An intrepid travel journalist and amateur photographer, Sunita Dwivedi set out to explore the Buddhist cultural legacy with the ardour of a self-guided researcher and a pilgrim. The result is this unique account of travels to the Buddhist sites of India. This multi-focal travelogue takes the tourist and the pilgrim from the better known sites of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to the interiors of Sikkim, Arunachal, the precarious heights of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh, and even across the borders to Nepal-the entire 'Dhamayatra' of the Buddhist circuit.

This multilayered historical ethnography of Bodh Gaya — the place of Buddha’s enlightenment in the north Indian state of Bihar — explores the spatial politics surrounding the transformation of the Mahabodhi Temple Complex into a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002. The rapid change from a small town based on an agricultural economy to an international destination that attracts hundreds of thousands of Buddhist pilgrims and visitors each year has given rise to a series of conflicts that foreground the politics of space and meaning among Bodh Gaya’s diverse constituencies. David Geary examines the modern revival of Buddhism in India, the colonial and postcolonial dynamics surrounding archaeological heritage and sacred space, and the role of tourism and urban development in India.

The “monumental bias” of Buddhist archaeology has hampered our understanding of the socio-religious mechanisms that enabled early Buddhist monks to establish themselves in new areas. To articulate these relationships, Shaw presents here the first integrated study of settlement archaeology and Buddhist history, carried out in the area around Sanchi, a Central Indian UNESCO World Heritage site. Her comprehensive, data-rich, and heavily illustrated work provides an archaeological basis for assessing theories regarding the dialectical relationship between Buddhism and surrounding lay populations. It also sheds light on the role of the introduction of Buddhism in changing settlement patterns.This volume was originally published in 2007 by the British Association of South Asian Studies.

Hundreds of India's stunning temples are catalogued and copiously illustrated in this two-volume work loaded with color photographs. A brief introduction to the principal religious groups who have made their home in this dynamic region leads into a description of the developmental stages of various architectural components and artistic styles in the different regions over the past 1500 years, from pre-historic cave art and ancient temples hewn out of solid bedrock to more recent European-style Christian churches such as those in Goa. India's religions and historical turning points are briefly discussed, enabling readers who may be less familiar with Indian cultures to recognize the value of the region's cultural heritage. The author details the technological and artistic progress of Indian temple construction in the context of cultural and religious shifts throughout history. The four indigenous religions of India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, as well as Christianity, are each appreciated on their own merits. The Taj Mahal, the most famous, was declared a World Heritage Monument in 1983. It has been described lyrically as a tear drop on the cheek of time, poetry in marble, a dream in marble, and an image of paradise; and in such superlatives as 'the greatest achievement of all Indo-Islamic architecture, the most beautiful of all monuments made by the hands of man.' But the UNESCO World Heritage Center has also singled out a wealth of monuments that preceded and followed its construction, denoting them as important elements of the heritage of human civilization. In this work, researched through personal visits to World Heritage sites in India and the monuments associated with them, the author shares his enjoyment of the depiction of human beauty in decorative sculpture and architecture and the narration of mythology therein. This is one work bound in two volumes.

The Indian subcontinent is the birthplace of Buddhism. Here is where the Buddha was born, where he lived and died. Here is where the first Buddhist councils were established, where the first monks practiced meditation, where the first stupas were built, where the great monasteries like Nalanda were established, where scholars from elsewhere in the Buddhist world came to learn Buddhism and so on. The earliest historical sites related to Buddhism were here too. In this book we provide an overview of historical sites related to Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent: including India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. Here too, we only mention some of the most important sites, for listing out all sites related to Buddhism is virtually impossible on account of their great number. We have also covered holy sites belonging to all the important sects of Buddhism, including Theravada and Mahayana and Vajrayana or Tibetan Buddhism. Our preference is to focus on historically important and more famous sites. For the purposes of this book, we leave out other important Asian Buddhist countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Japan for now. We will consider covering those sites in a separate book at a later time. For the purpose of covering the sites, we group them based on proximity. The author has personally visited most of the sites mentioned in this book in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The aim of this book is to provide the prospective traveler and pilgrim an overview of the sites so that they too can visit and see for themselves.

This book is the first attempt to describe all the fifteen placeswith which the Buddha had direct association: Lumbini,Kapilavastu, Bodh Gaya, Gaya, Sarnath, Shravasti,Kaushambi, Rajagriha, Nalanda, Vaishali, Patna, Kesariya,Kushinagar, Sankisa, and Mathura. The sequence of the fifteenBuddhist places follows the life-cycle and the journeysperformed by the Buddha as narrated in the JÈtakas and theTripi aka.Narration of each of these places accounts the mythology,legend, JÈtaka tales, cultural history, archaeology, field studiesand general information. The book is illustrated with 55photographs and 55 maps and figures, and also contains adescription of the main link stations like Varanasi, Allahabadand Gorakhpur. Nearby sites for excursion are also describedin the context.