Lumbini & the Buddhist Circuit

Overview

Lumbini is where Queen Maya Devi, travelling to her parents' home, stopped in a grove and gave birth. The date is disputed; the place is not. Ashoka came here in 249 BCE and left a pillar saying so, and a marker stone found in 1996 sits at the point the tradition names.

It is in the Terai, thirty kilometres from the Indian border, 150 metres above sea level and about as far from the Himalaya as Nepal gets.

The sacred garden

The Maya Devi temple is a plain white building over the excavation. Inside, a walkway crosses brick foundations layered back to the third century BCE, and the marker stone sits under glass.

Outside are Ashoka's pillar, the Puskarini pond where Maya Devi is said to have bathed, and a large Bodhi tree hung with prayer flags where monks of several traditions chant through the day.

The monastic zone

In 1978 Kenzō Tange master-planned a three-kilometre zone north of the garden and invited Buddhist nations to build in it. Thirty have. You can walk from a Myanmar temple to a Thai wat to a German-funded Tibetan monastery in an hour, each in its own national architecture.

Cycle rickshaws work the canal path and are the right way to do it.

Kapilvastu

An hour west, Tilaurakot is the excavated capital of the Shakya kingdom — the palace where Siddhartha lived until he was twenty-nine, and the eastern gate he is said to have left through. Brick foundations, a moat line, mango trees, and usually nobody there.

Practicalities

Fly Kathmandu to Bhairahawa — 35 minutes — or take eight hours of road. Entry to the development zone is NPR 200, the Maya Devi temple NPR 500.

Dress modestly and expect to be barefoot on hot marble. Mosquito repellent is worth carrying; this is the Terai.

Best season

October to March. April to June regularly exceeds 40°C and the monsoon is humid and waterlogged. Buddha Jayanti, on the full moon of May, is the biggest day in the calendar here — and one of the hottest.