Day 7: Bodhgaya (23-25 December 2007)

Bodhgaya was the first newly-added stop on my reformulated north-to-east India itinerary, and I decided, for lack of time and for a description of the place as "gritty, dirty, and poor" by an experienced traveler, to make it a one-day stop-over. This is, I am afraid, all too typical of my travel style: trying to pack too much in, piecing together complicated and easily foiled transportation logistics, and, frankly, exhausting myself. In this case, I was catching a 5:30am train from Varanasi, arriving Bodhgaya at 10am, and then departing Bodhgaya that same night at 10pm for the overnight train to Calcutta. But, hey, it saved me a day I could spend on the Orissa coast, and it kept from from having to spend the night in what sounded like an unattractive town.

So what is Bodhgaya, you ask? Or maybe you're less ignorant than I was I know that it is one of the holiest cities in Buddhism, the site where the Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. It is a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists from around the world, and the town is littered with (trash and with) temples from numerous Buddhist countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Nepal, China (I think in this case, when they refer to China, they mean Taiwan), Tibet (see earlier parenthical), Burma, Japan. The centerpiece of Bodhgaya is the Mahabodi complex, where a towering, geometric temple marks that special spot where Siddhartha Gautama became Buddha.

And quite a desolate place he chose to do it. Bodhgaya is in the heart of Bihar state, one of India's poorest. The terrain is dusty, flat, and unforgiving - I got to see a bit of it on the 40-minute auto-rickshaw ride from the train station in neighboring Gaya. Not much to say for the ride, except there were a lot of people standing by the side of the road looking for a lift. And my driver, despite his claim when selling me the overpriced ride of "no other passenger," stopped for at least eight of them. No worries: carpooling is more carbon friendly! One thing I enjoyed about the ride was that, at least for part of it, we were on a fairly open stretch of road, the first I'd encountered in India. Delhi, Agra, and Varanasi: packed, packed, packed. We got going at a decent speed, I felt a little wind in my hair, and, best of all, no suffocating fumes in front of me and no constant horn blasts all around me.

The driver dropped me off in the center of town, if you can even call it a center. There was the usual retinue of rickshaw drivers (cycle and auto), street vendors, beggars, and tourists. Two things were noticeably different: the tourists were mostly East Asian - Buddhists here for pilgrimage/religious tourism; and the locals were a mix of Indians and Tibetans. Bodhgaya is home to a large segment of the Tibetan exile community, and apparently the Dalai Lama himself spends time here in the winter when his home base in Dharamsala gets too cold (and when his travel schedule permits). It was a little disheartening to see the Tibetans here: visibly poor and, on stuck these dusty plains, even more topographically distant from their altitudinous homeland. I've never been to Tibet proper, but got fairly close, if not actually there, in Western Sichuan province (Daocheng and Litang), which is ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and geographically Tibet. It's just not in the demarcated zone that constitutes the Tibetan Autonomous Region. From what I've heard, Western Sichuan is one of the best places to experience Tibet, because the people there are relatively less oppressed and, as a result, relatively happier. (For anyone interested, the northwest Yunnan-Western Sichuan-Chengdu journey by public bus was one of my most satisfying and stimulating journeys - I can share more with whoever might be planning to head that way.)

I decided I'd spend the bulk of the day walking, since I was by now quite sick of autorickshaws, and there appeared to be a fairly manageable temple-to-temple stroll I could do. I saw a lot of Buddhas: fat, emaciated, serene, serious, Asiatic, Christlike. It was an terrific display of different styles of Buddhist art and architecture - I don't know where else one might get to see such a geographically diverse juxtaposition.

As lunchtime approached, I found myself walking through some back fields behind the temples and the main road, in search of the Root Institute for Wisdom Culture, a Western-run Buddhist education, meditation, and service center. I had heard they served a good lunch. Wandering in this open fields was nice - although they weren't especially pretty and the footing was often difficult, their openness was a welcome change from the clutter and filth of Agra and Varanasi. I was drifting toward a sense of serenity that had eluded me thus far in India, save a few calmer moments in Varanasi. I came across locals who, at last, wanted nothing of me except to talk a bit and hear why I was in Bodhgaya. And they even helped me find the Root Institute, walking with me most of the way.

The Root Institute was the first enclosed spiritual community I had come across in India. There are many such communities, institutes, monasteries, and ashrams all over the country, some run by Westerners, others by (often cultish) Indian gurus. I had initially listed "Ashram stay" on my list of trip goals, but those tend to require a bit more time than I had and, possibly, a bit more of a wacky/hippie/earthy/new-agey streak. But I can't rush to judgment not really knowing what goes on at these places, and I shouldn't judge too hastily based on the physical appearance of the residents and the fact that many Western counterparts of these institutions are clustered in San Francisco and elsewhere in the Bay Area.

I was too late for lunch, but I wasn't sure whether it was open to me anyway, because the Root Institute was in the middle of one of its multiday meditation workshops. Frankly, this sounds like a pretty good place to come to learn/practice meditation and also, if one is so inclined, to learn a bit about Buddhism. They hold 10-day introduction to Buddhism workshops, as well as other courses. 10 days is a bit long to spend in Bodhgaya, but if your focus is Buddhism, then might as well do it here. Kind of like taking an intro to Judaism course in Jerusalem. (Should synagogues offer that as an option for intermarried-spouses considering conversion? Nothing like a bit of travel and sense of ancientness to stimulate spiritual feelings...) What I found most intriguing about the Root Institute, in addition to the students, were the teachers. I didn't meet any of them, but I read their bios in the office. Most were Americans who had converted to Tibetan Buddhism, taken Tibetan names, lived in the U.S., and came regularly to Bodhgaya to offer classes. Two of them live in the Bay Area. Maybe I will look them up. It gave me a nice reminder that there are a heck of a lot of different paths people take in this world. Well, I'll confine that last statement to the different paths Westerners take. Seeing the poverty and street people in India have given me a not-so-nice reminder about the different paths people take in the third world. Anyway, if you're interested in more, and didn't click on my nifty hyperlink, check it out at http://www.rootinstitute.com/. Oh, and there are a number of other Buddhist meditation places in Bodhgaya, and elsewhere in India, so look beyond the Root Institute if you're serious about it.

