The old Bengali pilgrim road still runs through it, though now it is paved with the bare footsteps of half a million annual visitors. Beneath the sprawling branches of a sacred Bodhi tree, a Burmese monk in saffron sits in deep meditation beside a Tibetan lama chanting in burgundy, while somewhere in the shadows, a Sri Lankan dancer adjusts her costume for a procession. This is Bodh Gaya in the 21st century: a living museum of Buddhist diversity, a crossroads where all the rivers of the Dharma converge.

But look closer, and you will see something stranger still. Here, in the very soil where the Buddha touched the earth and called it to witness his enlightenment, Indians are beginning to remember something they had long forgotten. They are beginning to remember that they were once Buddhists.

Standing beside the Mahabodhi Temple as dawn breaks over the Niranjana River, Dr. Richard Dixey gestures toward the ancient spire. “This is where the Buddha was made,” he says quietly. The way he words it catches me off guard. But then he explains: before that night beneath the Bodhi tree, Siddhartha Gautama was merely a prince who had abandoned his palace for a spiritual quest. Afterward, he arose as the Tathagata—the one who has come and gone beyond all maps of identity and direction. The transformation happened here, on this exact spot, and it changed everything. For over a thousand years, Buddhism radiated outward from this small patch of Indian earth, carrying its profound understanding of suffering and its cessation to every corner of Asia. And then, by the 14th century, it had all but vanished from the land of its birth.

I am walking with a man who embodies the revival he describes. Dr. Richard Dixey moves through the temple grounds with the patient deliberation of someone who has trodden this path for decades. He is academic, yet far from detached.

History, like the Niranjana River, has a way of shifting course and revealing what was buried. Today, as India hurtles toward becoming the world’s third-largest economy, something unexpected is stirring in its spiritual soil. The nation that gave the world the zero, that mastered mathematics and medicine long before Europe, is rediscovering its Buddhist heritage.

As Dean of Dharma College in Berkeley, California, Dr. Dixey finds himself at the center of this reawakening.  It is not a coincidence that he married Wangmo Dixey, the eldest daughter of Tarthang Rinpoche, a lineage holder in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. This family has been sponsoring prayer ceremonies that now draw over twenty thousand monks, distributing millions of Buddhist texts, and quietly working to restore the three great traditions of Indian Buddhism to their native ground. This work of revival is not just a revival; it is a family’s offering.

What he is witnessing, he believes, is the slow emergence of a Buddhist superpower at the very moment when the world most needs what the Dharma has to offer.

Gaya: the great forgetting

To understand what is happening in Bodh Gaya today, Dixey explains, you must first understand what happened here across the millennia. The story begins, of course, with the Buddha himself—born just north of the present Indian border in the foothills of Nepal around 563 BCE, conducting his spiritual quest across the Ganges plain, and finally sitting down beneath a Bodhi tree with a vow that would echo through history: he would not rise until he had broken through to enlightenment.  In another words, if he did not get enlightened, he was prepared to die here. Which, of course, never happened.

For 45 years after that night, the Buddha walked the roads of northern India, teaching all who would listen. And for a thousand years after his passing, Buddhism flourished as the dominant spiritual force of the subcontinent. Ashoka the Great, so horrified by the bloodshed of his conquest of Kalinga around 261 BCE that he laid down his arms forever, marked this sacred site with edicts and built an enclosure around the original bodhi tree. Subsequent centuries saw the temple grow and expand—the present Maha Bodhi Temple, in its essential form, dates to the fifth and sixth centuries CE during the Gupta dynasty, though it has been renovated many times since. Chinese pilgrims recorded that by the seventh century, perhaps 50,000 people lived and studied in the monastic city that surrounded it.

Then came the forgetting. 

“Buddhism gradually died out in India,” Dixey says, “but remained completely vibrant in every country to the east.” The reasons are complex—waves of invasion, the rise of new religious forms, the gradual absorption of Buddhist ideas into the broader culture. By the fourteenth century, the great temple at Bodh Gaya had been abandoned to the annual floods of the Niranjana River. Silt buried the ground floor, along with hundreds of Buddhist statues and friezes that would remain hidden for five centuries. The spire alone protruded from the mud, and when iconoclastic raiders passed through, they saw only a half-buried mound and left it untouched.

In the 17th century, a Shaivite sect began using the exposed upper shrine, unaware of what lay beneath their feet. It was only when British authorities decided to renovate the structure in the 1880s that the buried treasures emerged—40 intact Buddhist statues, frozen in the mud, waiting 500 years to be seen again.

The slow unearthing of Buddhism

Dixey first came to Bodh Gaya in 1971. “Village boys were still playing cricket using stupas as stumps,” he remembers with a smile. “It was very low-key.” The great revival had not yet begun. But over the following decades, something shifted. Southeast Asian nations constructed temples around the main complex. Himalayan Buddhists established monasteries. Tarthang Rinpoche, himself a refugee who had fled Tibet in 1958, began a prayer ceremony that would continue for 37 years and counting.

When Dixey married into Rinpoche’s family, he found himself drawn into a larger vision. “He said to us in 2006, why don’t you start working with the Theravada schools to revive the Buddhist culture of India itself?” he recalls. The logic was simple but profound. While Tibetan Buddhism represents a Himalayan adaptation of the Dharma, most Indians, if they recognize a Buddhist, recognize the shaven-headed figure with a begging bowl: the classic image of the southern Theravada tradition. If Buddhism was to return to India, it would need to speak in a voice Indians could recognize.

