“And the Blessed One said: ‘Behold, Ānanda, a devout person of faith should visit these four places with feelings of reverence and awe: the place of the Tathāgata’s birth; the place of his awakening; the place where he set rolling the wheel of Dhamma; and the place of his passing.’”
— Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, DN 16
What happened here
In the late sixth or early fifth century BCE, a man born a prince named Siddhārtha Gautama — who had left his family and practiced extreme asceticism for six years without finding what he was looking for — sat down at the base of a pipal tree (Ficus religiosa) on the bank of the Nerañjarā river and vowed not to rise until he had seen through. That night, according to the traditional account, he passed through the three watches: recollection of his past lives in the first watch, the sight of beings arising and passing according to their actions in the second, and the direct seeing of the Four Noble Truths and the chain of dependent origination in the third. At dawn, touching the earth to witness his right to the seat he was sitting in, he became the Buddha — the awakened one.
This is what happened here. The Theravāda tradition, the Mahāyāna tradition, and the Vajrayāna tradition all trace back to this single night under this single tree on this specific piece of ground.
The Bodhi tree
The original tree is gone. A direct descendant of it — rooted here continuously or replanted from cuttings at several junctures — still stands at the western side of the Mahābodhi temple. The current tree is known to be a direct descendant because a cutting of the original was carried by Saṅghamittā, daughter of the emperor Aśoka, to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE and planted at Anurādhapura, where it still grows (the oldest authenticated tree with a known planting date in the world). When the Bodh Gaya tree died or was damaged in later centuries, cuttings were brought back from the Anurādhapura tree. The lineage of the wood is as carefully traced as the lineage of the teaching.
Pilgrims sit under the tree. Monastics meditate there through the night. The ground beneath the branches is where awakening happened once, and — the tradition’s quiet claim — can happen again.
The Mahābodhi temple
Beside the tree stands the Mahābodhi temple, a tapering brick tower about fifty-five meters tall, crowned with a spire and four smaller spires at its corners. The form was codified by the fifth or sixth century CE and is one of the oldest surviving brick structures in India. Xuanzang described it in detail in the seventh century, and his description matches what stands today to a degree that would be astonishing for any other monument. It was restored — with contested thoroughness — in the nineteenth century under British supervision, and again in the twentieth.
Inside the temple’s main chamber is a gilded image of the Buddha in the earth-touching mudrā (bhūmisparśa), the gesture he made at the moment of awakening. The image sits facing east, in the direction of the sunrise under which awakening occurred. UNESCO declared the complex a World Heritage site in 2002.
The center of a Buddhist world
Around the Mahābodhi compound stand monasteries and temples built in the last forty years by the Buddhist-majority nations of Asia: a Thai temple, a Burmese temple, a Bhutanese temple, a Tibetan temple, a Japanese temple, a Vietnamese temple, a Sri Lankan temple. Each monastery houses monastics and pilgrims from that country. A pilgrim can, in a morning walk, pass between architectural vocabularies that normally live thousands of kilometers apart. Bodh Gaya is the one place in the Buddhist world where all the Buddhist worlds arrive.
The Dalai Lama regularly gives teachings here, including the Kālacakra initiation — drawing tens of thousands. Thai and Burmese monastics perform their rains-retreat meditations on the ground. Western Vipassana and Zen practitioners arrive on organized pilgrimages.
The complicated ground
Bodh Gaya sits in one of the poorest districts of Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. The gap between the pilgrim economy and the town’s residents is stark and has been for centuries. Control of the Mahābodhi temple itself has been contested: under the Bodhgaya Temple Act of 1949, the management committee is composed of both Buddhists and Hindus, a compromise that Buddhists worldwide have long argued should be revised to Buddhist control given the site’s exclusively Buddhist sacrality. The issue remains unresolved.
Theft has been a recurring grief. Statues and relics have been removed across centuries of invasion, British collection, and modern crime. The atlas notes this without romanticizing it.
What one does here
Most pilgrims circumambulate the temple and the Bodhi tree (clockwise, as is the practice at Buddhist stūpas). Many prostrate — lying flat on the stone, arms extended — hundreds of thousands of times, using a ledge of wooden boards worn smooth by the practice. Many sit under the tree for periods of hours. Many make offerings at the Vajrāsana, the “diamond seat” — a sandstone slab that, by tradition, marks the exact spot where the Buddha sat through the night.
There is no single prescribed way to be here. The tree is here. The seat is here. What one does is between oneself and the same question Gautama brought to the tree.
“When he touched the earth, the earth shook in six ways.”
— traditional account of the awakening