15 March 2026
What actually happens in the process of pilgrim travel? Invariably, ‘modern’ pilgrimage entails a journey, both real and metaphorical. This standard notion of pilgrimage has not changed in a considerable period of time. It is real because it involves undertaking a physical journey from one’s home to a holy site. It is metaphorical because this journey also indicates a crucial passage in life from the ordinary to the pious. Any pilgrimage undertaken today has both a symbolic element and a physical progression. A pilgrimage, as Anton Pazos writes, is both an ‘act of devotion’ as it is also ‘one of the most widespread and deeply rooted religious impulses’ and ‘an essential element of religion itself’. That is, whether pilgrimage is mandated as an ideal of faith or not, pilgrimage as a practice, creates an important part of any faith’s institutional personality. Important aspects of this personality, which manifests over time, gets embedded on the ground as taken-for-granted practices of pilgrimage understood over time at least partly as ‘heritage’.
Pilgrimage is an activity that cannot be understood simply based on travel. In their book, Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, anthropologists Simon Coleman and John Eade suggested that pilgrimage entails relationships between the person, place, text and movement. Sinhala Buddhist pilgrimage to Nepal and India also brings together these parameters that build the overall structure of pilgrims’ travel as well as pilgrim space. Obviously, it is the ‘person’ who ultimately takes the decision to go on a pilgrimage even though the actual travel might be as part of a group. This travel takes them to a set of specific ‘places’ that constitute the Buddhist sacred landscape, which vary from Lumbini and Kapilvastu in Nepal to Bodh Gaya, Kushi Nagar and so on in India. ‘Text’, quite literally, is also crucial in this scheme of things since what prepares pilgrims for travel comes from informal discourses and formal textual sources that deal with pilgrimage in different ways. Similarly, ‘movement’ means the act people undertake individually or more often collectively, to travel from the comfort zones of their homes to specific sites in the pilgrim trail. In this movement, besides the pilgrims, tour operators, business entities including accommodation and travel service providers and various arms of three nation states (Nepal, India and Sri Lanka) play a crucial role in enabling travel.
Sinhalas, and for that matter most Buddhists, believe that pilgrim travel as it is understood today, was sanctified by the Buddha himself just before his death. The Buddhist discourse, the Maha Parinibbana Sutta, has laid down the foundation for Buddhist pilgrimage. As articulated in this text, Buddha’s main disciple, Ananda asked the Buddha how to personify him in matters of faith when the Buddha was no longer alive. In response to this, the Buddha had identified four places that he thought were worthy of visitation by the faithful. These are, the place where he was born, the place where he achieved enlightenment, the place where his first sermon as Buddha was preached, and the place where he died.
In contemporary terms, these places refer to Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Saranath and Kushi Nagar, which constitute today the four main sites of Buddhist pilgrimage. The latter part of the Sutta describes his funeral in some detail, and more importantly, also the places where remnants of his body or relics were taken and enshrined. This description with its mythological embellishments makes it very clear that the idea that the Buddha’s relics were considered worthy of veneration was widely accepted across the landscape marked by Buddhism’s reach. Historically, many narratives have persisted which have claimed the existence of the Buddha’s relics in numerous places in South Asia, some of which continue to be important pilgrim sites. In contemporary times, when a Sinhala Buddhist undertakes a pilgrimage to India and Nepal, their progression is at least in part mapped based on the trajectory these relics have taken and where they were believed to have been once enshrined. Sites associated with different aspects of the Buddha’s historical life and mythic encounters as well as latter-day Buddhist historical events and places of significance are also mapped into these pilgrim trails. Collectively, this information is a matter of cultural memory, located well within an active and popularly understood discourse on heritage.