The family began sponsoring the International Tripitaka Chanting Ceremony, now in its 21st year bringing together monks from a dozen countries. They distributed books to restock Tibetan monastic libraries destroyed over decades of upheaval. They improved amenities at pilgrimage sites scattered across the subcontinent. And slowly, something unexpected happened: “Small Buddhist communities that existed in India began coming together to support this. Indian politicians and cultural figures started promoting its Buddhist roots. That was absolutely not the case in 2006.”

The country, it seemed, was awakening to its past.

Awakening a superpower’s soul

But one tradition remained largely unrecovered. Buddhism, Dixey explains, comes in three flavors: Theravada, the southern school of the begging bowl; Mahayana, the northern school of the bodhisattva ideal; and Vajrayana, the tantric tradition associated with Tibet. Yet Tibetan Vajrayana is entirely based on Indian tantric teachings, and those teachings had not seen a significant revival in their homeland.

Enter Odisha.

Two years ago, his foundation, Light of Buddhadharma Foundation International (LBDFI) began working in this neighboring state, once part of the same administrative region as Bihar. Odisha, it turns out, holds substantial tantric remains. This includes the largest monastic site in India, only partially excavated. At Udayagiri, a site dating from 7th–10th centuries, they found a horseshoe-shaped chaitya hall for public worship alongside a private section containing the earliest tantric-style stupas in India. And next to one of them stands a statue with a Sanskrit inscription dedicates to Padmasambhava. The inscription dates from the reign of a king who ruled between 805 and 820.

“The Tibetans sometimes call Padmasambhava the Second Buddha,” Dixey notes. A prince who trained as a monk, abandoned his vows, married a princess, and developed tremendous tantric power, he was exactly what eighth-century Tibet needed: a dynamic miracle worker who could show that Buddhism was real in a shamanistic culture accustomed to dealing with spirits and mountain gods. The Tibetans invited him, and he went. But the inscription at Udayagiri suggests he returned.

Yet Padmasambhava’s connection to Bodh Gaya itself runs even deeper. According to Tibetan sources, one of his eight manifestations—Senge Dradok, the Lion’s Roar—appeared atop the very spire of the Maha Bodhi Temple where we now stand. From this vantage point, he is said to have defeated heretics with an overwhelming display of magical power, establishing the supremacy of the Dharma through means that transcended mere debate. And in the Cool Grove Charnel Ground, a site just outside modern Bodh Gaya where corpses were once brought for disposal, Padmasambhava received the eight sections of Mahayoga teachings from the dakinis: transmissions that would form the core of tantric practice in Tibet.

The charnel ground still exists, its atmosphere heavy with the power of transformation, a place where the boundaries between life and death, pure and impure, dissolve in the fire of tantric realization.

Today, LBDFI sponsors an annual ceremony in Padmasambhava’s honor at Udayagiri. Last December, for the first time, Theravada monks and Tibetan lamas sat together to meditate. “It was quite something to see,” he says quietly. And already, Indian families are coming forward with texts and dances and ceremonies in honor of Padmasambhava that they have preserved for generations—traditions no one was interested in until now really.

This matters, Dixey believes, as India is poised to become the world’s third-largest economy. The thought that that a Buddhist superpower could emerge in the 21st century carries profound implications.

And so the monks meditate beneath the Bodhi tree—Vietnamese nuns in grey, Chinese pilgrims in lay clothes, Sri Lankan dancers in elaborate costumes, Tibetan lamas with their hats and trumpets, and so on. Twenty or thirty countries, all doing different things, all preserving a core that remains the same. Above them, the great tree spreads its branches, the same species that sheltered the Buddha’s enlightenment. And in the soil beneath their feet, the memory of a Buddhist India stirs, slowly waking from its long forgetting.

The temple they rebuilt in 1880, then renovated again in 2002, stands in the exact style of the fifth century. The Bodhi tree is a descendant of the original. And the vow that can only be made here—the diamond vow to break through or die trying—is still available to anyone who comes seeking transformation.

India forgot its Buddhist soul for 500 years. But the soul, it seems, has a way of remembering itself. And as the 21st century unfolds its strange and unprecedented possibilities, the place where the Buddha was made may yet help make something new of us all.

One question remains in my mind. If India could forget its Buddhist soul for five centuries and then remember—the statues emerging from the mud, as intact as the day they were hidden—then what might you uncover if you simply dared to touch the ground beneath your feet? The Bodhi tree still casts its shade. The diamond vow still waits to be made. The question that haunts this sacred place is no longer whether India will reclaim what was lost.

The question has followed me home: will I, will you?

Related news reports from BDG

UNESCO Adds Odisha’s “Diamond Triangle” of Buddhist Sites to India’s Tentative World Heritage List
1,200 Buddhist Monks Attend Guru Padmasambhava Chanting Program in Odisha, India
White House Hosts Buddhist Representatives for Fourth Annual Vesak Observance
Light Up Peace: Vesak Day Celebration at Washington DC

Related features from BDG

Buddhistdoor View: Buddhist Diplomacy in an Era of Rupture
The Journey of Buddhism from Ancient to Modern India: Forces Shaping the Spread of the Dharm

Related blog posts from Tea House

2nd Global Buddhist Summit: Monastics to Join Republic Day Parade in New Delhi

More from Mandala Butterfly by Rebecca Wong