Endarkenment 1

Intense poverty is really hard to watch. Especially when it’s right in-your-face, and relentless.

It’s devastating to see raw suffering, it’s distressing, and there’s a grating feeling of uselessness that keeps digging at me, demanding a response.

Here in Bodhgaya, the site of Buddha’s enlightenment, where tens of thousands of Buddhists from around the globe are currently gathering to receive teachings from the the Dalai Lama himself, there’s also a very dark side.

I’ve never seen so many beggars, anywhere in the world.

There’s street upon street of them, lined up at the edges of the road as you walk past.

They’re desperately poor. Dressed in rags or old clothes. Dishevelled. Filthy. Lots of kids and young mums. Lots of old people. Some have major disabilities, and can’t walk, but few have any aids to help them. Like a basic chair on wheels, or even a trolley or some sort of skateboard.

So they drag themselves across the filthy streets with their arms, their bodies and limbs scraping against the asphalt, unusable deformed legs dragging behind them over the dust and stones. If they have legs at all that is. Or arms.

As I pass they call out and put their hands out, begging for some rupees. If they have a metal bowl they’ll bang it on the ground as I pass. Sometimes they’ll push their open hands into my body, demanding some acknowledgement. Sometimes they’ll grab my arm, or my hand, and force me to look into their eyes. And they won’t let go.

It’s excruciating.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to help all of them. Giving to a few every day is all I really wanna do right now, if I want to carry on doing what I’m doing. Which I do.

I mean, if I was really generous, I could totally empty my bank account right now and give more of them more money.

But the streets will still be full of beggars tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

And I know that’s no excuse.

This world is impossible to understand sometimes.

And it's somehow fitting that I’m experiencing all these emotions here, in Bodhgaya, Buddha's place of enlightenment.

Buddha was once a prince who lived a cloistered life in a palace, a few hundred kilometres from here. It wasn’t until he left the palace grounds for the first time, as a very young man, and was so overcome by what he saw, that he began to seek an answer to that big question that dogs every human.

How can I be happy in the midst of all this suffering?

How can I be happy, and stay happy?

The thing is, Prince Siddharta, before he was the Buddha, had every material thing he ever wanted, and a loving wife and son. But when he left the palace grounds for the very first time and saw the suffering of the poor, first hand, right in his face, he realised that life was not what he thought it was.

And it was the sheer brutality of poverty that led him to seek a deeper truth, to begin to understand how a person could learn to train their mind, and come to accept and transcend the joys and sufferings of their day-to-day realities, and live in peace and contentment anyway. And when they finally reach this place of true acceptance and openness, they will naturally spend all of their time helping others to do the same.

What a place to be.

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

My marathon journey to here from Kathmandu had one final twist.

Rather than take me right into the town of Bodhgaya, my long distance bus dropped me on the highway heading south, in the middle of bloody nowhere, 3km away from the town of Bodhgaya.

And it was midnight.

Yeah, thanks a lot guys.

As the bus pulled off I yelled out “FUCK FUCK FUCK YOU INDIA!!!”

I was totally over it.

It’d obviously been a long and torturous journey, and I was about a thousand kms from my equanimous best.  I was totally exhausted, had stomach cramps, and desperately wanted to lie down.

But luckily there was no one around to hear me fucking! my lungs out. I mean, I subconsciously knew that I guess.

And there were no rickshaws anywhere either.

Luckily, I’d kept some charge on my phone, and knew which way to walk. But walking in India late at night, anywhere, alone, isn’t really my favourite thing to do, let alone in a completely isolated place. And let alone at midnight, after such a long journey.

Not because I fear other humans, but because of the chance of coming across packs of aggressive dogs, which is a very real possibility here.

But luckily that didn’t happen, and after 20 minutes or so a rickshaw with a couple of passengers already inside came past and picked me up.

Phew!

There is a Buddha.

We dropped the others off first, but then the rickshaw driver had a long argument in Hindi with his other passengers about their agreed fare. It took them at least ten minutes to sort it out. Midway through their argument more “FUCK!!s” were almost exploding from my pressure-cooker face.

We finally made it to a guesthouse which I’d called on the way. The owner gave me a really hard time because I was so late.

Just what I needed right at that moment.

Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry, I had no control over it, just please give me a (fucking cunt piss shit bastard fucking stupid fucking) clean (fucking) bed!

Please.

Thank you.

Finally!!

Thank you thank you thank you.

I made it.

Buddhist Mecca

Because of the major spiritual gathering happening here at the moment, and because the rockstar Dalai Lama is here, I got kicked out of my guest house the next morning. At this time of the year pretty much all the hotel and guest house guests are Buddhist pilgrims, and they don’t stay for just a couple of nights, like me.

They’re here for 10 days, or a few weeks.

So the owners aren’t interested in someone locking in a room for just a couple of nights when all these people are arriving looking for much longer accommodation periods.

Or they’re just booked out already.

