There are two other main sites on the Buddhist Pilgramage trail - Bodh Gaya, where he attained enlightenment, and Sarnath, where he gave his first teaching. I would leave this till a later trip.
The park started like any other Indian bazaar or small town; a jumbled mass of traffic, bicycles, rickshaws, scooters, bikes and tuk tusk; a gate towering over the road; a jumble of handcarts, stalls and shops selling food, haircuts, trinkets.
A modern Chinese temple appeared on one side. I walked through this, and at the back in a corner, found a gate to a park. in the middle was a strange looking stupa, more seventies marble mausaleum than anything Buddhist.
Inside was a Golden Buddha, lying in a death pose. It looked quite unusual - I had seen plenty of supine Buddhas before in Thailand, but something about this one looked to have the serenity and sadness of death. It really felt quite moving.
This temple is called Mahaparinirvana temple. It was bult in about the 5th century AD, but rediscovered, excavated and restored about 120 years ago. The Buddha had lain all that time undisturbed.
Further on in the park, I a sad looking tourist information office. At a lonely desk in an empty room, a man gave me a map. 'Buddha's last teaching-' he pointed at the end of the road. 'Buddhas crenation' he waved round the corner.
Matha Juar, where hs gave his last sermon, looked small to me. Space for maybe a hundred or so people to sit an listen in a small depression before a temple. Not the stadium sized venue that might have been imagined for the last words of a dieing God.
The walk to his cremation stupa took about forty minutes, down a long tree lined avenue. Temples bullet by different Buddhist sects lined the way. A Tibetan Gompa rubbed shoulders with a Japanese Zen Pagoda, a Cambodian Wat with a Sri Lankan holy house, A Thai Stupa with a Chinese Happy Land building. The idea behind such an international park of Buddhist solidarity is quite amazing. I couldn't imagine The protestant, orthodox, catholic and coptic sects managing to co-operate to even start a similar project. But some buildings were in better repair than others, and the Indian street outside looked, well Indian, full of rubbish and dirty as hell.
The Buddha was 80 when he died. He had been teaching for forty years. What would have happened if Jesus had been granted such a long time I wondered? Would his message have been as powerful without his death? Would it have been as powerful if he had articulated it more? Would it have been as able to be misinterpreted, abused and profaned the way it has been for two thousand years?
The last monument was the cremation stupa. It may have been a perfect monument two and a half thousand years ago, but now the bricks were sagging and collapsed. Still it was a miracle it was still standing at all. Two and a half thousand years old.
It felt calm, quiet, sad, holy. Not that dissimilar to Lumbini really. The cold white mist that had accompanied me there was present here too, chilling the air and making everything ghostly.
It is said that when the Buddha was a just a young prince, just Siddharta Gautama, he was molly coddled and protected from suffering by his doting parents. He snuck out of the palace one day though to find out for himself what the world was really like. He saw a sick man, an old man, a corpse and a priest.
On the way back to the bus terminal, a old beggar woman approached me. 'Food, food' she mimed as she passed by.
SIddartha asked his father if he could protect him from being old. HIs father sadly shook his head no.
On the bus, there was a crippled man, his right leg ended at his knee and he carried home made crutches with him. I was not sure if this was from polio or from an accident.
'Can you stop me getting sick, or being crippled?'
As we turned from Gorakpur onto the main highway, the traffic slowed down to a stop. There was a large crowd ahead blocking the way. Slowly though, the traffic eased forward, the horns pushing their way through. As we passed, I saw why they had stopped. A man was spreadeagled on the side of the road, bits of motorbike casing around him, a pool of blood spreading beneath his head.
'Oh, Father, can you protect me from death?'
'No my son. I cannot stop any of these things'.
'Then I will find the priest. Maybe he can teach me how to protect myself from all this suffering'.
When I got back to Gorakpur though, there was no Priest waiting for me, just a dirty fog and a cold hotel room. Perhaps I am the priest I thought, waiting to find a Buddha. Perhaps its you.
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