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Eastern Systems and Sacred Places, two sections of this atlas that rarely touch, connect at only two points site-wide, and one of them runs from a single hand gesture back to the ground it is fixed to.

A Moment Fixed by a Challenge

Bhumisparsha, the earth-touching gesture, fixes a single moment: challenged by Mara to produce a witness to his fitness for awakening, the seated Siddhartha called on the earth, and the earth answered. The right hand reaches over the knee until the fingertips touch the ground while the left lies palm up in the lap, and it is, by the atlas's own record, the most reproduced of all Buddhist hand seals, associated among the five Buddhas with Akshobhya. What it carries, the record states plainly, is not serenity but a claim under challenge and upheld.

The Place the Gesture Is Fixed To

The gesture is, by the atlas's own record, the defining image of Bodh Gaya, the place under a fig tree in Bihar where Siddhartha Gautama is held to have become a Buddha and the most important site in the Buddhist world. The Mahabodhi Temple rises fifty-five metres beside a tree grown from the line of the original, with the Vajrasana, the diamond throne, set between temple and trunk to mark the seat itself. Monasteries built by Tibet, Thailand, Japan, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and a dozen other countries ring the town, so that Theravada, East Asian Mahayana and Tibetan Vajrayana are all present at once, visibly practising differently in the same enclosure, and the Dalai Lama teaches here periodically to very large crowds.

Where To Read More

• BhumisparshaThe gesture, one of only two live edges connecting Eastern Systems and Sacred Places
• Bodh GayaBuddhist SitesThe place the gesture is fixed to, the most important site in the Buddhist world