Lumbini

Having chosen our hotel for the night, we headed out to the birthplace of Buddha.


According to legend, the pregnant Maya Devi was travelling between the two states when she came upon a tranquil pond surrounded by flowering sal trees. After bathing in the cool water, she suddenly went into labour, and just had enough time to walk 25 steps and grab the branch of a tree for support before the baby was born. The year was 563 BC and the location has been positively identified as Lumbini.

After the birth, a seer predicated that the boy would become a great teacher or a great king. Eager to ensure the later, King Suddhodana shielded him from all knowledge of the world outside the palace. At the age of 29, Siddhartha left the city for the first time and came face to face with an old man, a sick man, a hermit and a corpse. Shocked by this sudden explosure to human suffering, the price abandoned his luxurious life to become a mendicant holy man, fasting ahd meditating on the nature of
existence. After some severe austerities, the former prince realized that life as a starving pauper was no more conducive to wisdom than life as a pampered prince. Thus was born the Middle Way.

After meditating for 49 days under a Bodhi tree on the site of modern day Bodhgaya in India, Siddhartha attained enlightenment i.e., a fundamental grasp of the nature of human existence. He travelled to Sarnath, near Varanasi, to preach his first serman and Buddhism was born. Renamed Buddha (the enlightened one), Siddhartha spent the next 46 years teaching the "Middle Way" -- a path of moderation and self-knowledge through which human beings couldescape the cycle of birth and rebirth and achieve nirvana, a state of enternal bliss.

The Buddha died at the age of 58 years at Kushinagar, near Gorakhpur in India.