Bling and Being
Trip Start
Apr 05, 2006
1
16
30
Trip End
Aug 04, 2006
Bodhgaya, India
Friday, April 21, 2006
Besides this slumming probably suited my new no-change-of-clothes, no-toothbrush lifestyle...
We were woken at 5.30, after 4 hours of passing out, and quickly on our way to Bodhgaya in a tuk-tuk. Claus found himself a really nice room in a Buddhist monastery for 100 rupees (less than GBP 1.50!) - a pleasant surprise after the railway station hole had cost us 250 Rs. Unfortunately, me and Rosie only had the day to spend here so wouldn't have the fun possibility of being woken by monks chanting ;)
Now a crash course on Bodhgaya for the unenlightened (ah ha ha ha.. no please stop, I didn't mean it, it was just an honest pun, guv). Bodhgaya is the small town in Northern India where the Indian prince Gautama Siddharta sat under a Bodhi tree to meditate on human suffering, and became enlightened. So it is the birthplace of the Buddhist religion and the most sacred site of pilgrimmage for Buddhists worldwide.
Personally, I wasn't sure how I'd feel - I'd been quite underwhelmed by Sarnath. Sure the architecture was impressive, but there was no special feeling - it seemed just like any other tourist site. We had a look round a few of the many monasteries dotted around the town, one from every country - Thai, Bhutanese, Japanese, Nepalese and more. They were decorated in the traditional Buddhist temple style - in modern terminology, with plenty of bling. ;)
The centrepiece of the town was of course the Bodhi tree and the magnificent Mahabodhi temple that sits imposingly in front of it. Given all the amazing architecture we had already seen in India, I was not expecting the temple to strike me all that much. So, when I turned the corner to be confronted with a beautiful carved pyramidal spire surrounded by gardens with hundreds of stupas, I was pleasantly surprised. For a start, I didn't think it was that big... ;)
Walking around the site, I felt amazed that I was standing just yards from the spot where a man had first experienced the profound realisation and bliss of nirvana. A realisation of great simplicity, but immense depth (and somewhat paradoxically, by its nature, ungraspable). Just being. I sat for a while in the garden to enjoy the tranquil surroundings and meditate.
I had to go and report my bag loss in the afternoon, which took quite a long time after the tuk-tuk driver drove us all about town - first to the railway station, then to the police chief's residence before finally getting us to the actual police station! I had to get a police letter within 24 hours of the theft and was hoping to be back for a zen meditation class at the Japanese monastery but it was an afternoon of form-filling instead. The only small amusement came when I met the police chief and saw he was wearing a rather fetching Bumchums T-shirt. Yes, that really is an Indian brand.
We had a train to catch to Calcutta from Bodhgaya - this time air-con sleeper, a luxury we'd never experienced before. Very wearied after a long day and 4 hours of sleep in the railway dungeons last night, we tried to just sit down and pass the time reading. Unfortunately, when you're the only white people in a station, maybe the only white people someone has seen for weeks or months, you don't get a lot of peace.
You never want to be rude and the people were not being nasty - they even bought us cigarettes and biscuits! But eventually when we'd told them again and again that we just wanted some peace, the only solution was to up and move to a different platform and sit behind some crates in the hope that we wouldn't attract too much new attention. Being left alone in public in India is not always a possibility!
By the time the train rolled in we were ready for some good a/c rest... ;)
