Rajgir
Trip Start
Jul 08, 2008
1
21
23
Trip End
Ongoing
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Rajgir,
Bihar,
India
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
I hopped the rundown bus from Gaya, which rumbled down the bumpy road north to Rajgir and the landscape of Bihar quickly followed; poorly-maintained buildings with disks of cow dung stuck to the outside walls and women busily pressing fresh dung onto the walls where free space would allow, leaving their trademark hand prints behind. The dung is commonly burned for fuel and must first undergo a drying process before it's finally peeled off the wall and placed in the fire. Swamp-like rice fields were present wherever buildings were lacking and the road seemed as though it were always resting on an elevated embankment, weaving through the submerged countryside.
After a couple hours the bus grinded to a halt with a queu of other buses and everybody started getting off. We had obviously not reached our destination and the driver explained "bridge is out. Must change bus to over there." He pointed to the river where people were hopping along poorly layed sandbags right next to what once must have been a working bridge but now was lacking its entire middle section. I crossed the river with my pack and tried to make sense of the bus-strewn monstrosity on the other side. Fortunately I was able to use some of the Hindi the kids in Bodh Gaya had taught me to figure out which bus would continue along my desired path. I quickly learned that any bus trip through Bihar would inevitably involve switching buses at least once.
We arrived in Rajgir after a few hours and I found a cheap guesthouse that appeared more like a garage from the outside, where the room had an unfinished concrete floor. I figured I would use the remaining daylight to see the ruins of Nalanda, the once great Buddhist university, and I hopped a local bus heading in that direction.
Nalanda was mostly in a state of ruins and contained the foundations of what were once temples and monasteries. A major point of transmission for the Dharma, the site is now just a reminder of what once took place here.
The next day I headed for the south end of town where the Buddha had spent much time living in a cave on Vulture's Peak before his enlightenment.
Rather than pay to watch a horse get whipped for 15 minutes I decided to walk the five kilometers and every step along the way I had at least a couple of curious locals tagging along. As I came closer to Vulture's Peak I could see the chair lifts carrying visitors up the steep mountain, which protruded out of the surrounding flat ground. According to a book I had been reading by Thich Nhat Hanh, King Bimbasari had a stone path laid to accomodate the Buddha and his sangha, who regularly made the long climb up and down the mountain. This path remained in place at the time the book had been written but it was obvious that a new path had recently been laid to take its place.
The conventional wisdom suggests that King Bimbasari saw the Buddha taking a walk around Rajgir and, immediately impressed with him, saught him out to be his spiritual teacher and offered him half the kingdom. The Buddha declined as he had already turned down a whole kingdom but promised to return once he attained enlightenment. When he returned a few years later, he was accompanied by his sangha containing over a thousand people and Vultures Peak became the place where many teachings were given.
Taking the chair lift up the steep mountain, the beaten track proceeds to a World Peace Pagoda built by Japanese monks, visible from many parts of Rajgir as it sits atop the mountain. Many people don't seem to know about Vultures Peak, which is just a 10 minute walk from there, so the site was accompanied by the solitude that the Buddha must have sought out many years before.
