In the Footsteps of the Buddha

The eight great places are spread across four hundred miles of the Gangetic plain, and reaching them properly takes patience and a good driver. This is the full arc: Shravasti, where the Buddha spent…

Length: 11 days, 10 nights
From: ₹2,54,000 per person
Pace: Active
Stops: 8
Best months: October to February

The route

8 stops over 11 days

Delhi
Lucknow
Shravasti
Lumbini
Kushinagar
Bodh Gaya
Patna
Varanasi

Dawn meditation under the Bodhi tree before the queues
Jetavana at Shravasti, where the Anandabodhi tree stands
The Maya Devi marker stone at Lumbini, Nepal
Ashoka’s lion capital, seen up close at Sarnath museum
The reclining Buddha at Kushinagar, robed at dawn

Day by day

What actually happens

Length: 11 days
Stops: 8
Pace: Active
From: ₹2,54,000

1

Delhi

Arrival in Delhi

You are met on arrival at Indira Gandhi International and driven twenty minutes to central Delhi. The day is yours to lose to jet lag. Later, if you are upright, the Buddha Jayanti Park off Ridge Road holds a sapling of the Bodhi tree planted by the Dalai Lama in 1993 — a quiet, unvisited place to begin.

Night: The Claridges, New Delhi
2B

Delhi

Relics, and the ground rules

The National Museum keeps the Piprahwa relics — bone fragments found in 1898 in a stupa on the Nepal frontier, now in a gilt casket in a small chapel-like room where visitors bow. An hour there with a scholar of early Buddhism sets up everything that follows. Afternoon at the Qutb complex, then an early night before a dawn flight.

Night: The Claridges, New Delhi
3B L

Lucknow

Lucknow, and the road east

The morning flight to Lucknow takes an hour. Bara Imambara’s Bhulbhulaiya is a labyrinth of 489 identical doorways in a vaulted hall built without a single beam. Lunch is galouti kebab at Tunday, minced seventy times and set with raw papaya. Late afternoon at the Residency ruins, still shell-pocked from 1857, where seven-sisters birds work the lawns.

Night: Lebua Lucknow
4B D

Shravasti

Into the Jetavana grove

Four and a half hours north-east through sugarcane and mustard to Shravasti. The Jetavana grove was the Buddha’s monsoon base for twenty-four seasons; what remains is brick foundations, the Gandhakuti where he slept, and the Anandabodhi tree, grown from a Bodh Gaya cutting. Sit at four in the afternoon and Sri Lankan and Thai groups chant in three languages at once.

Night: Lotus Nikko Hotel, Shravasti
5B L D

Lumbini

Across the border to Lumbini

A long day: six hours to the Sonauli crossing, where formalities take about forty minutes with our agent handling the paperwork, then an hour on Nepali roads to Lumbini. The Maya Devi temple encloses a worn marker stone said to fix the exact spot of the birth. Ashoka’s pillar of 249 BC stands outside, its inscription still legible.

Night: Hotel Kasai, Lumbini
6B D

Lumbini

The monastic zone by bicycle

Kenzo Tange’s master plan gave each Buddhist nation a plot along a three-kilometre canal, so a morning’s cycle takes you from the Myanmar Golden Temple to the German Lotus Stupa to the Chinese monastery, all built in their own idioms. Sarus cranes stalk the wetland between. Return at dusk for candle-lighting by the Puskarini pond, where Maya Devi bathed.

Night: Hotel Kasai, Lumbini
7B D

Kushinagar

Kushinagar, where he died

Back across the border and four hours south-east. Kushinagar is a small town with a six-metre reclining Buddha of the fifth century, carved from a single block of Chunar sandstone and robed each morning in fresh saffron cloth. Behind it, the Ramabhar Stupa marks the cremation site — a plain brick dome in a lawn, usually almost empty.

Night: The Royal Residency, Kushinagar
8B L D

Bodh Gaya

The long road south into Bihar

An early start for the drive into Bihar, broken at Kesariya, where the largest excavated stupa in the country rises in terraces from paddy fields with almost no one there, and again at Vaishali for lunch. You reach Bodh Gaya in the evening. Tibetan prayer flags along the approach road; the Mahabodhi’s tower lit gold above the trees.

Night: Oaks Bodhgaya
9B

Bodh Gaya

Under the Bodhi tree

You enter the Mahabodhi at half past five, before the coaches, and sit on the marble platform beside the Bodhi tree — fourth-generation, grown from the Anuradhapura sapling. Around you, monks in maroon, ochre and grey prostrate on polished boards. Later the Thai, Bhutanese and Japanese monasteries, the 25-metre Daijokyo Buddha, and the Sujata Stupa across the Falgu riverbed.

Night: Oaks Bodhgaya
10B L

Patna

Rajgir, Nalanda and on to Patna

North through Gaya to Rajgir, where the Vulture’s Peak is a fifteen-minute climb to a small brick terrace with a long view over the Rajgir hills; the Buddha taught the Heart Sutra here. Then Nalanda: nine centuries of monastic university in red brick, sacked in 1193. Patna by evening, and the Bihar Museum if it is still open.

Night: Maurya Patna
11B L

Varanasi

Sarnath, and departure

The first flight to Varanasi takes forty minutes. At Sarnath, in the deer park where the first sermon was given, you walk the Dhamekh Stupa’s carved band of sixth-century scrollwork and see Ashoka’s lion capital in the museum, at eye level, in good light. Lunch, then the transfer to Varanasi airport for your onward flight. The journey ends here.

Night: No overnight — departure day