Sinhala Pilgrim Travels
The sites most visited by Sinhalas in India are Bodh Gaya where the Buddha is believed to have achieved enlightenment, Saranath where he is believed to have preached for the first time as an enlightened person to a group of contemporary ascetics, and Kushi Nagar where he died, or attained parinirvana. The most visited sites in Nepal are Lumbini where the Buddha is believed to have been born and Kapilavastu, which is believed to be the kingdom where the Buddha’s father held sway. There are many other places associated with his life as well as latter-day events, which I will not focus on in this essay. Sri Lankan pilgrims have become familiar with the older place names used for these contemporary places as a matter of quotidian commonsense and religious training. So, Bodh Gaya becomes Buddha Gayawa and Kushi Nagar becomes Kusinara. Interestingly, Lumbini and Kapilvastu remain the same. Almost all place names used in the Sri Lankan pilgrim discourse are taken from Sinhala, which are linked to older Pali forms, and have very little to do with contemporary Indian or Nepali cartographic references.
In these pilgrimages, even though pilgrims self-consciously cross international borders and visit two independent countries physically, emotionally, they hardly cross any borders. That is, they remain within an extended emotional-religious landscape. Beyond the pre-existing cultural familiarity, culinary and ritual practices with which pilgrims travel, further entrench this. Sinhala pilgrims carry their own food and cook what is familiar to them almost throughout the entire 14-day trail. It is from this practice that I have drawn the title of this essay, ‘Home in My Luggage’. The rituals they undertake in these faraway places—from Lumbini to Bodh Gaya—and the incantations they invoke are the same they do in their home temples. It almost seems that a whole cultural repertoire closely linked to home travels with them, making home exist everywhere they visit.
Dynamics of Placemaking
The Buddhist sacred landscape would not have been understood as it is understood today, if the edifices that give this landscape its institutional and cartographic personality today had not been marked decisively by the ‘politics of humans’. Early marking was made possible due to Emperor Asoka’s efforts in formally identifying places important to Buddhists such as Bodh Gaya as well as Lumbini and Kapilavastu, and also by building several of the first temples incorporating some of these sacred places. Subsequent Buddhist kings, and political leaders of nation states in more recent times, have also contributed to this building spree effectively carving out on the ground what would ultimately become specific sites in the Buddhist sacred landscape.
This is not a simple matter of recovering heritage and history or merely an issue of faith. But it is also a matter of reorienting nation states towards the newer enterprises of international tourism and pilgrim travel that brings with them very specific economic and financial considerations as well as political and diplomatic dealings with neighbouring nation states. Further, place-making in this sense is motivated more by preoccupations of culture, ethnicity and national identity rather than merely by faith. Pilgrim sites, like any other place, are not simple fixed geographic locations marked on a map. The sense and meanings these places are associated with come from the people who live in these places as well as those who use these places for other reasons such as for trade, and people who visit them on a regular basis, such as pilgrims or those who have been expelled from these places in the process of their reinventing. As such, each of the pilgrim sites in the Buddhist trail has specific as well as generalized meanings. These inheritances are consistent across Buddhist polities when it comes to generalized meanings. When pilgrims visit these places today, this generalized sense of the historical and mythic past is one important source that aids in the process of meaning-making associated with each place.
Different places might have different representations for people. For instance, Sinhala Buddhists acknowledge—as do other Buddhists—that Lumbini is the place of the Buddha’s birth while Bodh Gaya is the place where the Buddha achieved his enlightenment. There is no contestation on this across the Buddhist world. But beyond this generalized sense, there are specifics that may not be equally important to all pilgrims. For instance, the Sinhalas also believe that a place not too far from the perceived site of the Buddha’s Enlightenment is where the Buddha received an offering of milk rice known in Sinhala as kiri pindu from a noble woman named Sujata, just before his process of meditation began that culminated in his Enlightenment. Very close to the Maha Bodhi Temple, the Sinhala Buddhist pilgrim trail has identified two places as the sites of Sujata’s palace and the place where she offered her alms to the Buddha, which many invariably visit along with the main Mahabodhi temple.
As a result of these beliefs, Sinhalas conduct an important ritual in this area that is essentially a simulation of the original mythological offering of alms by Sujata, by cooking an elaborate dish of milk rice and offering it to both monks and devotees. By doing so, the general area of Bodh Gaya creates an additional field of meaning, which constructs a different sensibility of this place in the minds of Sinhalas than it does for other Buddhists. Through their beliefs and what they do in each place, the Sinhala sense of place-making takes on a distinct Sinhala mythological colour and flavour that also makes these places culturally familiar comfort zones linked to what they have learned of the pilgrimage from formal and informal discourses they have been exposed to since childhood.
