Two Sites, One Name, and a Relic Casket

Where Kapilavastu actually stood has been argued for more than a century, and the argument runs across an international border. Tilaurakot in Nepal is a fortified town of the right period with gates, streets and a moat, and its distances from Lumbini match the itineraries left by Chinese pilgrims who visited in the fifth and seventh centuries. Piprahwa, a few kilometres away in India, has a large brick stupa and a monastic complex, and produced sealings naming the Kapilavastu monastic community.

Piprahwa also produced one of the most important finds in Buddhist archaeology. In 1898 a landowner excavating the stupa on his estate reached a stone coffer containing urns, one of them inscribed in early Brahmi with words generally read as a dedication of the relics of the Buddha, of the Shakyas. If the reading and the date hold, it is a fifth or fourth century BCE reference to the division of the Buddha's remains described in the texts. Further excavation in the 1970s found an earlier chamber beneath.

Neither identification is settled, and national feeling on both sides has not helped. The atlas records the two candidates and the state of the evidence rather than choosing. What is not in dispute is the wider landscape: Lumbini nearby, where excavation beneath the Ashokan pillar has traced shrine structures back to the sixth century BCE, and the pillars Ashoka set up in this region when he made his own pilgrimage to the places of the Buddha's life.