From Scholar’s Gaze to Seeker’s Silence

Today, May 12, 2025, marks Buddha Purnima-a sacred full-moon commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and Mahaparinirvana of Lord Gautama Buddha. Observed across India and throughout South, Southeast, and East Asia, devotees honor this auspicious day with introspection, ritual offerings, and acts of compassion. For me, Buddha Purnima carries a deeper resonance: it bookmarks pivotal moments in my career and education, reminding me of fieldwork under the Bodhi tree and the scholarly discipline it inspired.

It has always been more than a place to me. More than field notes, more than interviews, more than citation. Bodhgaya is not just where the Buddha awoke; it is where I did too – in fragments, in breath, in the quiet spaces between inquiry and reverence.

And today, though my body stayed elsewhere, my thoughts circled back – slow, sacred, steady – like pilgrims circumambulating the Mahabodhi Temple.

My first visit was clinical. Notebook in hand, camera slung across shoulder, I arrived with the posture of a scholar. I had questions about spatial sacrality, about religious cohabitation, about global flows of Buddhist pilgrimage. But Bodhgaya had questions for me too. Questions that didn’t translate into footnotes.

Even as I documented monastic routines and architectural alignments, something softer began to take hold. I found myself pausing – not for observation, but for awe. I remember the sound of chants rising with the morning mist, the tactile pull of butter lamps arranged in perfect rows, the sight of a child offering marigolds with both hands, as if giving the world away.

Research had led me there. But something else kept me returning.

In academic terms, Bodhgaya is a fascinating node in the global religious landscape – a transnational sacred site with deep local grounding. It’s where faith meets politics, where tradition intersects with tourism. The field literature – from David Geary’s ethnographic work to comparative studies in religious anthropology – is rich and layered. My own research mapped how sacred space functions not only as a site of memory, but as a generator of embodied knowledge as a sacred space. The temple doesn’t just tell the story of the Buddha; it enacts it, spatially, symbolically, communally.

But theory never quite prepares you for the moment you sit under the Bodhi tree – the descendant of the one under which Siddhartha sat – and feel the world still.

It’s not dramatic. There is no flash of enlightenment. Just a deep, quiet yes.

That first time, I closed my notebook.

And I listened.

There’s a paradox at the heart of Bodhgaya. It is a place of immense stillness, and yet it moves – constantly – with footsteps, chants, rituals, light. Devotees from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bhutan, Myanmar, Korea, Japan – each bring their own languages, their own ritual grammar. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t fragment. It layers.

One morning, I stood at the edge of the temple complex watching monks walk their meditative circles while Indian school children posed for selfies by the Lotus Pond. Nearby, an elderly Japanese pilgrim knelt beside a Tibetan lama giving silent blessings. A researcher in me wanted to parse the politics of presence. But a deeper part of me – maybe the part that had become a participant more than observer – felt only this: sacred space can hold contradiction without collapsing.

Bodhgaya teaches you that.

It doesn’t ask you to be someone else. It just asks you to be still long enough to see clearly.
By my third or fourth visit, I had stopped trying to separate my research from my experience. The notes I took blurred with reflection. I began to study not just what the place meant to others, but what it was doing to me. How it slowed me down. How it invited contemplation, not conclusion. I found myself drawn to the idea of “spiritual ecology” – how physical environments shape, and are shaped by, inner landscapes.

One evening, I sat beneath the great Bodhi tree after the temple lights had dimmed. I could still hear the gentle rustle of leaves – or maybe it was prayer flags – or maybe it was just my own breath, finally noticed. Around me, people sat in quiet clusters. Some wept. Some smiled. A few simply closed their eyes.

What unites us, I realized, isn’t belief – it’s longing. A longing for peace, meaning, wholeness. For some, that longing brings them to scripture. For others, to ritual. For me, it brought me back to Bodhgaya, again and again.

Reading the same sutra anew, I found lines I’d never noticed. Encountering groups of nuns whispering mala prayers, I felt their devotion echo in my own breath. One whispered, “Sab kuch yahin hai. Everything is here.” In that moment, I believed her.

What is it, truly, that draws us to sacred places?

I’ve sat with that question for years.

From a cognitive science perspective, we know that rituals and sacred architecture can stimulate parts of the brain associated with awe, empathy, and emotional regulation. From a sociological angle, pilgrimage fosters collective identity and solidarity. But from the ground – from under the tree, in the heat of the Bihar sun, surrounded by chanting, incense, silence – none of that matters.

What matters is the feeling.

And that feeling is this: I belong, not because I claim the space, but because the space claims me.
It’s a humbling belonging. A dissolving one.

The kind that reminds you you’re not here to dominate knowledge, but to receive it.

And so today, on this auspicious day of Buddha Purnima, I won’t be able to take a train to be there.

But in truth, I was there.

In memory, yes. But also in awareness.

Because Bodhgaya or any sacred site, once it enters you, does not leave.

It becomes a reference point for silence. A compass for calm. A reminder that beneath all our striving, something steady and still waits.

In the years since my fieldwork concluded, I’ve returned less as a scholar and more as a seeker. And perhaps that, too, is a kind of research. The kind that doesn’t aim to publish, but to understand.
And each time I return, something shifts. The temple is the same the site is the same, and yet I see it differently

So, at Bodhgaya

I found it in my breath.

In the soft light that poured through the window like morning in Bihar.

In the way my thoughts slowed – not stopped, but softened – circling, gently, toward presence.
I found it in the deep gratitude I feel for having known that place not as a tourist, nor even just as a researcher, but as one among many who sat under a tree and felt the world hush.

A tree that holds the memory of awakening.

And in its shade, I woke a little too.

I stand here on Buddha Purnima, the full moon casting its soft glow across my desk, and by that I’m carried back to Bodhgaya – where I once measured every stone carving as a scholar, knelt beneath the Bodhi tree as a pilgrim, and now. simply sit in quiet wonder. Each visit taught me something new: first the neat scholar in me took notes on Space and architecture, then the devotee or the spirtuality lingering inside in me felt the hush beneath the Bodhi tree, and now the seeker in me just breathes, finding that the real journey isn’t out there but in here, in the simple stillness of my own heart. I’ve learned that every step toward liberation and awakening isn’t found in distant places or grand rituals, but in the quiet chambers of our own hearts