Buddhist Sites Tour 2012 | dhamma footsteps

India-Nepal highway: more like a simple farmyard road than a highway leading to an international border crossing; rough surface and missing chunks of tarmac create an incredible, bump, crash and rattle in the bus that goes on without end. Too much vibration to be able to sleep and impossible because of the noise the bus driver is making with the horn, a high volume squeak-and-squeal alternating between two notes. Cows and goats wandering around scramble to get out of the way; people on bicycles scatter to make room. If there’s a traffic jam, he gets angry, leans out the window and shouts. There’s a co-driver in the cab and he’s sent out to bully, threaten and persuade the drivers of the vehicles to move to one side. Co-driver gets back in again, then another obstruction. I’m sitting at the front of the bus behind the driver, looking through the large windscreen and it’s like everything is held together in a makeshift, temporary way; no time to do it properly, we have to hurry on – what is it? I’m thinking along the lines of a war-zone or some kind of catastrophic event has taken place and this is an emergency vehicle; there is danger and we are fleeing for our lives. But it’s not that, it’s just normal.

The bus gets seriously stuck behind a buffalo walking slowly, with her calf, down the middle of the road; despite the driver’s trumpeting two-note horn, mother buffalo won’t move from her place in the center of the road. Co-driver is sent out to chase the buffalos to the side so the bus can get through and he whacks mother buffalo hard on the rump, an audible WHACK! I can hear above all the racket. Unfortunately, this sends mother and calf off into a frantic gallop straight down the middle of the road. The bus still can’t overtake and has to follow these galloping buffalos for some distance. The driver is getting worked up into a fury, bus lurches to and fro while he’s yelling like a wild man out of the window, and barely in control of the vehicle. Eventually the buffalos run off to the side of the road, the engine roars into life and we accelerate away. Co-driver climbs back into the cab, breathless from trying to steer the buffalos and for a few minutes he has to defer to the driver’s seething anger directed at him. It’s bizarre and funny, but nobody on the bus is laughing.

I’m with a Thai tour group, reserved, polite, quiet behaviour, small body movements and everyone is sitting straight up, dressed in white top and black trousers or sarong. Could be they’re in a state of shock, never having experienced anything like this before. Somehow they all thought (and I did too) that in India there would be vestiges of the Buddhist loving-kindness and the generosity of letting-go but instead of that the whole thing seems to be about blatant greed, hatred and delusion; a skeletal hell realm of holding on tight and mad with desire. India is discovering it’s identity in the media and advertising. The bus went past a poster showing the actor Riz Khan in an advert for whiskey and the slogan is: ‘I have yet to become me’. I managed to get a slightly blurred photo of it.

What happened to Buddhism in India? There were the Islamic invasions and what little remained was assimilated into Hinduism. It could be that, long before that, King Ashoka considered that one day Buddhism in India would come to an end because it has no built-in mechanism to withstand a forceful take-over; it’s fragile and light and doesn’t attach to anything. For this reason he erected simple stone pillars in places where significant Buddhist events took place; they function like markers on Google maps. The locations are verified and Buddhists coming to India, foreigners like me, visit the sites, Bodh Gaya, Sravasti, Lumbini, see these pillars and take a moment to consider that, yes, it happened here. And if it weren’t for King Ashoka’s sense of urgency that these places could eventually be lost in history, there might be no traces of Buddhism in India at all.

Bodh Gaya: 04.00 hours, this is where the enlightenment took place. I’m in a hotel not far from where it happened, early morning and the window is open, sitting on a cushion with mindfulness, watching the breath. There’s a sense of, it’s just over there, out the window and over to the right a bit; yes, it was there that the event took place. I’m near to the epicenter, ground zero. From here, it spread outwards to the people close by and dispersed among everyone who had a mind to listen. Then, in the course of time, reaching out to all parts of the world, so that visitors from Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, South East Asia and other places eventually came here to see for themselves. Ordinary lay people came, conversions from Hindu castes, bearded sannyasis with matted hair and white marks smeared across the forehead, and monastics came from all over Asia, robes in shades of ochre, maroon and grey; chanting … namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa … various intonations and melodic rhythms altogether in a pleasant discord.

How much of this is the same now as it was then, 2,600 years ago? The sensation of the breath is the same. The air gently touching the inner surfaces of nasal passages and throat and the consciousness that arises with that feeling. Through my own humanness and in a subjective sense, I can recognize the humanness of the bodhisattva. As well as the same blue sky, brown earth; green foliage, and even though the outer objects I can see may not be the same, changed over the centuries, the process of seeing is the same. The consciousness that recognizes this is the same for me as it was/is for everyone, and the ‘me’ and ‘mine’ I experience is not in any way different from anyone else’s ‘me’ and ‘mine’ who lived at that time, or now, or will live any time in the future.

You could say it’s just a sense of history that’s present whenever you enter a historical site, or a building or museum. It’s possible to know how the people, who lived then, felt and understood the world; the things they looked at and what they heard, smelt, tasted, touched and their mind responses; all of that is the same for me now, here in this place where the bodhisattva walked 2,600 years ago. I’m connected with the outer world by consciousness, in the same way the people at that time were; the conscious experience of what is seen is the same for me as it was for the bodhisattva – simply that function. And the environment I’m in, the outer world, may be different from how it was at that time, but the body/mind organism that receives the experience is universal. All beings are caught in this conscious experience. There’s no need to add anything else. The sense of ‘now’ that’s the same today as it was then could be the sounds I hear, the feeling of sunlight and the gentle wind blowing in my face; an awareness of the ever-present sensory data telling me outer and inner are the same and I’m an inseparable part of it all.

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Where there is the mind, where there are mental phenomena, mind-consciousness, things to be cognized by mind-consciousness, there a being exists or the description of a being. Where there is no mind, no mental phenomena, no mind-consciousness, there a being does not exist nor any description of a being. [SN 1.65]