Bodhgaya

The Bodha Tree

   One day around 2500 years ago Siddhartha Gautama sat in Bodhgaya and achieved enlightenment and thus became the Budda. Around 250 years later a temple was started the culmination of which still exists in a beautiful and tranquil yet mosquito infested garden. And while the tree is not the original - this was destroyed by a jealous wife of the Buddhist emperor Ashok who she felt paid it too much attention - there is a replacement a mere thousand odd years old.
Bodhgaya and Buddhism is in someways a parallel of Christianity and Jerusalem - the most important pilgrimage site of the faith now located in the land of another different religion. Bodhgaya is an island of Buddhism surrounded by Hindus. The history is that Buddism flowered from Bodhgaya to be exported across the waves and dominate in Sri Lanka, Japan, Burma, Thailand and Korea. Yet India enjoyed only a short period of Buddhist majority, soon wiped away by a resurgent Hinduism and then its marginalisation compounded by invading Islam.
  So the faces you see here in Saffron robes and shaved heads, gripping texts and Apple iMacs (Buddhists as a whole seem a technological lot), are East Asian rather than South. And each foreign Buddhist nation has built it's own monastery (officially atheist China aside) in a charming haphazard of different architectural styles.
  Unfortunately I couldn't go in to see any of them because the monks were universally on strike - something which I did not realise was philosophically possible. The issue apparently was the electricity bill coming out to around ten times what was expected, therefore went unpaid and the juice turned off. Far too much of an affront for these gadgetphiles who locked their gates in response.

The temple