Experiences in Bihar
More than temples. Retreats, rites, walks and fairs, with who each one suits.
Ten-day Vipassana course
Ten days of silence, taught free, in the state where it was taught first
A residential course in the tradition of S. N. Goenka. You arrive on day zero, hand in your phone, and do not speak to another student for nine days. You sit about ten hours a day, in the hall and in your room…
Yoga at Munger
The school that sent Indian yoga to the world, on the bank of the Ganga
The Bihar School of Yoga sits at Ganga Darshan in Munger, above the river. It was founded in 1963 by Swami Satyananda Saraswati and it is where the system now taught worldwide as Satyananda Yoga was put together: asana…
Sit with a monastery
Eighteen countries keep a monastery here, and several teach anybody who walks in
Morning and evening sittings, open classes and short courses at the monasteries around the Mahabodhi temple. Several run in English through the winter. Some take residential guests for a few days at a time. The Root…
Dawn under the Bodhi tree
The courtyard opens at five, and for an hour it is almost empty
Sit inside the Mahabodhi compound, under or beside the tree, before the coach parties arrive. The Vajrasana — the stone slab marking where he is said to have sat — is just behind the temple, under the tree's west side…
Sit in a cave
People have gone to these rooms to be alone for two thousand two hundred years
Four rock chambers within reach of one another. Barabar's granite is polished to a mirror and was cut for the Ajivika ascetics in Ashoka's reign — the oldest rock-cut caves in India. Dungeshwari is where the Buddha is…
Pind daan at Gaya
The rite for the dead that brings families to Gaya from everywhere
Offerings made for ancestors, at more than one site and in a fixed order, over one to three days. A priest leads it. The short form is done in a day at Vishnupad and the Phalgu bed; the fuller one adds Pretshila…
Pitrapaksh Mela
A fortnight when the whole of Gaya belongs to the dead
The fortnight of the ancestors. Several lakh people come to Gaya to perform pind daan in the same fifteen days, and the town rearranges itself around them: temporary camps, police on every ghat, queues at Vishnupad from…
Lifting water at Sultanganj
A hundred kilometres on foot in saffron, carrying Ganga water on a pole
Through the month of Shravan, pilgrims fill sealed pots with water from the Uttarvahini Ganga at Ajgaibinath in Sultanganj, hang them from a decorated pole, and walk. The route runs east out of Bihar towards Deoghar…
Diwali at Pawapuri
For Jains, Diwali is the night Mahavira attained nirvana — here
Jains keep Diwali as the anniversary of Mahavira's nirvana, which happened at Pawapuri. The Jal Mandir, the white marble temple standing in the middle of a lotus lake on the site of his cremation, is lit and circled…
Langar at Patna Sahib
Everybody eats, sitting on the same floor, at one of the five Takhts
The free kitchen at Takht Sri Harimandir Ji, running all day, every day. Anybody may eat and anybody may work: peeling, rolling rotis, washing steel plates in a line. Nobody asks who you are or what you believe before…
An urs, and the qawwali after it
The night a saint's death is kept as a wedding, with singing until dawn
An urs marks the anniversary of a Sufi saint's death, understood as the soul's union with God — which is why it is kept as a wedding and not a funeral. A chadar is laid on the tomb, the shrine is lit, and qawwals sing…
Chhath on the ghats
Bihar's own festival, and the largest thing that happens here
Four days ending with offerings made standing in the river: first to the setting sun, then, the next morning, to the rising one. There is no priest and no temple in it. The person keeping the fast does everything…
Kalpvas at Simaria
A month living in a tent on the river, eating once a day
Through the month of Kartik, families move out of their houses and live in tents on the sand at Simaria ghat on the Ganga. One meal a day, bathing before dawn, readings in the afternoon. Thousands keep it. It ends at…
The hot springs at Rajgir
Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Muslims have bathed in the same water here for centuries
Water comes hot out of Vaibhava hill into a set of walled kunds at the foot of it. Brahmakund is the hottest. Makhdum Kund, further along the same hill, is named for a Sufi saint. They have been in continuous use since…
The Jethian to Rajgir walk
The valley road the Buddha and King Bimbisara are said to have met on
A walk of roughly fourteen kilometres through the Jethian valley, over the hills, and down into Rajgir — the route by which the Buddha is said to have come from Bodh Gaya to Rajagriha, and where the king came out to…
Walk Nalanda with somebody who can read it
Ten metres of brick is a wall to most people and a lecture hall to a guide
The excavated monasteries and temples of the world's first residential university, with the site museum and the Xuanzang memorial. Eleven monasteries and six temples are exposed, in rows, with the students' cells, the…
Sonepur Mela
Asia's largest cattle fair, a month long, where two rivers meet
A month of animals, traders, theatre tents and pilgrims on the sand where the Gandak runs into the Ganga. It opens on Kartik Purnima with a bathe at the confluence and a visit to the Harihar Nath temple, and it has run…
Malmas Mela, Rajgir
Once in about three years, the gods are said to move into Rajgir for a month
A month-long fair in the hot-spring valley during the intercalary month of the Hindu calendar, which falls roughly every thirty-three months. Bathing at the kunds, temples open around the clock, and a crowd that fills…
Vivah Panchami in Mithila
The wedding of Ram and Sita, kept as a wedding, in the bride's own country
Mithila keeps the anniversary of the marriage as a marriage: processions, songs sung by women in Maithili that exist for no other occasion, and the whole of Sitamarhi and Punaura Dham given over to it.
Learn Madhubani painting
A wall painting done by women in Mithila for centuries, now a hundred-crore trade
Mithila painting was made on the mud walls of houses for weddings and festivals, by women, in natural colour, with a bamboo twig and a rag. It moved onto paper and cloth in the 1960s and became a livelihood. Villages…
Silk at Bhagalpur
Tussar woven on handlooms in a city that has done it for two hundred years
Bhagalpur is called the silk city for a reason: tussar is reeled, dyed and woven here on handlooms in weavers' own houses and small sheds, and the whole chain from cocoon to finished cloth is within a few kilometres.
Valmiki Tiger Reserve
Bihar's only tiger reserve, in the forest along the Nepal border
Nearly nine hundred square kilometres of sal forest and grassland in West Champaran, against the Himalayan foothills and the Nepal border. Tigers, leopards, sloth bear, gaur and a great many birds. Safaris run from…
Birds at Kabar Taal
Bihar's Ramsar wetland, and a temple on an island in the middle of it
An oxbow lake in Begusarai, the largest freshwater wetland in Bihar and the state's first Ramsar site. Tens of thousands of migratory birds use it in winter. The Jaimangla Garh temple stands on an island in it and is…
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