Place-making takes place in other distinctly different ways as well. For instance, many Buddhist countries and territories have their own formal centres in important Buddhist pilgrim sites linking some of these places more formally to notions of nationality, territoriality and the state. The best-known of such places is Bodh Gaya, which has a ‘national-cultural’ and socio-political presence for many countries or Buddhist locations, including Mongolia, Cambodia, Japan, Bhutan, Thailand, Bangladesh, Nepal, China and Sri Lanka besides the Tibetan and Sikkim Buddhist presence from within India itself. The same applies to Lumbini as well which has been made possible by the overall structure of the Lumbini Development Plan from the very beginning. This is why areas specifically earmarked close to the Maya Devi Temple now have temples from both Theravada and Mahayana countries varying from South Korea to Sri Lanka. All these centres, which have been established at different historical periods, point to the plurality of Buddhism in both cultural and political terms. These are also indicative of how different national-political sensibilities of Buddhism have been established on the ground in Bodh Gaya and Lumbini. Of course, this pattern is repeated in other sites too, but to different degrees.
The Mediation of the State in Pilgrimage
Let me conclude by briefly outlining the state’s mediation in pilgrim travel and what it means. It is obvious that the Sri Lankan, Indian and Nepali states are closely invested in facilitating pilgrim travel. This is not a simple matter of augmenting matters of faith. More importantly, it is a matter of engaging in regional politics, soft diplomacy, cultural politics, influence peddling across borders and generating commerce and income. Given the nature of nation states that have emerged since the 1940s in South Asia, international travel of this kind is not possible without the intervention and facilitation of the state. Such facilitation ranges from the issuing of thousands of visas by Nepali and Indian governments during the pilgrim cycle each year to Sri Lankan pilgrims and the Sri Lankan government’s close monitoring of its citizens traveling through these countries, facilitating affordable air travel via the national carrier and providing accommodation to some of the pilgrims in centres owned by the Sri Lankan government. I take these as taken-for-granted quotidian tasks of the state in the specific circumstances in this context.
What is more important however is, this facilitation pushes the usually omnipresent shadow of the state to the background, in the context of which the state willingly reinvents itself, and in this new space emerges a more layered, historically contingent and mythologically informed cartography of the Buddhist sacred landscape with hazy borders. At the same time however, a different sense of being Buddhist is simultaneously further entrenched based on multiple ethno-cultural identities of contemporary Buddhism(s). This is because pilgrims travel not merely as Buddhists, but as Buddhists with very specific cultural and ethno-political identities that have often pre-existed the emergence of the nation state.
In real terms, pilgrims hardly need to deal with the bureaucracies of these nation states in organizing their travel. This is because diplomatic and political decisions taken over a long period of time have allowed even something as crucial as issuing visas to be a routine matter in which pilgrims do not get involved. It is something that is exclusively done by tour operators as a matter of routine based on long-standing intergovernmental agreements. The only place pilgrims formally deal with the functionaries of nation states and the politics of nationhood is at immigration counters at airports or land borders. But what is obvious is, when it comes to these three countries, pilgrim travel is treated without any overt anxieties by officials, which means passing through immigration and borders generally become a non-event. Besides, given the relaxation of border controls when it comes to pilgrim travel, hundreds of kilos of cooked and uncooked food that Sri Lankan pilgrims carry with them in every pilgrim tour to expand their sense of home while on pilgrimage go routinely unchecked. This is obvious in all Indian airports from which pilgrims begin their travel. This would not have been possible under conditions of routine travel. Rather than an official position, what has happened is the emergence of an unofficial attitude that diminishes the overpowering presence of the state even though it is never absent.
Seen in this sense, pilgrimage brings together a number of interconnected interests, dynamics, services and politics that are both visible and not so visible, while all of them are collectively essential to ensure that pilgrimage can take place in the way they manifest at present.
