Last shot from Kathmandu

After Lumbini, I went back to Kathmandu, just to get my indian visa before crossing back the border. I was happy to go back to India and felt slightly sad about the ambiance between tourists and locals in Kathmandu, and generally in Nepal. Tourists have a very selfish behavior and look down on local people, implicitly considering them as inferiors. Thus local people feed anger towards them and the relations are very bad, even though the average tourists don't care about that and therefore don't really feel it.

Tilaurakot

Archaeologists are pretty sure that this was the place were the buddha's family used to live and where is spent his youth.


There is nothing more than some ruins an local Nepalese boys :)






This is the ruins of the very door by which Gotama left his city and his worldly life

Lumbini - other places

Most temples are still under construction. There were lots of problems in the area, during the civil war, and even recently there were some maoists attacks. They even killed some monks. I guess that's why the development has been so slow here.



This is what I found in the monastery of Sri Lanka. Strange...



Government of Myanmar's pagoda



There is also a Goenka vipassana center



Huge Korean temple, under construction



Korean monastery



Tibetan stupa under construction



Chinese monastery from the Korean temple



Dusk from the Korean temple

Lumbini - World peace Pagoda

Local people call it 'sahnti stupa'. The builders are the same than the one in Pokhara. They were Japanese people horrified by the holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They wanted to spread the message of peace and built a bunch of stupas a little everywhere.



This symbolizes the buddha just after is birth in Lumbini



This one symbolizes his enlightenment in Bodhgaya



This is his first discourse to his five companions in the Deer park of Sarnath, near Varanasi



This is buddha's death in Kushinagar. These are the four important moments of his life.

Lumbini - Thai monastery

Lumbini - German temple

There is no German buddhism. It is actually a Tibetan temple. The only thing coming from Germany is money.



It is said that for a given being, the chances to get a human life are the same than the ones a turtle entering in the water in Tokyo would have, by heading once to the surface of the ocean, to emerge inside a tyre left previously in the bay of Los Angeles.












There are very beautiful paintings on the outer walls of the temple















This is a representation of Swayambhunath, Kathmandu's monkey temple



It is said that in one of his previous human lives, the who would become the buddha, out of compassion, cut some pieces of his own flesh to feed young tigers.



Mandala on the ceiling

Lumbini - Vietnamese monastery

Lumbini - the village

Lumbini is perhaps among the tiniest villages in Nepal. There is only one street...

Lumbini - Chinese monastery

Entrance






The temple



Guardian









Chinese fat buddha

Lumbini - Maya Devi temple

While waiting for the Indian embassies to compute the data about my visa, I went to Lumbini, which is the birth place of the Buddha. There is a huge park surrounding the place, and a lot of monasteries are under construction there. A few of them are finished already.


So this is the place, at the heart of Maya Devi temple



The 'exact place'



Just above the 'exact place'



These are ruins of very old stupas (3rd century BC) surrounding the 'place'



There is also a 'sacred pond' and a beautiful tree



This pillar has been first raised by the great Indian buddhist emperor Ashoka during the 3rd century BC. Ashoka had also built the stupa I visited in Sanchi near Bhopal, and did so in Bodhgaya, as in many sites all over India.