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POSTCARDS FROM THE SEAT OF ENLIGHTENMENT

“The search for enlightenment is like riding an ox, in search of an ox.”
--Buddhist teaching

This is not what you would expect from the road to the seat of enlightenment. Outside the car window a bleak landscape unfolds. Stray dogs gnaw on discarded garbage. Cement huts and cheap shacks litter the countryside. The road is a maize of pot holes, mud and gravel. It is a geography of impoverishment. But 2500 years ago this region had its moment in the sun, when a young prince named Siddhartha descended from the nearby hills after a long fast and positioned himself beneath a sturdy looking tree, a Bodhi tree, and that night he achieved his goal of Enlightenment.

I am just now returning from a few days at the fabled site in India of Siddhartha’s “Big Moment,” and attempting to process the experience. There is a magnetic charge anytime you approach a site of such literal and metaphorical significance, and like a magnet, these encounters tend to attract or repel. The town of Bodh Gaya, built around the Bodhi Tree where Prince Siddhartha transcended to become the Buddha, offers a little of both.

Bodh Gaya is considered by many to be the most sacred pilgrimage site in all of Buddhism, and there is an aura to the actual Bodhi Tree—a sense of history, of significance, of time. Being surrounded by pilgrims from all over the world adds a cosmopolitan buzz to the isolation of the region, and for some this will be the high water mark in their life’s spiritual journey. But there is another side to Bodh Gaya: a dark underbelly.

The town itself is not much more than a huddle of cheapish hotels, restaurants and trinket vendors. The architectural highlight is the presence of a large number of monasteries representing the different sects and aesthetic traditions of the religion. There is also, in the center of town, the Mahabodhi Temple with its ornate pyramids jutting into the sky. Along the eastern flank of the temple rests the famed Bodhi Tree, and the parcel of land beneath known to the Buddhist world as the “Diamond Throne.” The temple complex is a UN World Heritage Site, and attracts international visitors by the thousands.

The Bodhi Tree to which the pilgrims flock is not the actual tree the Buddha would have known. The original Bodhi was cut down by the wife of the great Indian Emperor Ashorka in the 3rd century AD. Fortunately for Buddhist lore a sapling of the original tree had been transplanted to Sri Lanka centuries before, and the tree towering over the Diamond Throne today is an offspring of this transplanted relation. The name Bodhi comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “enlightenment.” The tree itself is a fig tree, a banyan fig tree or pipal tree, known for its great size, broad intertwining limbs, and longevity. It has a powerful presence, and its history and genealogy adds a tangible and symbolically sacred dimension to the spot.

Yet beyond the temple gates are scenes as tragic and shocking as any you will find in all of India. Because Bodh Gaya is the only real tourist attraction in the entire province of Bihar, the great poverty center of the sub-continent, families abandon their physically and mentally disabled kin here to fend for themselves as beggars on these dusty streets. The wretched and conniving also venture here like moths to the flame of the ever-present white tourist buses.

In its introduction to the region, the Lonely Planet Guide to India notes: “The extreme poverty surrounding Bodh Gaya make tourist buses and private cars targets for dacoits (bandits), who periodically use mock accidents and road works to stop vehicles. There has also been an alarming rise of banditry and violence aboard trains, despite an increasing military presence.” You find no such warnings for any other region in India, not even the disputed and terrorist prone territory of Kashmir, or the slums of Calcutta.

Such is the tension awaiting the traveler venturing to the real Axis Mundi of Buddhism: an odd, even surreal mixture of the sacred and the profane. I hold memories of attending the morning meditations with hundreds of monks from around the world, the air rich in the sent of incense and the sound of ringing bells; of hundreds of baritone voices chanting in unison. I felt the exhilaration of a living culture—of a deep breath, of being in the “now.”

But the exhilaration is tempered by any number of indelible images: gnarled and aged hands grabbing at me through the temple fences, innumerable polio children dragging their limp legs behind them across stone courtyards, the beggars swarming in droves, murmuring like zombies, “Hello, mister. Hello, mister.” And then there are the ever-present con men playing on the sensibilities of those whose journey here holds deep spiritual significance.

The experience actually hardened me. I took one step closer to becoming the “Ugly American.” Wherein I find the central irony of this adventure: my conscious efforts that led me to seek out this sacred pivot point almost felt like a karmic drain. In confronting such unimaginable misery beyond my ability to remedy only acted to desensitize me further to human suffering. Which leads to a secondary irony: the Buddha’s quest was for a path to end human suffering—a middle way between a devotion to pleasure and to pain. Yet today, the Diamond Throne is a grand kaleidoscope of human suffering.

The Dali Lama has taught that the truly strong can find enlightenment anywhere; they can find Buddha in the basement, if you will. Pilgrimages and sacred sites are for the rest of us, for the would-be spiritual travelers. I have traveled to sacred sites all over the world, from Machu Picchu to St. Peters, and I always leave with a slightly altered perspective on the physical presentation of the human spirit. A journey to Buddha’s Bodhi Tree is sure to make an impression on any traveler—that impression just might not be what you are expecting.