The Great Temple at Bodh-Gayā
1958; College Art Association; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043079.1958.11408557
ISSN1559-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography
ResumoOF all the temples in India, none has enjoyed a wider renown or boasts a more venerable lineage than that at Bodh-Gayā, some fifty miles south of Patna, the modern capital of the state of Bihār in the central Ganges valley.1 Here the former prince Gautama Siddhātha came after years of homeless wandering and strenuous asceticism, and after refreshing himself with a bath and food took his seat beneath a great tree near the village of Uruvelā, there to pass in one night of meditation through the eight stages of knowledge into the transcendent wisdom (Bodhi) known only to a Buddha (Enlightened One), and from this place he went forth to preach his doctrine of salvation as embodied in the Four Aryan Truths and the Middle Way or Eightfold Path.2 The spot which thus became the cradle of Buddhism and, in later centuries, a center of pilgrimage for devotees from all over the Buddhist world, is in a region which has also long been associated with the cults of both Śiva and Vishnu, and after the decay of Buddhism in India proper, in the tenth or eleventh centuries, the temple itself passed into the hands of a sect of Śaiva ascetics and was allowed to fall into ruins.3 Its identity was never completely forgotten, however, and shortly after 1875 a Burmese mission came to Bodh-Gayā to clear away the fallen debris of the crumbling temple towers and patch up the ruinous masonry. A few years later a second Burmese mission, working in cooperation with the government of Bengal and under the direction of J. D. Beglar, cleared away still more of the accumulated rubbish and attempted to restore the temple to a semblance of its former grandeur. In the process, large portions of the original fabric were removed, displaced, or concealed; the temple as it now stands, with its five towers and projecting entrance, is essentially a nineteenth century reconstruction (Figs. 1 and 12).4
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