Standing at the edge of a six-foot trench, an archaeologist from Nepal’s government peered down at a row of round holes — new evidence, he said, that below our feet lay a 2,500-year-old thatch-and-timber city where the Buddha lived until the age of 29.
The archaeologist said he was thinking about the future, when thousands of pilgrims would be climbing down from rows of buses every year to see the ruins in the Nepalese town of Tilaurakot.
“We are trying to compel them to spend money here,” he said.
Photo: AFP
Similar enthusiasm could be detected about 17 miles away on the Indian side of the border, where India invites tourists to visit another site it claims are the ruins of the Buddha’s childhood home. Asked about the Nepali site, an Indian archaeologist sniffed.
“The question doesn’t arise,” he said.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL TUG-OF-WAR
Begun in the glory days of the British Raj, this archaeological tug-of-war has remained unresolved for more than a century, of concern to virtually nobody. But changes are coming to the baking orange plains that straddle Nepal and India.
Buddhist history is an ever-more-serious business. China and India, two giants maneuvering for control in South Asia, have identified Buddhism as an instrument of soft power. In an area where, for centuries, Buddhism all but disappeared, a range of global stakeholders are investing in infrastructure to accommodate throngs of future pilgrims. India’s prize attraction is Bodhgaya, the site where, it is believed, the Buddha attained enlightenment. Nepal, increasingly aligned with Beijing, jealously guards its claim to the Buddha’s birth and early life.
“It is a matter of surprise that even today, in this 21st century, 2,500 years later than the time of Buddha’s birth, that it’s still a little bit confused,” said the Nepali prime minister, Sharma Oli, at a government-sponsored Buddhist conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, last month.
Of the conference’s 385 delegates, more than 300 were Chinese; India’s delegation numbered nine. When Oli complained about outsiders trying to encroach on Nepal’s status as the Buddha’s home, it was quite clear whom he meant.
“There are people, a few people, perhaps, who are deliberately trying to create a situation of confusion,” he said.
Buddhist lore has it that Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, grew up within the luxurious setting of his father’s palace in the city of Kapilavastu, carefully guarded from any exposure to human suffering. When, at 29, Siddhartha stepped outside, he was confronted with the sight of the aged, the diseased and the dead, an experience that shook him so powerfully that he left his father’s home the following day, embracing life as an ascetic.
Until the time of the British Raj, there was little serious effort to determine where these events occurred. A powerful Hindu revival had rolled over the plains, extinguishing virtually all trace of the religion that had begun there. Then came the European Indologists, armed with the only shreds of evidence available: the accounts of Chinese monks who traveled the Buddha’s path in the fifth and seventh centuries AD.
RIVALRY
By the time the British withdrew, digs at two different locations had both declared victory. The modern border between Nepal and India had also come into existence, and the two claims, supported by fragmentary evidence and fired by nationalism, hardened into a cranky rivalry.
“Engulfed in complete darkness, the scholars made a beginning in the direction of locating Kapilavastu like a wild-goose chase,” KM Srivastava, of the Archaeological Survey of India, wrote in a memoir of his expedition to the Indian town of Piprahwa.
His discoveries, he wrote, a bit huffily, so infuriated a “particular set of scholars” that they “derived pleasure in indulging in the most unparliamentary language questioning the identify of Kapilavastu.”
The Indian consensus has held — at least in India, where tour operators market Piprahwa as “the place where the Buddha spent his childhood grappling with the overwhelming and puzzling problem of human existence.” This spring, India’s minister of culture opened a museum there, displaying evidence, mostly in the form of inscriptions on ancient seals, that was said to prove it was the true site of the Buddha’s childhood home.
Across the border in Tilaurakot, a Nepali-British team supported by UNESCO has been plowing ahead with its own hypothesis: that an Indian-organized expedition in the late 1960s had simply stopped digging too early.
The leader of that Indian expedition, Debala Mitra, uncovered traces of a sprawling brick city, but she said it could not have been Kapilavastu because it had been built hundreds of years after the Buddha’s life. Last year, the UNESCO-backed team cut down through the brick structures Mitra had found and discovered a second fortification whose ramparts were made of clay.
Then they dug even farther, slowing their work to a crawl. They were watching for cylindrical depressions in the earth: evidence that under the clay fort had once stood timber fence posts, perhaps for so long that the wood had decayed, leaving a shell of earth behind.
Six feet below the earth’s surface, they found them. The traces of hardened earth inside those holes, when analyzed in a laboratory, dated from the sixth century BC, meaning they would have stood during the Buddha’s lifetime.
Sunanda Sakyaputra, a Buddhist monk who had traveled to Tilaurakot to meditate, said the site of the ruined palace, a place where the Buddha “was not happy,” gave him a profound sense of the futility of human suffering. Asked about the town on the Indian side, he snorted.
“That is wrong, very wrong,” he said. “All things. India thinks all things are hers. Why?”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby