Dharmapala's Lawsuit for the Mahabodhi Temple

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Maha Bodhi Society was founded in 1891 by the Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala, with its first office at Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha's own awakening. Its founding aim was the restoration of the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya to Buddhist control after centuries under non-Buddhist management, a goal Dharmapala pursued in part through a lawsuit he initiated against the site's Brahmin custodians, a legal campaign that made the temple's control a matter of formal dispute rather than an informal grievance left unpressed.

Alongside the temple campaign, Dharmapala set the Society a wider mission: reviving Buddhist practice and pilgrimage in India, the religion's own land of origin, where organized Buddhist institutions had largely disappeared centuries earlier, and spreading the dharma internationally through the Society's own journal, The Maha Bodhi, a publication that carried Dharmapala's revivalist project to readers well beyond South Asia from the Society's earliest years and remains part of its work today. The choice of Bodh Gaya itself as the Society's first office was deliberate rather than incidental: Dharmapala placed his new organization at the exact site of the Buddha's awakening, making the temple dispute and the Society's founding location one and the same campaign from the very beginning.