Nipponzan Myohoji Japanese Buddhist Temple, Worli

A few minutes from the traffic of Worli Naka, set back behind a modest gate, the Nipponzan Myohoji temple is one of the quietest addresses in central Mumbai.

• This is a working Japanese Buddhist monastery of the Nichiren tradition, and it looks the part: a white-walled prayer hall with carved stone pillars, painted panels of scenes from the Buddha's life, a large marble Buddha and the big wooden drums used for chanting, set in a small green compound where birdsong is louder than anything else.
• Thousands of commuters pass within a hundred metres of it every day without ever noticing it is there.
• The monastery's story runs straight through modern Indian history.
• It belongs to the Nipponzan Myohoji order founded in Japan by the monk Nichidatsu Fujii, who travelled to India in 1931 with the intention of returning the Buddha's teaching to the land of its birth.
• Fujii met Mahatma Gandhi during the 1930s, and the order's distinctive practice — beating a hand drum while chanting the Lotus Sutra invocation Na-Mu-Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge-Kyo — was taken into Gandhi's ashram prayers, which is why the sound is oddly familiar to Indian ears.
• The Worli prayer hall is generally dated to 1956, the year India marked two and a half millennia since the Buddha's parinirvana.
• The same order is known worldwide for the Peace Pagodas it later built across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
• Visiting is simple, free and refreshingly unmanaged.
• Leave your shoes at the step, sit quietly on the matting at the back, and you can stay through a chanting session without understanding a word of it; the drum keeps a steady pulse that makes the city outside recede.
• Monks and caretakers are used to curious visitors and will usually explain the altar, the calligraphy and the drum if you ask politely.
• Dress modestly, silence your phone, ask before photographing people or the shrine, and allow twenty to thirty unhurried minutes.
• Morning and early-evening prayer times are the reason to come; a midday visit is peaceful but often silent.
• Worli, Prabhadevi and Dadar between them hold some of Mumbai's finest pure-vegetarian eating, but this is also a city with a deep seafood culture, so read the signboard before you sit down — a genuinely pure-veg kitchen almost always says so at the door, and it is worth confirming at the counter.
• Within a short ride you will find Udupi-style lunch homes doing idli, medu vada and rice plates, Gujarati and Rajasthani thali houses around Prabhadevi and Dadar West (many willing to prepare Jain food on request), and Maharashtrian snack counters near Dadar serving misal, poha and sabudana vada.
• Sweet and farsan shops in the Prabhadevi lanes are dependable for pedha, barfi and chivda; if you are buying bakery items, ask whether they contain egg.