Kushinagar

Kushinagar is where the Buddha died, and it is the least visited of the four great pilgrimage sites. Both facts are worth dwelling on.

The death

The Mahaparinibbana Sutta gives an unusually circumstantial account: the last meal, the illness, the walk to Kushinagar, the couch between two sal trees, the last instruction to the assembled monks that they should be lamps unto themselves and work out their salvation with diligence.

It is a death scene without miracle or apotheosis. The tradition is emphatic that what happened was the extinction of a person who had ended rebirth, not the ascent of a god.

The reclining figure

The Parinirvana Temple holds a reclining Buddha about six metres long, carved from a single block of red sandstone.

A. C. L. Carlleyle unearthed it in 1876, in pieces. A copper plate found with it carried the text of a sutta and recorded its installation by a donor named Haribala, a named patron, a dated context, an inscribed text, all recovered together. For a fifth-century object that is exceptional documentation.

Alexander Cunningham had identified the ruins as Kushinagar in 1861.

The Ramabhar Stupa, a short distance away, marks the traditional cremation ground.

Why it is quiet

The other three sites have something to draw a crowd, a birth, an awakening, a first teaching. Kushinagar has a death, and pilgrims who come here have usually come to the other three first.

The town is small. Thai, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Burmese and Tibetan temples have been built around the site, and both Theravada and Mahayana communities maintain monasteries, but the scale is nothing like Bodh Gaya's.

The airport

India built an international airport here, opened in October 2021. It was inaugurated on Abhidhamma Day, with a first flight carrying Sri Lankan clergy, on the expectation that Buddhist pilgrimage from across Asia would fill it.

It has been effectively dormant since 2023 on commercial grounds, handling a few dozen passengers a year and used mainly for official movements.

It is a fair illustration of how the economics of pilgrimage actually work. State investment can build the infrastructure. It cannot manufacture the traffic, and pilgrims continued to arrive as they always had, by road, from Gorakhpur.

Buddhist tradition puts the Buddha's death at Kushinagar in specific, almost clinical detail, down to the meal blamed for it.

The final meal and the final teaching

The Mahaparinibbana Sutta describes the Buddha, in his final days, accepting a meal from the blacksmith Cunda that included a dish later translated variously as pork or a type of mushroom or truffle, after which he fell seriously ill. Tradition is explicit that the Buddha instructed his followers not to blame Cunda, treating the meal as circumstance rather than fault. He is described teaching until close to the end, lying between two sal trees, and finally entering parinirvana, final release from the cycle of rebirth at death.

Splitting the relics eight ways

Following cremation by the Malla clan who ruled the area, tradition holds that the remaining bodily relics were divided into eight portions and claimed by rival kingdoms and clans who had gathered, some accounts say under threat of conflict, averted by a Brahmin who brokered the division. Stupas were then built over each portion across the region, seeding a relic-veneration practice that spread with Buddhism itself.

The reclining figure

The large reclining Buddha statue housed at Kushinagar's Mahaparinirvana Temple, depicting the moment of death rather than teaching or meditation, is one of relatively few major Buddhist images built specifically to represent this scene rather than the Buddha's life or enlightenment.