Bodh Gaya

The place

The tradition places the awakening beneath a pipal tree on the bank of the Neranjara river. A descendant of that tree stands at the site, and beside it the vajrasana, a polished stone slab identified as the seat, which is of Ashokan date and is among the oldest objects there.

Ashoka is recorded as having visited and built at the site, and a railing of the second or first century BCE survives in part.

The Mahabodhi Temple

The temple is a tall straight-sided pyramidal tower of brick, some fifty metres high, with four smaller towers at the corners, standing east of the tree. Its present form is substantially of the Gupta period with later restoration, most extensively in the nineteenth century under Alexander Cunningham and J. D. Beglar, and it has been much argued over — how much of what stands is ancient and how much Victorian reconstruction.

The form is unusual for Indian Buddhist architecture and was copied elsewhere in Asia, notably in Burma and Thailand.

Pilgrimage and dispute

Bodh Gaya draws pilgrims from every Buddhist country, and monasteries built by Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Japanese, Bhutanese and other communities surround the site.

Its management has been contested. The temple was under the control of a Hindu mahant from the sixteenth century, and the campaign to return it to Buddhist administration, begun by Anagarika Dharmapala in the 1890s, was a formative episode in modern Buddhist revival. Legislation in 1949 established a management committee, whose composition — including non-Buddhist members — has remained a source of grievance.

It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002.