On Lumpini

Get out, now!  Lumpini!

Lumpini was a fairly easy arrival. A Chinese couple and I were ejected at a wide, T intersection with half a dozen vending “tents” clustered under a tree. People had low, wooden tables on which they sat amidst packages of plastic baubles, packets of snacks, browning piles of produce, bug-screen cages over hunks of freshly butchered meat. Not-quite vertical posts held up ratty tarps or the occasional bit of sheet metal or recycled board scraps. The coolie depositing us waved down the T, pointed at a minivan hollowed out to hold two dozen passengers, and said, “Lumpini.” We walked over to the bus and were intercepted by half a dozen men wearing sarongs and shawls. The youngest might have been a weather-baked forty, with skin wrinkled to deep black lines under wiry gray wisps of hair. The oldest could've been Mowgli's cousin.

“Lumpini?” I asked.

“Lumpini,” a grizzled old guy said, pointing down the stem of the T.

“You want taxi?” said a man with prodigiously large hands, ears, and nose, pointing at a micro-sub-compact car.

“How much?”

“700 rupees.”

“700 for all three?”

“Yes, for all three.”

It seemed a small price for a direct ticket out, especially after traveling through the mountains where transactions are conducted in US dollars and foreigners are to pay, in dollars, what locals pay in (70/$1) rupees.

“How much the bus?”

“42 rupees.”

“For all three?”

“Each.”

I looked at the Chinese couple and nodded toward the taxi. “Costs 230 split three ways, or the bus is 42 each. I like the bus.”

They nodded back and we climbed into the mini bus. And sat. And waited. Gaudy local busses roared past without slowing. An occasional tourist bus—svelte, modern busses with sparkling, uniform paint jobs and curtains drawn behind tinted windows—came up the road we were waiting to go down. And always the stream of bicycles, motorbikes, and rattle-trap jalopies belching decibels and fumes in every given direction.

Lumpini is the modern development around the place where Gautama Buddha was born. Now, there's the rock where he dropped, and a brick-and-concrete lined pool where Maya Vedi, Buddha's mother, took a ceremonial pre-delivery bath. In the local, Nepali calendar—Bikram Sambat—Buddha was born in, um, -585, or whatever you call the year 585 years before the Emperor Vikramaditya defeated the Sakas. In terms of the modern Buddhist calendar, this translates to -100. Or 642 BC. There's also a pillar placed by King Ashoka to mark the exact place of Buddha's birth. This was in 193 BV. On the Buddhist calendar, it was in 294. In the Western world, it happened in 249 BC.

I was going to Lumpini because I was in Nepal with some time and not enough legs left for serious climbing. What better than to see the site where, quite literally, one of the world's major religions was born? Given that my legs were protesting the prospect of level traversing and outright revolted at the prospect of vertical work, how could I pass up a journey of under 60 miles to see where Buddha was born?

Easy to say before spending 14 vomit-crusted hours in a beyond-revival public bus driven by a maniac whose existential edict was to live just past the realm of feasibility while transporting a load of hapless johns from here to there as quickly as existentially possible. Followed immediately by sitting in a gutted minivan with a score of other people, baking in the sun while waiting for more people, most notably a driver, to pile on.

Sometime later, long after the heat cranked to raise the maximum amount of stench from myself and the other passengers, a driver leapt in and, within a second and a half, we were rocketing down the washboard track. We veered around buffalo and cattle and children and bicycles and motorcycles and rickshaws and pedestrians and people who decided to sit in the middle of the road. And then the van stopped and the driver started yelling, “Out here, out here! Lumpini, out here!” and the Chinese couple and I staggered into another open square.

We were surrounded by three-sided hovels half as tall and twice as wide as a phone booth. People sat in these and hooted over the evening's entertainment: in the square, a small herd of children chased stray dogs with sticks, occasionally catching and pummeling one in a chorus of blood-curdling screams and desperate yelping, accompanied by hooting and cheering from the periphery.

