such as Dharamsala. Historical sites such as Bodh Gaya only appeal to them when a teaching or prayer gathering, like the annual Kagyu Monlam conducted by the Karmapa, is held there. And it convinces me that, without a permanent Buddhist presence and without regular Buddhist events, a project such as the Buddha Park in Patna, promising as it may sound in theory, risks proving useless and wasteful in practice – or rather in the absence of it.

Sanjay bolo

In the Hindu household with whom I stay during my visits to India, there is a three-and-a-half-year-old who, to the great alarm of his grandfather looking to the family business, and to my own immense satisfaction, already has the makings of a fine panditji. This young boy has been collecting murtis, in the form of small statues and images, of every bhagwan and bhagwati he could lay his hands on: Ganesha, Hanuman, Lakshmi, and many more. He has them arrayed on his own puja table, and spends a large part of every day doing homage to them.

Even before my arrival, he had decided to have the Buddha represented amongst them. This is not surprising in itself: some Hindu scriptures teach, after all, that the Buddha is the ninth and up to now most recent of the avatars, or incarnations, of the god Vishnu. In the absence of an actual image of the Buddha, he had temporarily assigned one other of his deities to provide that duty; and interestingly, the one he had alighted on was not Vishnu or any of his other widely worshipped forms such as Krishna or Rama, but that of a meditating Shiva; I say interestingly because to Shiva, almost alone in the whole Hindu pantheon, I happen to be particularly devoted.

(Since then I have bought him a proper Buddhji, and upon this new statue taking its place on the puja table, the Shivji image was promptly reassigned to its correct representation.)

Every morning he called me to do puja with him, and every evening too, if he could get away with it. He had a surprisingly good memory for a three-and-a-half-year-old, for I could recognise his reproducing many snatches and many gestures from the regular prayers conducted by his mother and his grandmother in the family shrine room upstairs, during which he would sit in whenever the occasion allowed. That is not to say there was not a good deal in his ceremonies that was simply invented; and the overall result, I must confess, to a casual non-Hindu participant like myself, resembled nothing so much as a lot of mumbling in Hindi and Sanskrit.

His devotion was, nevertheless, strikingly sincere; and therefore I decided to incorporate my own little daily observances alongside his. Whenever I would come to his puja table, I would arrange to open proceedings with the four lines of the traditional Tibetan Buddhist taking of refuge, which starts: “Sanjay chö tang tsok jee cho naam la ...” (“I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha ...”)

But this three-and-a-half-year-old proved to be even more observant than I had given him credit for. After a few days of this, an occasion came when I failed to perform my usual recitation, arguably distracted by having been snatched by him in the middle of rather engrossing writing work to perform my puja duties. He waited patiently for a few seconds, then nudged me and solemnly instructed, “ ‘Sanjay’ bolo.” (“Say your ‘Sanjay’ stuff.”). I immediately complied, and as a reward could observe him, from that moment on, accompanying me on this short prayer with as many of the words as he had managed to catch by himself, and certainly every time as far as “Sanjay chö tang.”

So I thought I might as well add a little bit of instruction on what we were doing, and tried to explain to him in my broken Hindi that this was a prayer to the Buddha, using his Tibetan title: “ ‘Sanjay’ dusra naam Buddhji ka hai.” (“ ‘Sanjay’ is another name for the Buddha.”) That tiny nugget of information absolutely delighted him, and if anyone else came upon us thus occupied, he would gladly repeat the explanation of his own accord. As for me, I have become a tad more knowledgeable about Hindu divinities, even if it is only to be able to tell the goddesses Durga and Saraswati apart, and still get hopelessly confused between Lakshmana and Balarama.

A love affair with Bihar

Many travel guides will tell you that state of Bihar, in northern India, derives its name from "vihara", the land of monasteries; this is the birthplace of Buddhism, and here is where you'll find the most numerous and significant Buddhist sites in the whole of India.

But Bihar is also the cradle of Indian history. This is where the first empires straddling most of the land mass of the Indian sub-continent arose: Magadha, ruled by the Nandas at the time of Alexander the Great's invasion, and shortly thereafter, the Mauryas, under the great emperor Ashoka, 'one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen'. Today's capital city of Patna, on the banks of the Ganges, stands on the ruins of Pataliputra, where the Mauryas built a many-pillared hall of such magnificence that 'even in decay (it) made such an impression on a Chinese traveller (Fa Hsien, in the 5th century) that he thought it the work of spirits'. These were empires that were fabled for their power and their riches; and indeed Bihar boasts the richest agricultural soils in the country.

Yet nowadays Bihar is the poorest state in India, with an (unfortunately so far deserved) reputation for lawlessness. It is mostly shunned by tourists, except for those who shuttle into Bodh Gaya through its recently built international airport, or in the direct train from Benares; thanks to the exploits of Mark Shand and his book "Travels on My Elephant", a few may even have heard of the Sonepur Mela, across the Ganges from Patna (the largest animal fair in India, dwarfing its more glamorous and better-publicised counterpart in Pushkar in Rajasthan; true, no camels here, but nowhere else will you find as many elephants.) And what can compare with the riotous joy of the post-Diwali Chhath Festival, when Biharis fast for a day and a night and flock to the Ganges for puja to the rising sun? Or with the myriad objets d'art in the Jalan collection at Quila House?

I dream that one day tourists will flock into Bihar and discover all its many historical and cultural gems. Indeed I dream someday of being able to take people on a "In the Footsteps of the Buddha" tour in Bihar: to Bodh Gaya, obviously, where the Buddha reached enlightenment; to Rajgir, erstwhile capital of the Magadhan Empire and site of the First Buddhist Council after the death of the Buddha; to Nalanda, site of the largest Buddhist university in the world until its destruction in the 12th century by the invading Muslim armies; and finally to Vaishali, to the stupa where the Buddha's ashes were buried, and to the only Ashoka pillar still standing in situ. Preferably with a cruise on the Ganges thrown in for good measure ...

(All quotes above are from "India: A History", by John Keay. It's a fantastic book that I highly recommend. I read and annotated it thoroughly before my first foray in 2001-2002.)