Kapilavastu

Buddhist tradition places the household of Siddhartha Gautama at Kapilavastu, the principal town of the Shakya people, a small republic on the edge of the Kosala kingdom. The accounts describe a father determined that his son should rule rather than renounce, and a childhood arranged so that nothing distressing would be seen: three palaces for the seasons, and the roads cleared before any outing.

The four sights are the story of that arrangement failing. On successive journeys out of the city the young man sees an old man, a sick man, a corpse being carried to burning, and finally a wandering ascetic with a calm face, and learns from his charioteer that the first three come to everybody. The great departure follows, at twenty nine, leaving a wife and a newborn son.

The town returns to the narrative years later, when the Buddha visits it as a teacher. The texts record a difficult reunion: a father who wants his son to behave like a prince and finds him begging in the streets of his own city, and a series of ordinations from within the family, including his half brother Nanda, his son Rahula, and cousins who become the closest and, in one case, the most hostile of his followers. It is also where his foster mother asked three times for women to be admitted to the order, and was refused, before the request was granted on conditions. The commentaries add that the Shakyas were destroyed by a neighbouring king within the Buddha's own lifetime.

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.