Downtown Lumpini Bazaar,
where kids chase small furry animals with sticks

Our first stop was the Chinese hotel. After hearty welcomes and a flurry of Mandarin, the Chinese couple waved at me, and a porter came to show me a room—off-white sheets and bathroom cleaned, in the most optimistic world, with a quick splash of water—for 1500. The Chinese couple stopped, but it was over my budget. I made a less-than comfortable traverse around the entire perimeter of the dog-beating arena, trying not to feel the skin crawling up my spine, to the other guesthouse in town. It was more in my budget, surprisingly so: 300. And it had one wing of dormitory rooms with a communal bathroom. None of the mattresses had sheets, but they all had an ample layer of mold growing across them. Usually, “communal bathroom” indicates a toilet/shower getup shared by the hotel, the amount of... residue in the single open toilet indicated a much, much larger community, especially as the shower nozzle poured, if indeed it produced water, directly into the basin. Regardless, its stench of mold and fecal residue permeated the entire guest wing. And somehow 1500 seemed somewhat more manageable.

When I returned, the Chinese couple were eating dinner.

“You come back!” the woman called around a mouthful of wonton soup.

“Yes!” I waved across the square. “Other place is cheap cheap, but it's no good. You're smart to stick with the best!”

A managerial sort in a business suit took me to look at another room. “Okay, I'll take it,” I said, and I dropped my backpack, relishing dreams of a shower followed by a dinner of north-Gangetic ingredients prepared by Chinese cooks.

“Sorry, sorry,” the lady said. “Water done today and generator not working. Maybe later we get backup power and you have light.”

“No shower?”

“No shower.”

“No toilet?”

“Maybe one.”

“Dinner?”

“Okay.”

Before I sat for dinner, hot and gritty and without prospect of respite, I dug through five menus: three in differing Chinese characters, two in forms of Sanskrit.

“Umm, okay,” I said, patting my belly. “Very hungry. Soup?”

Blank stare.

I pointed at the empty bowls left by the Chinese couple, held up one finger. “Soup. One.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Is there chicken?”

Blank stare.

I folded in my arms and clucked. “Chicken?”

Enthusiastic nod.

“Two: chicken.”

Enthusiastic nodding.

“Rice?”

Rice. We know this one. Okay.

“Soup, one?” Nod. “Chicken, two?” Nod. “Rice, three?” nod. “Okay!”

Twenty minutes later, I received a plate: a small scoop of rice with a fried egg.

I tried to question the server. I tried to find the manager. But I had a half cup of rice with a fried egg. And that was that.

Morning was my downfall. I went to one of the places around the square and scoped out what came from the wood-fired cooking pots: a bubbling vat of vegetable curry the color of baby poop, head-sized donuts of unsweetened rice flour, and squiggly nests of sweet dough deep fried and doused in syrup. I ordered a bowl of the vegetable curry—it was bubbling enthusiastically enough for me to hope any pathogens were neutralized. And maybe they were, maybe it was something else, but from that meal onwards, my digestive tract turned into a wicked fast roller-coaster ride for any form of food or drink.

It was something of a relief to see kids running around with dogs, right until I realized that instead of the kids chasing dogs with sticks, the dogs were helping the kids chase down monkeys to beat with sticks. To the delight of the locals around the square, expressed with cheering and hooting at every successful canine capture and fustigation.

I have since become willing to entertain the notion that plugging a kid into a TV—which is not so possible in a place with electricity for maybe 4 hours per day—is maybe not such a bad idea.

Lumpini's Grande Canal.
Mahayana to the left, Theravada to the right,
Peace Pagoda straight ahead three miles

Lumpini turns out to be a sprawling compound of mainly wild parkland. A fence—three miles long and one mile wide—borders the compound, save where there are entrance gates at each of the cardinal points. Each entrance has a little metal shack in which someone sits to collect 200 rupees from each tourist, or 20 from a Nepali. Just inside the gate, there will be a lineup of rickshaws manned by guys with toothpick legs, gray hair, and sun-baked skin that makes an American football look soft and supple. And they dive on incoming tourists like linemen on a fumble, shouting, “RICKSHAW RICKSHAW RICKSHAW” from a nostril-curdling point blank, waving at their rigs.

