It has been a week since I returned from India. I have much to share about my pilgrimage with a tremendous francophone group of dharma sisters and brothers from Quebec and France. During this pilgrimage, I visited some sites where Shakyamuni Buddha reached enlightenment and where he first taught the "Four Noble Truths" and the "Eightfold Path."
This trip was essential to me as a modern Buddhist practitioner and psychotherapist living in Canada. I wanted to explore the difference between traditional and contemporary Tibetan Buddhism as it has been adapted and integrated into the West. I have a personal Buddhist practice and use Buddhist psychology and contemplative creative therapy in my professional work. However, it is hard to understand and compare the differences between how Buddhism integrated other cultures and changed through centuries of evolution. Buddhism in Thailand, China, Japan, and Korea... takes the flavours of each country it has encountered and evolved with its geopolitical, social, economic, and religious history.
This trip took me back to the source of where it all began, 2600 years later, how Buddhism is still practiced, how the story is told and what remains at these places where the Buddha started and ended his spiritual journey of enlightenment.
We arrived in Delhi and stayed at a Tibetan settlement in the New Aruna colony in central Delhi.
Then we departed for Bodh Gaya, and reality came crashing down. Have you ever experienced envisioning and romanticizing places that have meaning for you? You have never been there, but you think it should be a certain way with a specific atmosphere; your mind projects and creates an alternate reality of the place.
Well, that's what happened to me. Also, I forgot about the intensities of India and how it brings you to a reality that is raw and unforgiving of our Western privileges. I am sheltered from a certain kind of suffering in Canada: the suffering of survival. I am not in survival mode to eat or get clean water; I have plenty of clothes, a comfortable and clean dwelling, and the privileges of working in a good profession, enjoying my work and life. In Delhi, Bodh Gaya, and other surrounding towns we visited, you constantly see the survival of people of all ages, raw survival that is difficult to swallow and digest. Still, it is the conditions of life of certain people there. Even if you don't want to see it, you will see, hear and feel it.
The Bodh Gaya of today was not what I expected, even though I was unsure what to expect. I had imagined a sacred and peaceful place. Well, welcome to reality, welcome to the practice of suffering, suffering of change, and all-pervasive suffering! You are constantly challenged in Bodh Gaya by dirt, garbage, pollution, noise, monks, markets, fake monks, consumerism, material consumption, pilgrims from all over the world, brothers and sisters from across the globe, beggers, security checks, the stupa and the bodhi tree! See it, hear it, smell it and feel it all! I wanted to practice, and I practiced.
Following the footsteps of the Buddha meant going to the great stupa where the Shakyamuni Buddha reached enlightenment and then to the places where he practiced meditation and attained his realizations. The place in the countryside Bakrour, where Sujata brought him food while practicing austerity meditation, starving himself, and realizing the "Middle Way," and he was offered Kushi grass to sit on to be more comfortable.
Then, we visited the Vulture Peak, an impressive site with well-known Buddhist teacher's caves such as Ananda and Shariputra.
The journey continued to Sarnath where the Buddha started to teach on the Middle Way and the Four Noble Truth, the locations are marked by stupas in red bricks and ruins of monasteries and new temples are around the stupas with pilgrims coming from all over the world.
In the next post I will share on the visit and history of Nalanda Monastery University...
Kind regards,
EMAHO
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