What to do?

Go and eat.

I was starving. I found a tent eating house, and really pigged out on Tibetan tucker. It was super cheap and super delicious.

Potala tent restaurant

Then, as usual, off I went looking for a place to sleep.

There’s Buddhist monks and nuns everywhere, of all flavours. Tibetans, Thais, Sri Lankans, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indians, Koreans, Japanese, Bhutanese, Chinese, and every other -ese you can think of.

Burmese temple

There was no affordable accommodation anywhere in town. So I got out of town, and walked to a smaller village on the other side of the Falgu Cessriver.

Clothes dryers, Indian style

A view of the main temple in Bodhgaya, the Mahabodhi temple, from across the other side, where I finally found a place to stay. Mahabodhi means “great bodhi” tree.

It was super quiet on that side

'Xactly. We've got a bit of work to do.

School Uniforms of the World, latest contribution. Walking across the bridge, back into the hustle and bustle.

Oh my Gourd! Look at the size of them! And the pumpkins too.

Drying cow pats. They burn quite well, which is not surprising, given that they’re basically half-digested dried grass. Fine for cooking, and handy, because it gets the cow shit off the streets.

You see them all over India.

Mahabodhi Temple and The Tree

The Mahabodhi World Heritage Park is the raison d’être of Bodhgaya, as it contains the descendant of the very bodhi fig tree under which Buddha sat when he achieved enlightenment, in around 450 BCE.

It’s the most important Buddhist pilgrimage site in the world.

According to tradition, Buddha sat under the bodhi tree and meditated without moving for seven weeks, before he finally achieved enlightenment. Not that it was a one off, though. It’s not that easy.

He’d already spent six years in the forest, living as a Hindu ascetic, meditating his head off, begging for food, basically learning and refining his spiritual and physical practices constantly, until he finally got to that last seven week marathon of meditation superpowerness.

A couple of hundred years later, the great Emperor Ashoka, who ruled a large part of the Indian subcontinent from 268 to 233 BCE, became a convert to Buddhism, and he spread Buddhist spiritual practices far and wide across his kingdom. He himself regularly paid homage to the bodhi tree, initiating a worship festival at the site every year.

The story goes that Ashoka’s queen was reportedly jealous of her husband’s devotion to the tree (of all things to be jealous of), and so she poisoned it. OMB! What a shoka!

But the tree didn’t die.

Infuriating!

While bodhi fig trees have extremely long lifespans (generally 900 to 1500 years, and possibly longer), it’s generally thought that the current tree is just a relative of the original.

But who cares about that, because the existing tree, and the temple and grounds surrounding it, are truly magnificent.

Security around the whole site is super tight.

In 2013, and also in 2018, there were bombings carried out there by the Indian Mujahadeen, in revenge for the slaughter of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar by Burmese Buddhists. The mujahadeen’s stated aim was to attack important Buddhist sites in India.

So these days no electronic equipment is allowed inside the whole area, including mobile phones. So no pics guys, except from the web.

The stunning mahabodhi tree

The main stupa, which has a large Buddha statue inside

The Dalai Lama himself, visiting the tree

The temple at night.

None of these images really portrays the incredible vibe at the temple right now, with tens of thousands of devotees here. Especially at dusk.

Huge rivers of devotees circumambulate the main temple, many of them chanting or spinning prayer wheels. All of the spare ground in the whole area is full of tiny transparent tents, with monks meditating, chanting, playing their Tibetan drums, or reading scriptures in Pali.

Thousands of devotees set up their mats and prostrate whilst facing the sacred tree. Prostrating is a Buddhist devotional ritual of standing with palms together, and then bending down and sliding the arms and whole body forwards onto the belly on the ground, and then coming up and doing it all again.

It’s a bloody tiring practice. Most of the devotees, mainly monks, strip off down to their singlets to do it, as it’s hot and sweaty work. And they do between 200 and 1000 prostrations a day. Impressive.

When I was in Tibet many years ago I saw many groups of devout pilgrims prostrating their way right around the country.

Each prostration was done facing Mount Kailash, the most sacred of Buddhist mountains, in western Tibet. They would do a prostration, then move their mats sideways a slight distance along, then do another. Their intention was to prostrate from Lhasa all the way to Mount Kailash, a distance of 1200km, and then prostrate all the way around it, another 50 clicks or so.

I’m sure that by the time you’d finished doing that, in the incredibly hostile climes of Tibet, often away from any villages and food sources, you’d have a reasonable understanding of what suffering is, and how to overcome it.

In Bodhgaya I circumambulated the Mahabodhi temple and tree many times. It’s not my first time here. It’s a beautiful, meditative thing to do, despite the hordes. In fact, because of the hordes, because us hordes were all there for the same reason - to wish peace to every corner of the world, and to wish for happiness for every single living being in it.

Mobile phone locker queues. Yeah, it took forever.

Tibetan dinner spot

Menu for Italian carnivores

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