Mulagandha Kuti Vihar

A short walk east of the Dhamek Stupa, in the deer-park quiet of Sarnath where the Buddha is believed to have preached his first sermon, the Mulagandha Kuti Vihar rises in warm ochre stone like a modern echo of an ancient shrine.

• Consecrated in November 1931, it is the crowning achievement of Anagarika Dharmapala, the Sri Lankan monk-reformer who founded the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891 to revive Buddhism at its Indian birthplaces.
• Named after the original 'Perfumed Chamber' — the Buddha's rainy-season dwelling whose ruins still lie in the neighbouring archaeological park — the temple was never intended as a museum piece.
• It is a living vihara: monks in ochre robes tend the sanctum, oil lamps flicker before a gilded Buddha seated in the first-sermon gesture, and every evening a resonant, unhurried chanting of Pali suttas fills the hall as visitors sit cross-legged on the cool floor.
• Step inside and the walls tell the whole life of the Buddha.
• Between 1932 and 1936 the celebrated Japanese muralist Kosetsu Nosu — sent on commission and supported by admirers in Japan — covered the interior in luminous frescoes that carry the story from the dream of Queen Maya and the birth at Lumbini, through the great renunciation and enlightenment, to the first sermon at Sarnath and the passing at Kushinagar.
• The style fuses Japanese line-work with Ajanta-inspired Indian sensibility, and the paintings remain among the finest twentieth-century Buddhist murals in India.
• In the entrance foyer hangs a large bronze bell gifted by devotees from Japan, its deep toll marking prayer times, while the altar enshrines sacred relics associated with the Buddha, recovered from ancient sites such as Taxila and Nagarjunakonda and displayed to the public only on the full-moon days of Buddha Purnima and Kartika Purnima.
• Outside, in a small walled courtyard, stands the temple's most tender treasure: a Bodhi tree grown from a sapling of the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka — itself descended from the very tree at Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha attained enlightenment — planted here in 1931.
• Pilgrims from across the Buddhist world circle it clockwise, tie prayer threads, and sit in its shade.
• Golden statues gifted by different nations ring the compound, giving the grounds a gentle, international calm quite distinct from the crowded ghats of Varanasi city, eleven kilometres to the south-west.
• For vegetarian travellers, Sarnath is one of the most reassuring places to eat in all of India.
• As a Buddhist pilgrimage centre it is overwhelmingly satvik and pure-vegetarian, and the little lanes around the vihara are lined with simple pure-veg thali houses, garden cafés and tea stalls where onion-and-garlic-free meals, paneer curries, hot kachori-sabzi and masala chai are the everyday norm.
• You will find no meat, fish or alcohol in the temple precinct, and most eateries nearby are entirely vegetarian by custom — carry a little cash, eat a leisurely thali after the morning walk, and you will never have to ask twice whether a dish is veg.