The first morning, we reach the temple in the dark. It is not yet five, and already the road is a river of maroon and saffron flowing toward the Mahabodhi. By the time the sky greys, the whole enclosure — every lawn, every path, the base of every stupa — is a single seated field of people, perhaps two hundred thousand of them, wrapped against the Bihar winter, waiting.
I have brought a group of twelve. This is the hardest thing we do all year: to hold a small, quiet practice inside the largest gathering in the Buddhist calendar. And it is, I think, the most rewarding.
A place for each week
My teacher gave me a discipline for these days, and I pass it to the group. The tradition holds that after his awakening the Buddha remained at Bodhgaya for seven weeks — forty-nine days — moving among seven spots around the tree, each marked now by a shrine. So each afternoon, when the morning teaching ends and the crowd thins, we walk to one of the seven, in order, and sit.
The teaching fills the morning; the walking empties the afternoon.
Week one, beneath the tree itself, where he simply remained in the bliss of freedom. Week two at the Animesh Lochana, gazing back at the tree in gratitude — a whole week, the texts say, spent looking with love at the place of his liberation, which is a teaching in itself. Week three on the jewelled walk, the Ratnachakrama, its lotus carvings marking the paces of his walking meditation.
What the crowd teaches
There is a fear, among people who love silent retreat, that a crowd is the enemy of practice. The December teachings cure that fear. To sit among two hundred thousand strangers, every one of them there for the dharma and nothing else, is not a distraction — it is a kind of instruction. You feel, physically, that you are one small part of something enormous and old, and the small anxious self grows quiet of its own accord.
By the fourth day the group has stopped fighting the density and started to rest inside it. One pilgrim, a lawyer from Melbourne who had never sat in a crowd in her life, told me on the fifth evening that she had stopped being able to find the edge between herself and the people around her, and had cried without quite knowing why.
The last afternoon
On the final day we walk the seventh spot, the Muchalinda tank, where the serpent king is said to have sheltered the meditating Buddha from a week of storms, coiling beneath him and spreading his hood above. There is a statue of it in the middle of the water. We sit on the bank as the light goes, and I do not say very much, because there is not very much to say.
Forty-nine days is a long time to remain in one place after everything has already happened. That is the teaching of the seven weeks, I think: that awakening is not a finish line you cross and leave, but a place you can choose to stay, and gaze back at, and walk slowly around, in gratitude, for as long as you are given. We had seven days, not forty-nine. It was enough to see the shape of it.