The Birthplace of Buddha

Sunset at Lumbini courtesy of Blogspot site Up The Thoughts

THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BUDDHA

There were a thousand reasons to be here; and none at all. He had come to the birthplace of the Buddha on impulse; having listened to a fellow Australian talking about how interesting it was.

They had been sitting by Pokhara Lake as the heat of the day shimmered across the calm, often majestic pond. A few hundred meters to his left the Indian pilgrims continued to queue for the boat ride to the temple in the center of the lake. Time passed.

Within weeks, entirely due to that random conversation, he was sitting in the dusty streets of Lumbini watching a bullock drawn cart laden with straw pass by; the only indication that the last two centuries had occurred being the rubber tyres.

A monkey scampered across the road.

The signage on the café opposite declared: “Rahul Cyber Café: A plateform for Communication.”

They could spell “communication” but not “platform”. Go figure.

Needless to say, he had never seen the Cyber Café open.

The idea that there was actually Wi-Fi there was probably a myth; as mythical as the hot water most Nepalese hotels claimed to have when you were booking in; only to proffer a bevy of excuses as to why just on this one day the hot water could not be found. They had already got your business. They didn’t care.

The most common phrase was: “What can I do?”

As in, “It is a fixed price sir, what can I do?”

Beyond the little cluster of guesthouses, restaurants and shops, at the end of the street in fact, you entered an almost entirely agrarian culture. Boys shepherded little herds of goats. Water buffalo were herded past; the calves clinging close to their mothers. Little mud huts, the housing of the poor, were tidy and well maintained. While in the gutter opposite, they just threw their rubbish.

The children frequently greeted his passing with “Namaste”, hello, as if they didn’t see many tourists walking the streets back here. They probably didn’t. He namaste’d straight back. He knew from hanging around with them for the past six weeks that they took great offence if you didn’t say a simple hello back. They didn’t realise you were besieged; sick of people trying to claw money out of you.    

There wasn’t much hurry to do anything. At the café opposite the Lumbini Village Lodge he had expressed a desire for breakfast but no one had bothered to take his order. The heat of the day was only just beginning to build.

He was yet to see Buddha’s birthplace. He was yet to change hotels from the first one he had dumped in after a long bus ride. After clambering off the bus he followed the first, well the only, tout who greeted him to a nearby hotel. It probably wasn’t the best deal in town; but after an entire day in crowded local buses it would have to do.

He had thought, earlier in the day, that after travelling downhill for so long, that they must be at a low altitude.

Then they started passing through clouds.

The mountain landscapes were spectacular; and he drank them in; having always preferred the mountains to the sea; a reaction to his beachside upbringing perhaps.

But now he was on the hot, dusty plains of India; enlightened souls in the fabric of things; having passed beyond.

It took a day or two to work out the layout of Lumbini.

He had assumed Buddha’s birthplace would be some remote but beautiful village with views of snow capped peaks and spectacular valleys.

Instead it was a small, hot, dusty town on the plains of the subcontinent.

The Indian border was only10 or so kilometers away.

There were local police, army and border police.

Whoever designed the police and military uniforms, artful in their patterned blue, black, and shades of grey, deserved a Nobel Prize for beautification of the planet.

Nepalese men wear their uniforms well.

Outside the compound, if you could call it that, surrounding Buddha’s birthplace was a sign detailing the main proscriptions: do not lie, steal or indulge intoxicants or sexual misconduct.

What could one say?

Money seemed to have dried up almost entirely.

With his instant new friend, just add rupees, they had spent most of the day wandering through the villages surrounding Limbini.

Many of the vistas harked back to a pre-industrial age; or 16^th Century England perhaps.

He watched a farmer make an improvised but nonetheless masterful chillum out of mango leaves.

Opposite a woman crouched on the side of the dirt road patting together cow dung and straw in an age old ritual to provide material for burning.

She patted them together expertly for hours.

Later he watched as a man herded his water buffalo down a narrow track; followed by a line of Buddhist monks in deep burgundy robes.

All was not lost; nor ever would be again.

After the years of surveillance in S.E. Asia and back home; he still suffered occasional waves of paranoia.

Could they really have followed him here? How could they have known he would be sitting under this particular group of flowering mango trees, on this particular isolated farm 10 kilometers from the Indian border?

It was impossible.

He deliberately tuned out the garble in the middle distance.

The heat shimmered across the neat fields of barley.

After the frenzied economic activity of modern Thailand, here there seemed to be almost no money in circulation.

They had to try several different small shops in the villages they passed through before finding someone who could change a 500 rupee note; less than 10 dollars.

Everything seemed cast out of a story book.

Children and adults alike greet him with “Namaste”; in a manner which insisted on a response.

There was always that phrase, “local talent”, to get him over the hump of who and what had gone before.

Small mud huts, with their thatched roofs, was the principal form of housing.

If people had been living in these conditions in the suburbs of Sydney there would have been an outcry.

Here it was just life; the children playing in groups under the trees, the cattle browsing in the fields, the much prized goats staked out in various allotments.

He could have longed for something else, but that was not going to be. No fulfillment coming your way.

The beginning of the sign at the back of Buddha’s birthplace began “Be Vigilant”.

After Thailand, he assumed it would be a warning against pickpockets.

Then he read the sign in full: “Be vigilant. Guard Your Mind Against Negative Thoughts.”

The sun turned to an orange ball as it set below the neighbouring fields.

Some of the pilgrims barely glanced at the stone said to mark the very spot of Buddha’s sudden birth.

Other pilgrims went into an instant rapture at the site of what they had traveled so far to see; pressing their heads in some sort of meditative daze against the gold coated bricks adjacent to the spot.

The queue behind them would grow impatient, pressing up against their rapture.

There was a pocket in the stone said to be his first footstep into the world.

Some of the remnants of old bricks and walls from early temples, similar to those he had seen in so many other places, were 2300 years old.

What amazed him was that the individual born here, the Buddha who had founded one of the world’s great religions, or beliefs, had within a few hundred years of his death been influential enough to have had temples built on the site of his birth.

Unlike those who barely glanced at what they had come to see – what he and the mother of his children had called the Delphi Syndrome after they had travelled one day all the way to the Greek ruins of Delphi; only for her to want to turn around and go straight back to Athens.

While he stood in the old auditoriums and listened to the sounds of applause and laughter from the long dead crowds she had sat, heavily pregnant and pouting, in one of the local cafes near where the buses collected their passengers.

He would always linger in strange places.

Outside the “Buddha Park”, the compound inside which lay not just the World Heritage listed site of his birth, encased in a large white building to protect it against the elements, but numerous temples and then monasteries being built by numerous countries. The Korean monastery was unfinished; and its grey concrete walls were almost materialistic.

The Nepalese had decorated theirs with the all seeing eye.

The German monastery did not look German at all, looked like it didn’t know what it wanted to be. While the substantial Austrian complex, where devotees were able to stay in the rooms and dormitories, looked very Austrian but was actually built by the Swiss.

He had been around the site three times; standing over the birthplace of someone who had changed the planet.

While it was high season in Nepal’s trekking zone, here it was low season.

On the second time round he found himself the only tourist in the building, talking to a green eyed, helpful young soldier who seemed keen to practice his English.

The soldier explained not just the history of what he was looking at; but his own delight at being able to work in a place like this.

It was wrong to have lustful thoughts in a place like this; so instead his admiration for the genius of the designer of the Nepalese military and para-military uniforms deepened.

On his way out of the park monkeys screeched and called to each other in the near dark forest; some sort of primitive bedtime story from our ancestors; "Are you there, are you still there?"