Abstract
Sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts and archaeological remains per se. Its significance mainly lies in the active interaction between humans and religious architecture within its dynamic ritual settings. In addition, this mutual relationship is critical for understanding the sacredness, particularly in Bodhgayā’s context and generally for the ‘living’ sacred architecture in India to best sustain the values of the place in its context while also managing change to the surrounding landscape. The Mahābodhi Temple complex in Bodhgayā (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002) and its immediate sacred landscape is a ‘living’ heritage, which constitutes differential densities of human involvement, attachment and experience. This entire sacred landscape has been actively produced and reinterpreted socially, culturally and politically during the past century. Thus, it is implausible that everyone would equally share and experience it in a standardised way based on authoritative heritage regulations, which are often quite distant from the local reality.
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Notes
- 1.
On the one hand, Bodhgayā has immense significance for the Buddhists as the most important pilgrimage place in India because of the ‘Diamond Throne’ (vajrāsana), the place where the Buddha attained supreme wisdom, while on the other, due to its close proximity to Gayā and its inclusion in the Hindu pilgrimage network, it also draws thousands of Hindu pilgrims who come here to worship the Buddha deva (literally: God), commonly viewed as the Vishnu’s avatāra (literally: incarnation) and perform ancestral rites called Gayā-śrāddha.
- 2.
Bodhgayā is also known as the NGO capital of India with more than three hundred NGOs, both legal and illegal, all competing to receive maximum donations from foreign tourists in the name of the Buddha.
- 3.
For more on this subject, please refer to Joshi (2019) The Mahābodhi Temple at Bodhgayā: Constructing sacred placeness, deconstructing the ‘great case’ of 1895. Manohar Publishers, Delhi.
- 4.
Since the post-reformation in the sixteenth century, Westerners were aware of the significance of the nature of Christian religion and the importance of a canon of authoritative works. During the nineteenth century, they took upon themselves the task to significantly construct Buddhism as a world religion by encoding, systemizing and locating its essence firmly within a clearly defined ‘canonical’ texts, which were studied and translated in Western institutions by European scholars. One such French Sanskritist scholar was Eugène Burnouf, who in 1844 wrote a monumental Introduction à l’historie du Buddhisme indien utilizing the 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal by Brian Hodgson in 1824. Burnouf argued that Buddhism is an Indian religion and that it must be understood first through texts in Indian languages (Lopez Jr, 2009: 87). Soon after Buddhism’s construction in the nineteenth century by European Orientalists, it became their domain and, later, that of American and Japanese scholars. Much of the earlier translations of the Buddhist doctrines had shortcomings due to the limited cultural understanding of the early scholars. In addition, these translations often reflected approaches that seemed to be divorced from the living traditions of nineteenth-century Asia and mainly reflected Western aspirations and interests.
Anagarika Dharmapāla who was one of the most important Buddhist reformers in the nineteenth century Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka) was heavily influenced by European Orientalist studies and British monumental archaeology. Due to his unfamiliarity with Pāli texts and a better acquaintance with the general anglophile bourgeois culture, Dharmapāla during his early years was significantly influenced by enormously popular The Light of Asia authored by Sir Edwin Arnold, whom he reverenced as his “English Guru”. Arnold, while preaching through his writings, heavily relied on the second-hand knowledge of both Buddhism and Hinduism through English translated books and his trusted English speaking Buddhist friends.
- 5.
As per the Population Census 2011 of Bodhgayā Nagar Panchayat, Musilms are the second largest population (8.85%) after Hindus (90.23%). Buddhists make up only 0.41% of the total population. Interestingly, scholars (and even authorities) have overlooked (either intentionally or unintentionally) the presence of Muslim population in Bodhgayā. As per the Imam of Jama Mosque in Bodhgayā, the Muslims have been there since at least fifteenth century CE and the local mosque, which itself is a large structure, owns a great extent of land adjacent to the WHS boundary of the Mahābodhi Temple.
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Joshi, N. (2022). The Two Faces of Bodhgayā. In: Singh, R.S., Dahiya, B., Singh, A.K., Poudel, P.C. (eds) Practising Cultural Geographies. Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6415-1_13
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