Day by Day
Days 1 to 2 Imperial Delhi Mughal Grandeur and Modern Peace
Arrive at Indira Gandhi International Airport and transfer to your hotel with a traditional welcome. Day One orients you in the old city. The Red Fort, built by Shah Jahan in 1638, is a complex of palaces and audience halls enclosed by 2.5 kilometers of red sandstone walls. It was the seat of Mughal power for nearly 200 years. Raj Ghat is the simple black marble platform where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated on January 31, 1948. The eternal flame has burned here since that day and the garden around it is one of the quietest places in Delhi.
Day Two moves to the monuments that frame India's longer history and its plural present. Qutab Minar, begun in 1193 and completed a century later, is the tallest brick minaret ever built and part of the first mosque constructed in India after the Islamic conquest of the subcontinent. The Lotus Temple, completed in 1986, is a Bahai house of worship built in the form of a half-open lotus flower, open to visitors of any faith and requiring only silence inside. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Both carry something of what Delhi holds at its best: the coexistence of traditions that elsewhere refuse each other.
Stay: New Delhi Hotel
Days 3 to 4 Varanasi and Sarnath The Eternal City and the First Teaching
Board the overnight first-class air-conditioned train from New Delhi to Varanasi, one of the great rail journeys in India: 14 hours through the flat Gangetic plains, arriving in the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Settle into the hotel and go to the river before the sun rises. The private boat moves slowly along the ghats as the city wakes and the rituals begin: pilgrims bathing in the Ganges, priests performing puja on the stone steps, the smoke from the cremation fires at Manikarnika Ghat drifting across the water. Hindus believe the Ganges here carries the power to grant liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The city has operated on that belief for at least 3,000 years.
Sarnath is seven kilometers north of Varanasi and exists in a different register entirely: quieter, more orderly, with the excavated ruins of monasteries and stupas spread across a park rather than stacked above a riverbank. This is the Deer Park where the Buddha, having attained enlightenment at Bodhgaya, walked to meet five former companions and delivered his first teaching. Buddhists call this event the First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. The Dhamekh Stupa, built in the 5th century AD to mark the spot, rises 43 meters from the park. The Archaeological Museum holds the Lion Capital of Ashoka, carved in the 3rd century BC and now the national emblem of India.
Stay: Varanasi Hotel
Days 5 to 6 Bodhgaya The Moment of Enlightenment
Six-hour drive southwest from Varanasi to Bodhgaya, arriving in the afternoon. Bodhgaya is the most sacred site in Buddhism. This is where Siddhartha Gautama, after years of ascetic practice that nearly killed him, sat down beneath a fig tree on the banks of the Niranjana River and vowed not to move until he understood the nature of suffering and the path to its end. He remained in meditation for 49 days. What he understood beneath that tree became Buddhism.
The Mahabodhi Temple complex surrounds the site. The temple in its current form dates to the 5th or 6th century AD, though there has been a structure here since the time of Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the oldest brick structures in the Indian subcontinent. The Bodhi Tree in the temple courtyard is held to be a direct descendant of the original tree, propagated through cuttings taken to Sri Lanka by Ashoka's daughter and returned to Bodhgaya when the original was destroyed. Whether or not that lineage is continuous, the tree has been venerated here for over 2,000 years. The morning hours, before the pilgrims arrive in numbers, are the right time to be here. Bring something to sit on. Take the time.
Stay: Bodhgaya Hotel
Days 7 to 8 Rajgir and Kushinagar Peaks of the Magadhan Kings
Drive north to Rajgir, the ancient capital of the Magadha kingdom and the city where the Buddha spent several monsoon retreats under the patronage of King Bimbisara. The Vulture's Peak, Gridhrakuta hill, was the Buddha's preferred teaching location during these stays. It is here that he is said to have delivered the Lotus Sutra and other foundational Mahayana texts. The chairlift to the summit passes the Japanese-funded Viswa Shanti Stupa, a white peace pagoda of the kind built at several sacred sites across Asia in the postwar period. The view from the peak is the same view the Buddha would have had: the valley of Rajgir below, the forested ridges on all sides.
Vaishali, further north, was an ancient republic rather than a kingdom, one of the first democratic governing systems in recorded history. The Buddha visited it multiple times. It is where Ananda, his closest disciple, persuaded him to allow women to be ordained into the monastic community, the first time in any religious tradition that women were given full ordination. The Ashokan pillar still stands in the field where it was placed in the 3rd century BC. Kushinagar, the final stop, is where the Buddha died at the age of eighty. The Mahaparinirvana Temple houses the 5th-century reclining figure that shows him in his final posture, lying on his right side, facing west, in the state of ultimate peace. The Muktabandhana Stupa nearby marks the site of his cremation.
Stay: Rajgir and Kushinagar Hotels
Days 9 to 11 Lumbini and Shravasti The Birthplace and the Teaching Years
Cross the border into Nepal and enter the southwestern Terai, a flat subtropical lowland far removed from the Himalayan landscape most visitors associate with Nepal. Lumbini sits in this lowland. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the confirmed birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, born here in approximately 563 BC to Queen Mayadevi and King Suddhodana of the Shakya clan. The Mayadevi Temple, rebuilt several times over the centuries and last excavated and restored in the 1990s, stands over the marker stone that identifies the exact spot of his birth. The Pushkarni Pool, the sacred garden where Queen Mayadevi bathed before the birth, remains in the complex. The Ashokan pillar erected at the site in 249 BC, inscribed with the emperor's declaration that this is the birthplace of the Buddha, is still standing.
The excursion to Tilaurakot in Kapilvastu, roughly 27 kilometers from Lumbini, visits the ruins of the palace complex where Siddhartha spent his first 29 years. The archaeological remains are modest but the context is not. This is where he lived as a prince, married, had a son, and eventually looked over the palace wall and encountered an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic. Those four sights, the traditional account says, set him on the path. Drive to Shravasti on the final day of this section. The Buddha spent 25 consecutive monsoon seasons teaching in the Jetavana gardens here, donated to the monastic community by a merchant who is said to have paid for the land in gold coins laid end to end. The ruins of the Jetavana Monastery complex are the most extensive Buddhist archaeological site in northern India.
Stay: Lumbini and Shravasti Hotels
Days 12 to 14 Return to Delhi
Depart Shravasti for the drive to Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, for the rail or road connection back to Delhi. The journey retraces in reverse the general arc of the circuit: from the teaching years in the west back through the heartland of the Gangetic plain to the capital. Arrive in Delhi in the evening for the final night.
Day Thirteen is at leisure. The National Museum in Delhi holds one of the finest collections of Buddhist art in the world: Gandharan sculpture, bronzes, illuminated manuscripts, and the Lion Capital of Ashoka alongside the full sweep of the subcontinent's artistic history. The markets of Connaught Place and Lodi Colony offer the last opportunity for crafts, textiles, and the particular kind of shopping that only happens at the end of a long journey when you finally know what you want to take home. Private transfer to Indira Gandhi International Airport on the morning of Day Fourteen for your departure.
Stay: New Delhi Hotel
