I started my Buddhist journey last October at the birthplace of the Buddha in Lumbini, near the frontier of modern-day India and Nepal. I was intrigued by the fact it was a place of pilgrimage for nearly a thousand years, attracting monks, scholars and kings from every corner of the Buddhist world, before totally vanishing from view for centuries. To me, this lost locus of Buddhist sanctity was like a metaphor for the disappearance of Buddhism from India, the land of its birth and development, and the country where I had grown up. I wanted to know why Buddhism was abandoned there yet flourished in so many other places. |