Part of me knows that these men depend on people like me to drop a couple hundred rupees for a morning tour of the compound. A bigger part of me looks at legs even skinnier than mine, faces more wrinkled than my grandfather's, the strange proportions of a toothless person without dentures, the stranger sight of three scraggly green teeth, and revolts against the thought of having this particular individual pedal me around in the baking hot Gangetic sun.

Did I mention that the compound is three-miles long? On the brochures, a canal runs down the middle, with periodic boat docks and fountains. Maybe one day it will happen. For now, the concrete walkways along the canal are in place, and there's an occasional work crew lining the canal with bricks. Which is to say, it's an open, baking hot trudge to get from the Maya Vedi temple at the southern end to the Peace Pagoda and museum in the northern quadrant.

Lumpini is divided into three sections according to a German-designed master plan. The southern square mile is devoted to the birthplace itself, with the sacred bathing pool and Ashoka pillar and a large botanical garden. It also has a guesthouse and a few tents selling sacred souvenirs—amulets and braided necklaces and statuettes but no postcards or posters of any part of the place, let alone the photography-restricted sacred areas. The middle mile houses temples and shrines and monks from around the world, segregated into Theravada on one side and Mahayana on the other. The northerly reaches hold the World Peace Pagoda, the museum, two upper-end hotels, and, according to the brochure, a family housing compound, a school, a reference library, a medical center, a pilgrim's rest area, a shopping complex, and a canteen, plus a crane sanctuary. Again, maybe one day.

Buddhism has two main sects: Theravada, which is more common south of the Himalayas, and Mahayana, which is typically found from the Himalayas north. Theravada is considered an older, more austere form of Buddhism, yet it is still common to see a Thai monk smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone while walking into a mega-mart store. Mahayana is somewhat more fluid, adapting to and adopting local customs and traditions as it spreads. It tends to be more ostentatious, as in the drums and horns and chanting of Tibetan Buddhism. (In one guesthouse on the Annapurna Circuit, I woke to the blaring of a horn accompanied by frantic drumming. I later learned that the horn was made from a human femur and the drum from two skulls, as is traditional; at the time, it was cold and dark and I was less than pleased to have some yahoo with weak embouchure blasting a makeshift horn with zero resonance and a wonky fundamental up in the high tenor range.)

No drawbridge, but ample gates.

In Lumpini, the Theravadas built on the Eastern side of the canal, the Mahayanas on the West. It's great fun in the morning and evening, when horns, drums, and chanting from the Mahayana side thunders across the plains, and it's easy to imagine the Theravadas welcoming the challenge to retain deep meditation (Theravadas chant Pali sutras at times, but have no practices to match horns and drums). Given that I live in a Theravada country, I made my way up the Mahayana line, hoping to learn about the other side of the Buddhist world.

Just past the rickshaws, I tried to enter the compound dedicated to meditation instruction and retreats, but the gates were locked for the mid-morning meditation session. A few minutes later, I stood under the panopticon eyes of a Nepali monastery and read that my presence would be welcomed in the evening cool. Not before. Likewise the Tibetan, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese compounds.

The German temple

I was able to visit the French temple: an open, tile square with a small, white stupa. Next door, the German temple was a fantastic conglomeration of statuary and wild frescoes of scenes from Mahayana mythology. Most of the figures were recognizable from ancient-Hindi mythology and similar statuary parks in my Theravada hometown—the Goddess of Many Arms, the Fearsome Chicken/Hawks, the Fearsome Tiger/Chickens, the Guard Dragons, Pious Worshippers, and sundry Bodhisattvas—but they were of German origin, so instead of the hard, angular lines with ornate curlicue trim, they were the same creatures reimagined by Hummel.

