Lumbini

Lumbini has better early documentary evidence than almost any sacred site anywhere, and a recent excavation that has been widely over-reported.

The pillar

The Ashokan pillar, rediscovered in 1896, carries an inscription recording that Ashoka came in person in the twentieth year of his reign, worshipped, and exempted the village from tax, because the Buddha was born here.

That is a third-century BCE inscription naming the place at the place. Almost no sacred site in any tradition has anything comparable. It establishes beyond argument that Lumbini was identified as the birthplace within about two centuries of the traditional date, which is not the same as establishing that he was born there, but is a great deal more than most sites can offer.

The 2013 excavation

Work led by Robin Coningham, published in Antiquity in 2013, dug beneath the brick shrines inside the Maya Devi temple and found timber structures on the same alignment, with an open central space. Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating placed activity in the first millennium BCE, potentially as early as the sixth century.

This was reported worldwide as archaeological proof of the Buddha's birth date.

What it actually shows

It does not show that. Two questions have to be kept apart:

• Was there human activity at this spot in the first millennium BCE? The excavation supports yes.
• Was that activity a Buddhist shrine? That is an interpretation, and it is disputed.

The timber structure could be an early shrine. It could also be an earlier tree shrine of a non-Buddhist kind, or a structure unrelated to religion. The dating of the Buddha's own life is itself unsettled, Heinz Bechert's reassessment moved the consensus for the death substantially later than the traditional 483 BCE, towards around 400.

The excavators were more careful than the coverage. The stronger claim should not be repeated as settled.

The zone

UNESCO inscribed the site in 1997 and the Lumbini Development Trust administers it. The master plan, designed by Kenzo Tange, divides the monastic zone deliberately: Theravada monasteries to the east, Mahayana and Vajrayana to the west, some two dozen built by different countries in their own national styles.

Shops, hotels and restaurants are excluded from the zone entirely, so the commerce that surrounds every other major pilgrimage site is here zoned out by design.

Lumbini's modern layout follows a single architect's plan, drawn up decades after the site had already been identified from a pillar in a field.

The plan that organised the site

In 1978 the Japanese-sponsored master plan by the architect Kenzo Tange was adopted to organise Lumbini into three zones: a sacred garden around the Maya Devi Temple and Ashoka pillar, a monastic zone where Buddhist countries built their own temples in national styles, and a new town for visitors. Construction proceeded in stages over decades and continues; the monastic zone today reads almost like an architectural survey of world Buddhism, with Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana temples standing within walking distance of each other.

The birth account

Buddhist tradition holds that Queen Maya, travelling to her parents' home to give birth, stopped at Lumbini's grove and gave birth standing, holding a sal tree branch, and that the infant immediately took seven steps and spoke. A carved panel called the Nativity Sculpture, damaged and much handled over centuries by pilgrims touching it for blessing, is displayed in the Maya Devi Temple depicting the scene.

Older than any figure claims

Ashoka's pillar and inscription, dated to his visit around 249 BCE, are themselves already commemorating a birth remembered as having happened some three centuries earlier, at a site local tradition had evidently kept identified across that span.