AS BIDARI AND I stood in the hot morning sun at the entrance of what is now a sprawling complex of three square miles at Lumbini, the archaeologist credited two men for its existence. The first was Emperor Ashoka. The second was the Burmese U.N. secretary general U Thant, who held that post from 1961 to 1971. It was he who came here in 1967 and, as an adherent of Buddhism, despaired at seeing the Buddha’s birthplace in a state of disrepair, a wilderness of hyenas and jackals. He went back to New York and set in motion what he called the master plan for Lumbini, which would transform it into a microcosm of the Buddhist world, designed by the renowned Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Nearly 60 years on, the dream was real. A canal, which Bidari described as “a spinal cord,” ran along a north-south axis, dividing the monastic zones into Mahayana and Theravada. On one side, built in distinctive local styles, are monasteries representing Bhutan, China, Japan, Mongolia, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Tibet and Vietnam. On the other are Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand, which along with Bhutan and Mongolia are the world’s only Buddhist-majority nations. A project such as this might easily have fallen prey to being too schematic, a religious theme park of sorts, but that wasn’t the case: It was beautiful and thoughtful, endowed with the spirit of mid-to-late 20th-century Modernism.
Bidari bookended the 2,600-year history of Lumbini with two Asian Buddhists, one from the third century B.C., one from the 20th century A.D. But this is a story whose end would not know its beginning were it not for the work of a handful of European scholars, including the British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham, the first head of the Archaeological Survey of India, who, beginning in the 1830s, used the writings of Chinese travelers like the seventh-century monk Xuanzang to locate and excavate sites such as Sarnath (where Buddha delivered his first sermon) and Bodh Gaya (where he was awakened) in northeastern India. It’s an intellectual debt that still rankles a little. No one wants to be beholden to someone else for their own history. Nor was the role of the West, when it came to Buddhism, a thing of the past. As one grand Tibetan teacher would tell me in Kathmandu, there now existed such a thing as International Western Buddhism. In the West, the Buddha was not only the deity of the lounge, spa and meditation center but also the focus of serious study, of academic departments where Buddhist scholarship was full of vitality.
What made Buddhism so many things to so many people? I received one intriguing answer even before I left New York. At a lecture given by Donald S. Lopez Jr., a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Michigan, I asked what the secret of Buddhism’s adaptability was. Lopez said that it lay in the figure of the Buddha himself: “It’s said that when the Buddha speaks to a crowd of thousands of people, every single person there imagines himself sitting alone, and they hear the Buddha speaking to them in their own language, giving a teaching specifically for them.” The Buddha, after all, Lopez added, was often described as the great physician, “and it’s only a quack who prescribes the same medicine to every patient.”
Much was disputed about the Buddha’s life, Bidari explained, but everyone was in agreement that Gautama Buddha was born in Lumbini: It was here, in a garden, that the heavily pregnant Queen Maya, traveling between her husband’s kingdom of Kapilavastu and her maternal home in nearby Devadaha, was overcome by labor pains. (Upon conceiving, she had, in a Buddhist equivalent of the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, dreamed that four celestial beings took her to the Himalayas, where a six-tusked white elephant holding a lotus entered her body. Maya would die a week after childbirth, leaving the Buddha to be raised by her sister, notably the first woman convert to the new doctrine, the first bhikshuni, or Buddhist nun.) At the garden in Lumbini, she had clutched at a tree branch and given birth to Siddhartha standing up. Lotuses bloomed as the miraculous child took his first seven steps, whereupon he raised a finger in the air, proclaiming himself “chief of the world” and declaring this birth to be his last. By which he meant that he had arrived at the threshold of that most sought-after state within the Hindu-Buddhist scheme — release from the cycle of reincarnation. “Talk about arrogance!” Naman Ahuja, 51, the chief curator of the Lumbini Museum, would say to me the next morning.
