Lumbini｜The Quietness and Absurdity of Siddhartha's Birthplace

The road from Pokhara to Lumbini was unbelievably bumpy, and it wasn't a bumpy road. On the smooth asphalt road, the local bus swayed violently. The crowd was about the size of a can of sardines, and the unsatisfied driving stopped people along the street, dragging the seven-hour drive into a whole day.

By the time we arrived at the Korean temple in Lumbini, it was almost dusk, just in time for dinner.

This Korean temple is said to have started construction five years ago, but it has provided free food and lodging. Five years later, the scenery here is still the same, and the unfinished temple is accompanied by a large amount of cement ash, because the Koreans are no longer willing to fund this temple. Therefore, the abbot had to hand over the board and lodging to the Nepalese for management.

This is my first impression of Lumbini: to call it a sacred place is absolutely not, and even a little ridiculous. But after the dusty hitchhiked here, they walked along the river in the direction of the sunset. Several local children picked up dry wood from the woods and put them on their heads and walked back to the town. A tricycle stopped by the river to take a bath. Tourists swaying and swaying. Compared with the Pokhara Lake District, which is full of tourists in the Han Dynasty, Lumbini is very quiet.

More than 2,500 years ago, the queen of a kingdom at the foot of the Himalayas returned to her hometown because she was about to give birth. On the way, she passed a garden in Lumbini and gave birth to the prince Siddhartha under the big tree by the pond and the sudden multicolored auspicious omens. , is the Buddha Shakyamuni who later founded Buddhism.

Of course, later there were more descriptions of chiseling and affiliation that beautified the birth of Buddha, but this could not save Lumpini from being forgotten in the vicissitudes of the world, if it wasn't for Xuanzang's record in his Great Tang Western Regions that he had seen Ayu Wang built a stone pillar here until 1896, when Indian archaeologists dug up the stone pillar according to the records of Xuanzang, which proved the sacredness of the place.

The Nepalese government has planned this place as a museum of Buddhist temples in various countries. With the assistance of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a slow reconstruction project is being carried out (in Nepal, one cannot expect any speed of construction to be seen), but really It is too far from Kathmandu. Even though there are many Western Buddhists who come to Nepal to seek Dharma practice, very few of them make pilgrimages here.

On the contrary, the Nepalese tour groups came one car after another. During the day, they took pictures with their hands on the shoulders of the Buddha statue, and at night they cooked dinner in the pavilion of the temple, which was very lively. When I saw the joy of Nepalese people from the corridor on the second floor, I remembered that Buddhism is still prosperous today, but it has never been popular in the place where the Buddha was born. It is really difficult to say about the world.

Google today's Korean temples, it seems to look like this: (It means that the color tone is too different, when I went there, it was the same as the ghost movie scene.)

This article responds to the call for essays by @workinggirlJennifer: Writing Scenery. However, it seems that there is no description of the scenery, so I can only respond.

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