Arriving at the pilgrimage site in Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha gained Enlightenment, you deposit your shoes and phone and walk down to the Burmese Mahabodhi Temple. There, you can queue to visit the shrine at the temple’s base or join the stream of pilgrims walking around it. Thais and Burmese circle the building all day, led by yellow-robed bhikkhus reciting ancient Pāli chants, while Koreans, Taiwanese and Vietnamese make the circuit in large groups, and Himalayan Buddhists murmur mantras, or proceed around the Temple prostration by prostration.
Traditional accounts relate that, shortly before he died, the Buddha instructed his disciples to build monuments known as stupas in the places where he was born, gained Enlightenment, gave his first teaching and passed away. He said that visiting these sites would ‘inspire confidence’ in his followers when he was no longer physically present. In time, many more stupas were constructed across India and Asia – some as simple as a Celtic burial mound, others including a range of symbol-laden features. Everywhere, Buddhists circumambulate stupas and temples – the practice of pradakshina, as it is known in Sanskrit, or ‘making kora’ as the Tibetans say – always walking clockwise and keeping the monument on their right. I’ve just returned from leading a pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy sites in India and Nepal, and in each place we joined the flow of pilgrims and felt the surprising power of circumambulation.
Walking around a monument differs fundamentally from marching ‘from A to B’ or from wandering aimlessly. The aim is simply to circumambulate, and in doing so to find oneself in relationship with the stupa and what it represents. In Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first teaching following his Enlightenment, a sturdy and distinctive stupa survives from ancient times – its mound and shaft oddly resembling the shape that obsesses the characters in Close Encounters. Its massive presence drew me towards it, and suggested a powerful symbol of the Buddha, whom it commemorates, and his Enlightenment, which it symbolises. To circumambulate is therefore to make Enlightenment, or Buddhahood, the centre of one’s focus and one’s relationship with it.
Since my return, the image of circumambulation has come to me in meditation. When my attention scurries after the thoughts that arise, the image of the stupa and its massive presence draws me back to the path encircling it. I associate that with what Buddhists call going for refuge – the act of placing the Buddha, his teaching and his community at the centre of one’s life. And I feel myself stepping back onto the pradakshina path and finding that I am not alone. I have joined the long stream of pilgrims who have trodden the path in the past, experience it in the present, and will discover it in the future, all of us circling the Buddha, feeling what he means of for our lives, forever making kora.