There is a tree in Bodhgaya, Bihar, beneath which the most important event in the history of consciousness may have occurred.
Approximately 2,500 years ago, a man named Siddhartha Gautama — a prince who had renounced his kingdom and his luxury in search of an answer to the problem of human suffering — sat down beneath a sacred fig tree and vowed not to rise until he had found what he was seeking. After forty-nine days of meditation, he attained what Buddhists call bodhi: awakening, enlightenment, the complete and permanent liberation from suffering and from the cycle of death and rebirth. He became, at that moment, the Buddha — the Awakened One.
The tree under which this occurred is called the Bodhi Tree. The original tree no longer stands (it was reportedly destroyed by the emperor Ashoka before his conversion to Buddhism, and subsequently by later rulers), but a direct descendant — grown from a cutting taken to Sri Lanka in the third century BC — grows today on the same spot, within the magnificent Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya.
To sit beneath this tree — as hundreds of monks, nuns, and pilgrims do every day — is to encounter something that cannot be entirely explained by the known laws of psychology. The spot is, by any measure, extraordinarily peaceful. The tree is enormous, its heart-shaped leaves catching the light in that particular way of sacred fig trees. The Mahabodhi Temple rises behind it, its soaring spire a ninth-century masterpiece of Buddhist architecture.
But it is not the architecture or the botany that makes the experience what it is. It is the quality of attention that 2,500 years of collective devotion has concentrated in this one small place on Earth. The monks who circle the tree in clockwise pradakshina, their lips moving in silent mantra. The Tibetan pilgrims prostrating full-length on the stone. The Japanese meditators, perfectly still, their orange robes like the flames of candles. The ordinary people from every country — who have no formal religious practice, but who sense, when they sit down here, that something in them has become quiet.
Positive India Journey arranges private morning meditation sessions at Bodhgaya — at dawn, before the general crowds arrive, when the temple complex is at its most luminous and most still. Experienced meditation teachers guide guests through a sitting practice in this extraordinary location. It is the kind of experience that people call life-changing, and they are usually right.