About 30 meters outside the Root Institute, I saw a group of young Indian Bodhgayans playing a game of pick-up cricket. India is truly a cricket-mad nation, and the best evidence of it, to my mind, is the fact that the pick-up game the young people are always playing in the streets is cricket. Kind of like the fact that in Brazil, every kid is playing soccer. One them called out to me and asked me if I wanted to play (so nice not to have to feel defensive and suspicious with every interaction here) and encouraged me when I initially hesitated. He explained to me the rules - I already knew the basic rules of cricket from my brief stint on the Jesus College Graduate XI a few years back - but this finally elucidated for me how pick-up cricket can be played. They have one stumps and one batsman at a time, instead of the usual two, and the number of wickets to be taken is equal to the number of players on each side. We played in a space enclosed by a short wall and their rule was if you hit the ball on the fly beyond the wall, you were out, unless you hit it so far that it hit the large brick wall a ways away, in which case you scored a six. The other usual rules applied: 6 balls to an over, and you could be called out by catch, by bowl, by LBW (leg before wicket), and by run.

My play was moderately incompetent - OK in the field (they put me as wicket keeper, which I think in pick-up cricket is the equivalent of being put in right field) and a disaster at bat (popped out on the first ball - a "duck" in the parlance). Our team lost handily, but the kids (ranging in age from early teens to early 20s) were extraordinarily welcoming and nice. The one who had reached out to me - a well-spoken 25-year-old and clearly the leader of the group - had already explained to me that he was the principal of the local school. I thanked him for the game and asked if I could take a look around his school. He happily obliged, and I looked through his well-kempt but crumbling building. There were four rooms, plus a tiny principals office, covered in students' artwork. He told me that the school has 80 students, 6 teachers, and him. He showed me the pile of student information forms - perhaps the application they had to fill out before enrolling? - and one of the fields was daily wages. They all seemed to range between 50-60 rupees per day - around US$1.25-1.50. That's either just above or just below the global poverty line, depending on which measure one uses. I think he was probably already expecting it by then, but he seemed genuinely grateful when I asked him if I could make a small donation.

Then, back to the pseudo-reality of the Bodhgaya tourist/pilgrim trail. I wandered into a newly constructed temple complex outside of which were huge tourist buses and inside of which were many chattering Chinese speakers. I busted out some Mandarin, which caught my targeted conversation partner by surprise - it turned out she (in Tibetan monk robes), and the others (in regular dress), were Taiwanese.

I had some Tibetan snacks - vegetable momo (dumplings) and thupka (noodle soup) to recharge before heading to the pinnacle of Bodhgaya, the Mahabodi Temple. By now, the sun was starting its descent, which told me that the temple would have both uncomfortable crowds and pleasant oblique light. Upon approaching, I heard the hypnotic drone of a Buddhist chant coming from a set of loudspeakers and also from human voices - as it turned out, from an ocean of red and orange robes seated in masses on the western and northern sections of the courtyard surrounding the temple. In the other sections were Tibetan monks (and Westerners in the monk attire) doing a very physical form of prayer that involved using an elevated wooden board and slippery hand pads to go from standing to kneeling to a thrusted prostrate position and back. Kind of like some type of prayer yoga. The stone temple itself climbed toward the sky like an ornamented pyramid, an angular stupa, and an elongated ziggurat (this last sentence probably is more demonstrative of my architectural ignorance than anything else). Inside, I struggled through the crowd to catch a glimpse of the 2-meter high golden Buddha (the serene, thin, Asiatic variety). I followed the crowd in a slow progression around the inner courtyard to the back side of the temple, where that famous tree still stood. Well, it wasn't the actual tree but a descendant - a sapling had been taken to Sri Lanka and planted, and a sapling from that tree was replanted at the Bodhi tree's site. I lingered a bit - as much as I could given the push of the crowd - to ponder Buddhism's ground zero.

By now, it was nearly dusk. I hurried to the Tibetan exile market and quickly bought some beads before the vendors packed up shop - given how little I negotiated, I'm sure I got fleeced, but one of the beauties of this country is that when you get fleeced it's for a dollar here, a dollar there, at most five dollars (U.S.). I had an uninspiring tourist dinner - I've been super careful about food in this dirty and podunk towns, and can't say I've enjoyed much of the Indian food I've eaten - and hired an autorickshaw back to Gaya. I repeated what is becoming my usual train-platform routine: I waited nervously for my train, because there was no information I could find about the platform on which it was arriving, or its actual arrival time. I made a friend: again, a young Indian guy who took quickly to me, talked my ear off, asked for my "email ID", and begged me not to forget him. And, Ashok, if you're reading this, I haven't forgotten you!

The train arrived with the all-too-common two hours delay. By this point, I was becoming an expert: I had confirmed my waitlist ticket and found my berth assignment only, and I confidently folded down my middle bunk for a rather pleasant night's sleep on the ride to Calcutta.