Bodh Gaya: Buddhists at loggerheads with the VHP

A section of Buddhist monks and the laity have renewed the agitation for ‘total Buddhist control’ of the Bodh Gaya shrine. The timing, just ahead of the assembly election in Bihar, has raised some eyebrows, especially because the demand itself is fairly old, first raised by Sri Lankan Buddhist missionary Angarika Dhammapal in the late 19th century.

It picked up momentum in 1992, when Bhadant Surai Sasai, a monk from Japan, conducted a yatra between Nagpur and Bodh Gaya in support of the demand. Since then, the agitation surfaced periodically, only to fizzle out soon.

This time it is different, insists Bhadant Prajnashil, advisor to the agitating Buddhists and a former general-secretary of the All-India Monks’ Association. The support is much more broad-based and is gaining traction in Maharashtra and even beyond India, he claims. Bhadant Surai Sasai, he points out, has been leading the protest at Nagpur.

Approached by the BBC, Gaya District Magistrate S.M. Thiyagrajan said the home department of the Bihar government has been apprised of the agitation.

Buddhists object to the shrine being called the Mahabodhi Temple. Buddhists, they maintain, have nothing to do with ‘temples’ and are not Hindu. They refer to it instead as ‘Mahabodhi Mahavihara’ (monastery).

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, on the other hand, claims that Gautam Buddha, along with Lord Ram, was the ninth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the preserver; Buddhism, the VHP holds, is merely an offshoot of Hinduism and Buddha was a ‘Hindu reformist’.

The VHP’s claim is, not surprisingly, based on the alleged existence of a ‘Shivling’ in the shrine’s sanctum sanctorum. Buddhists scoff at such claims and say what the VHP sees as a Shivling is actually a broken pedestal. Late researcher and professor of Ancient Indian history P.C. Roy, too, held that there was no evidence of a Shivling and that the object claimed to be one did not have any of the features of a proper Shivling.

Bhadant Prajnasheel says mockingly that if the VHP’s claim is to be taken at face value, then Buddhists should also be allowed to manage Hindu temples, particularly the Vishnupad temple located a few kilometres to the north of the Buddha shrine. Devout Hindus believe that performance of certain rituals in the Vishnupad temple remains a pre-condition for the final salvation of souls and their release from the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth.

The management of the Mahabodhi ‘temple’ was contentious enough to have been raised at the Gaya session of the Congress in 1922. The shrine was then the private property of the head of the Shaivite Math in Bodh Gaya. A committee under the chairmanship of Dr Rajendra Prasad was constituted for the resolution of the conflict between Hindus and Buddhists for control over the shrine.

Post-independence, an Act was passed in 1949 for power-sharing between Hindus and Buddhists to manage the shrine. A nine-member committee was formed which included four Buddhists and five Hindus, all nominated by the state government. The Mahant of Bodh Gaya, the alleged usurper of the seat of Buddha’s enlightenment, was made the only permanent member of the committee headed by the ‘Hindu’ district magistrate of Gaya. In case the Gaya DM happened to be a non-Hindu, the state government retained the power to nominate a ‘Hindu’ as chairman.

In the 1960s when K.M. Zuberi, a Muslim, was posted as Gaya DM, the Bihar government appointed Jageshwar Prasad, an MLC, as the chairman for the period of Zuberi’s tenure.

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In 2013, the Nitish Kumar government amended the Act to make the post of chairman ‘religion neutral’. The Gaya DM, irrespective of his/her religious belief, was to be the chairperson of the committee. Significantly, no non-Hindu has been posted as the DM of Gaya since then. Needless to add, one of the reasons Muslim IAS officers are not considered for the post of Gaya DM is the issue of Bodh Gaya shrine management.

The shrine has anyway often been in the news for the wrong reasons. The molestation of a Chinese pilgrim, an ugly fight among monks over distribution of offerings, the chief monk and secretary of the shrine committee being accused of clandestinely snipping branches off the Bodhi tree — below which the Buddha is believed to have achieved enlightenment — and selling them at fancy prices to foreign devotees are only some of the reasons.

Incidents like the opening of the shrine during prohibited hours at night to facilitate ‘darshan’ by a group of pilgrims in a hurry from Japan, and the alleged stalking of a woman visitor from Singapore by an important functionary of the shrine have also come up once in a while.

The list is fairly long, though. It was revealed in 1992 that the then chief monk Gyan Jagat was not a Buddhist but a member of the VHP’s ‘Marg Darshak Mandal’ and had called on the king of Bhutan as the head of a VHP delegation. Within hours of the disclosure, the monk, who had lorded over the shrine for more than a decade, mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind even his personal belongings.

Yet another scandal is that guidelines issued by UNESCO on 26 June 2002, when the shrine was listed as a world heritage site, have allegedly been flouted. The guidelines were issued for the preservation/ conservation of the shrine and maintenance of its ambience. They included the creation of a buffer zone within a periphery of 0.5 km from the shrine’s outer walls by banning any construction activity, and gradual relocation of existing structures to retain the shrine’s ambience.

The UN body also called for a pollution-free environment around the shrine. The UNESCO also wanted only single-storeyed structures of a certain height within an area of 1 km from the shrine and a ban on construction of taller buildings.

Even the agitating Buddhists do not show any particular concern about the violations. When asked, Bhadant Prajnashil replied that everything would be fine once the management was transferred to an all-Buddhist committee.

The master plan promised in 2002 is yet to be prepared and notified. The real estate mafia is believed to have thwarted all attempts to get a master plan prepared in consonance with UNESCO guidelines. The Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee itself has got a building constructed within the ‘buffer zone’.

Asked about the non-compliance, committee secretary Mahashweta Maharathi claimed that the office was constructed by the government and the committee had little to do with it. Minutes later, the secretary called up to claim that the government had kept the UNESCO in the loop on the construction.

The untimely drying up of leaves on the sacred Bodhi tree had set off alarm bells some years ago. The Dehradun-based Forest Research institute attributed the phenomenon to factors like soil compaction, bottlenecks in the sub surface flow of nutrients, noise and air pollution caused by the high-density foot fall and the tendency of the devotees to touch the tree etc.

The scientists recommended a restriction on the number of entrants to the shrine at a particular point of time, replacement of marble tiles in the temple premises with porous ‘sand tiles’, switching over to solar energy and adequate darkness in the vicinity of the tree at night to facilitate the process of photosynthesis.

Restrictions on entry and replacement of extra hard marble tiles with porous ‘sand tiles’ are yet to be implemented. Some efforts have, however, been made for clean energy and switching off lights after 9.00 pm. Scientists from the Forest Research Institute visit Bodh Gaya every six months to check the health of the Bodhi tree.