After the German temple, I found myself behind a swarm of Indian schoolchildren on a field trip. Just over half were girls, all of whom were wearing bright and sparkly saris, and the boys were wearing loose cotton shirts over sarongs or loose cotton pants as they swooped and dived around each other in a rollicking stream of rounded syllables and bouncing consonants. And then one of them saw me, barked something, and they all came to an immediate, silent halt. They slowly turned around, easy and nonchalant-like, and stared at me. With nowhere to walk around them, I smiled a stupid tourist smile and walked right through the middle as a few score eyes followed me without blinking under the glare of the sun or glow of blond hair. Once I was a dozen steps past, they erupted in a flurry of whispers and whisper-shouts. And they followed me all the way around the Crane Sanctuary—which looks remarkably like anyplace else in the compound save for the canal—past the upscale Japanese hotels, to the Peace Pagoda. Closed for something.

The Peace Pagoda

According to the map, I could find the canteen and shopping center near a collection of buildings not far away, so it seemed a good opportunity to get some shade and cold water.

Heh.

I did find the museum the map said was there. It featured many large pictures of relics found in Lumpini and elsewhere. And I was ushered to a movie I simply had to see—a colonial-sounding voice narrating the proposed developments to Lumpini as if the tourist haven were already in place. I got to see video footage of all temples with open gates and ornate welcoming displays, a snazzy CG rendition of the grand canal, tour through the elegant cafeteria and staff living compound, and see a museum full of tangible artifacts, not just pictures. I would've been impressed had I not just paced the same terrain.

On the way out, I resolved to hire a rickshaw. I had been walking around in the pummeling sun without food or water for a number of hours—I assumed that, as is the custom in Thailand, the promenade would be lined with carts hawking drinks and food on a stick and authentic memorabilia and knockoff souvenirs and ice cream and chopped fruit and noisemakers and any other device to possibly separate the tourist from the rupee—and it was time for a break, not for a three mile walk back.

Naturally, it turned into the single longest stretch of solo travel I made anywhere in Nepal. Even in the early morning hours or the baking noontime, people and jeeps and cows and busses speckled the Annapurna Circuit. Nowhere else in Nepal did I make it so long without getting hit up to buy or pay for something. And when I did find someone, she had just locked the convenience shop outside the Maya Vedi Temple—no cold water for me.

The Ashoka Pillar, next to the Maya Devi Temple

Hoping to save the best for last, I walked into the low brick edifice of the Maya Devi Temple grateful simply for the shade and relative cool. From the outside, it looks like an adobe fort of Wild West design, save that it has a brick-lined pond instead of a wooden fence. And the Ashoka pillar, which is swaddled in prayer flags and gold leaf as high as the devout could reach.

Inside, the modern structure protects half a dozen brick foundations of ancient stupas. An elevated wooden walkway around the perimeter gives a vantage of these, each of which is guarded by a sign on the railing reading, “NO PHOTOGRAPHY” in five or six languages. Similar signs mark the cardinal walls and the jetty that extends out as an overlook of what is thought to be the exact place where Maya Vedi grabbed onto a tree branch and popped out Gautama Buddha, who took seven steps and said, “That's the last time I'm going through that!”

Now the rock is under a glass case that is completely covered with gold leaf, at the base of a pillar decorated in kind, guarded by a man with an assault rifle. It seemed a little excessive, but it certainly deterred me from taking illicit photographs.

As I stood in the gloom—the only light comes from the front door, opposite the Birthstone Overlook, and narrow slots around an elevated ceiling—I tried to find some sense of the sacred, the quiet holiness that pervades so many pilgrimage sites, but first the guard had a sneezing fit, and then he was sniffing mighty, juicy snorks, and then blowing juicy honks over the railing onto one of the 1^st Century (who knows which calendar) stupas, and by the time he finished, six young men approached with machine-gun chatter that shattered the remaining silence from far outside the door and echoed by the time they were inside. After they'd worked around to the Overlook, each handed the guard a cell phone and filed down to where I was standing. The guard followed, tapped me on the shoulder, and waved me to the back of the overlook so he could take pictures with each of the six cell phone cameras.

The benefit of spending all day in the sun without water was that when a rickshaw driver with especially heinous teeth that paled in comparison to his breath came chasing after me as I was leaving--
“RICKSHAW RICKSHAW YOU GO TEMPLE TOUR?”--I didn't have the voice to retort.