Day 37 (4th March) Varanasi

Today was Holi Day, sometimes called Colours Day when people buy red, orange or blue paint powder from shops and throw it over each other. Others put masks or wigs on. The purpose of the festival is to applaud the triumph of good over evil and also to mark the end of winter and the beginning of summer. It is a joyous occasion and people were shouting “Happy Holi” at us from all directions.

We had arranged for the bicycle rickshaw man we met yesterday to take us to Sarnath, 15 kms north of Varanasi. It is a major pilgrimage site for Buddhists because the Sarnath Deer Park is where the Buddha preached his first sermon to his 5 disciples after he attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in 528 BC. The Indians claim that the Buddha was born in Sarnath while the Nepalese reckon he was born in Lumbini, Nepal. We stopped first at the Tibetan Temple, which was less than interesting, and then walked to the complex of buildings surrounding the bamyan tree under which the Buddha preached. The first building was the Mulagandha Kuty Vihara temple, built in 1904 by a Sri Lankan with money donated by Mrs Mary Foster of Honolulu. There were Buddhists chanting mantras in from of a large image of the Buddha. We then went to see the famous tree but it was partially hidden by a naff model depiction of the Buddha and his five disciples, and there is a board which gives his sermon translated into English. We walked down to see the massive Damekh stupa but it was fenced off and we couldn’t get near it. Built during the Gupta Empire in the 4th-5th centuries it is allegedly one of the 8 stupas holding the ashes of the Buddha. We decided not to visit the museum because it was getting late; that’s a shame because it contains the three-lions head of the Ashoka Pillar, carved in 250 BC. Then we went back to the hotel. The commercialism of Sarnath made it somewhat disappointing.