By EDWARD A. GARGAN
It was evening, history records, on that day in 531 B.C., when the 35-year-old Siddhartha Gautama settled himself under the spreading branches of a peepul tree here. For weeks, the young prince sat, meditating on the nature of death and life, and finding, in his contemplations, the path to immortality, or nirvana. In the course of his meditations, Gautama attained enlightenment and became the Buddha.
Over the centuries, the original tree died or -- legend conflicts on this -- was felled. Today, a peepul tree, what became known as the bo tree, a vast tangle of branches stretching away from a thick, gnarled trunk, now stands on the very spot, it is said, of the tree that once shaded the Buddha. Abutting the tree soars a tiered pyramid of gray stone, its surface incised with dozens of bas-relief images of the Buddha.
Today, this place of Buddhist reverence and meditation is rent by sectarian conflict. India's Buddhists wish to control the temple and its grounds, preserving it as a unique religious place. But local Hindus who dominate the management of the temple maintain that the Buddha is in fact merely an incarnation of a Hindu god, and insist that the holy ground should be open to Hindu gods and Hindu ceremonies. And because, in India religion is politics, these theological disputations have dissolved into animosity, recrimination and violence.
For Buddhists, both in India and throughout Asia, this is the Bethlehem of Buddhism, a place of rare holiness and reverence, a place that stirs awe and renewal. It was from here, the Buddha went forth, founded a religious order of monks, nuns and lay people, and taught his doctrine, or dharma, a collection of precepts intended to show the path to nirvana. Appealing to socially oppressed castes of the time, his ideas defied the authority of the dominant Aryan Brahmins, touching off an upheaval against brahminical monopolies of wealth and power.
That conflict born in the sixth century before Christ -- the clash between Buddhist rationalism and Hindu mysticism, ritual and caste -- percolated through the millenniums.
"Tension is now increasing because this is a Buddhist temple," said Bhikshu Rastrapal Mahathera, the director of the International Meditation Center here. Swathed in a rust-colored robe, the Buddhist priest, who sits on the management committee of the temple, said that Hindu priests controlled the temple and that their hold had to be broken. "In Muslim institutions, only Muslims are there," he said. "In Sikh institutions only Sikhs are there. Why, in Buddhist institutions, cannot it be only Buddhists?"
Over the years, the Buddhists charge, Hindu priests have infiltrated the site here, fixing a Shiva Lingam, or representation of the Hindu god Shiva, before the 1,000-year-old golden Buddha inside the temple, placing their own idols in adjacent buildings, and draping other images of Buddha as if they were Hindu deities.
In mid-May, a group of 2,000 Buddhist pilgrims from Maharashtra became so agitated at the presence of Hindu gods and priests at the temple here that they broke several idols and slapped several of the Hindu holy men. That eruption of violence galvanized Buddhist priests here, and they now are demanding complete control of the site, which is administered by a committee of five Hindus and four Buddhists.
But the Hindu authorities in this town of temples and monasteries insist that Hinduism is all-embracing. "We treat our idols and their idols as the same thing," said Deen Dyaldaya Giri, a senior official at the Hindu Math, or pilgrimage site here. "The basic controversy is whether it is a Hindu temple or a Buddhist temple. We see it as both."
But more than administrative control of a holy site is at stake in Bodh Gaya. Already, a far more pronounced tension crackles between militant religious and political Hindu parties and India's Muslim minority. A deadly struggle is periodically waged over a mosque in Ayodhya, which some Hindus assert is the birthplace of the mythical god Ram and where they wish to build an enormous Hindu temple.
So intense did passions become in that dispute that they catapulted the Bharatiya Janata Party, a hard-line Hindu political party, into prominence as the leading opposition force in Indian politics. Now, similar emotions are being stirred here, with members of the Hindu party and its allied groups organizing resistance to Buddhist claims on the temple.
In the last few weeks, huge slogans scrawled in red paint have appeared on the outer walls of the shrine here - "Stop Becoming False Buddhists" and "Panch Pandava and Shiva Lingam will not be removed," a reference to the Buddhas draped as Hindu gods and the small deity placed before the central statue of Buddha in the heart of the temple here. All of the slogans were signed with the initials BJP.
With perhaps five million adherents, India's Buddhists number fewer than one percent of the population, in contrast to the nearly 100 million Muslims of India. But for Hinduism's militants the threat posed by Muslims and Buddhists is not simply one of religious diversity, but a challenge to the very soul of India itself. In the decade of the 1950's, desperate to escape their oppression and social stigma, more than three million untouchables in Maharashtra embraced Buddhism. Indeed, at the entrance to the temple here, Bhikku Prajna Deep, a monk wrapped in a saffron robe, said that is why he adopted the faith.
"There are distinctions between upper and lower castes in Hinduism," he said. "I do not believe in that. I was from a backward caste. By converting, I am away from the Hindus."
For militant Hindus, any conversions, be it to Buddhism, Islam or Christianity, are a dangerous betrayal of the motherland, a form of not only religious, but also cultural and national treason...
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