Lumbini & the Maya Devi Temple

Everything begins here. In a garden in the Terai lowlands of what is now Nepal, beside a pond and an ancient sal tree, Queen Maya of the Shakyas is said to have given birth to Siddhartha Gautama — the child who would become the Buddha — in 563 BCE.

The marker stone and the temple

At the centre of the sacred garden, the Maya Devi Temple shelters the exact spot: a marker stone, identified by archaeologists, pinpointing the place of birth, and near it a worn stone relief of the nativity scene. Beside the temple lie the Puskarini, the pond where Maya is said to have bathed, and the sal tree; and standing close by, the Ashokan pillar whose inscription — carved when the emperor visited in 249 BCE — records simply that "here the Buddha was born," the earliest and most decisive verification of the site.

The garden of every tradition

The wider Lumbini Development Zone, master-planned by the Japanese architect Kenzō Tange, sets the sacred garden within a great axis of monasteries built by Buddhist nations across a landscape of water and trees. It is a place of extraordinary peace. We cross the border from India to spend two unhurried days here — the birth at the heart of the circuit that traces the whole life.