Bodhi Day

Bodhi Day commemorates the enlightenment (bodhi) of Siddhartha Gautama, the night and dawn on which, after years of seeking and a final period of meditation beneath the tree later called the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, he saw through to the nature of suffering and its ending and became the Buddha, the "Awakened One". It is the central event of Buddhism, the moment from which the whole tradition flows, and its commemoration is accordingly one of the most significant days for those schools that keep it separately.

The observance belongs above all to the Mahayana traditions of East Asia. In Japan, where it is called Rohatsu, it is fixed to 8 December (the eighth day of the twelfth month), and in the Zen schools it is preceded by an intensive week-long meditation retreat, the rohatsu sesshin, in which practitioners sit through the nights in emulation of the Buddha's own resolve not to rise until awakened. Elsewhere in the Mahayana world it follows the traditional lunar date. The Theravada traditions of South and Southeast Asia do not keep a separate Bodhi Day, commemorating the enlightenment instead as one of the three great events, birth, enlightenment and passing, gathered together on Vesak. Where it is kept, Bodhi Day is observed quietly, with meditation, study of the teaching, chanting and reflection rather than festivity, in keeping with the inward character of the awakening it recalls.

The original Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya has not survived unbroken from the Buddha's own time; historical and pilgrim accounts describe the tree being damaged, cut down or destroyed more than once over the centuries, and the tree growing at the site today is itself a later descendant rather than the literal tree the Buddha sat beneath. The most historically significant surviving cutting is the Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, traditionally said to have been planted around the third century BCE from a branch of the original tree brought by the missionary nun Sanghamitta, and it is documented and maintained today as one of the oldest continuously tended trees with a recorded planting date anywhere in the world, cared for by an unbroken succession of guardians.

Cuttings from the Anuradhapura tree and from the present Bodh Gaya tree have since been propagated to temples and Buddhist centres worldwide, so that a Bodhi Day observance in a country far from India may take place literally beneath a descendant of the tree the festival commemorates, a physical continuity that gives the day's central symbol an unusually well documented material history compared with the relics and sacred sites of many other traditions.