About this page
The map shows the Middle Country, the region of northern India and the Nepalese lowlands in which the Buddha lived and taught in the fifth century BCE, with the Himalaya to the north and Tibet beyond them. From west to east it spans some 1,200 kilometres, from Delhi to the mountains of Sikkim.
Each place carries its name as the Pāli texts give it. The modern name, and a note on the place, appear when the place is selected.
The Story button follows the Buddha’s life in thirty-two episodes, from his mother’s dream to the council held after his death. Each step opens the story, draws his route from the place of the episode before, and sets a round picture at the place where the texts set the episode. The routes are estimates. The texts name many of the towns he passed through and rarely the roads between them, and they do not record the order in which the episodes of his middle years took place; there the map follows the order the commentaries give.
The Discourses button counts the discourses of the Pāli Canon by the place where each was given. A discourse usually opens with the words “Thus have I heard. At one time the Blessed One was staying at …”, and names the town, often with the park or grove. The count covers the Long, Middle, Linked and Numbered Discourses, the Udāna, the Sutta Nipāta and the Itivuttaka: 1,496 of their 3,678 texts name a place. The height of a column is the number of discourses set there, and its colours divide them by collection. Where the texts name only a people, or a town of theirs whose site is unknown, the column stands at the people’s name; eight places known only by name are listed without a column.
The stories follow the Pāli Canon, the oldest complete collection of the Buddha’s teachings, wherever it tells them. Much of the life story now familiar was added by the commentaries, written down in Sri Lanka many centuries later: the four sights, the night ride out of the palace, the name of the woman who brought the meal before the awakening. Each story says which it follows.
The round pictures on the map follow the earliest Buddhist art, the carved railings and gateways of Bharhut and Sanchi from the second and first centuries BCE. In that art the Buddha is not shown in human form. His presence is marked by a tree, an empty seat, a wheel, a pair of footprints or a parasol, and the scenes are set in round medallions. The towns are drawn in the same manner, as ramparts, gates and halls with vaulted roofs, and show no particular town. The landscape is painted in the manner of Tibetan painting, with blue and green mountains, ochre foothills and rivers set with waves.
Each story opens with a detail of a painting from one of the later traditions of Buddhist art, Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai and Burmese, which show the Buddha in human form.
The mountains, rivers and lakes are those of modern maps, and many of the rivers have moved since the Buddha’s time. The forests are imagined: the texts speak of great forests between the towns, and nobody knows how far they reached. The towns stand at the sites archaeologists have identified with them; where the identification is disputed, the town’s mark is dashed and its note gives the alternatives.
Elevation from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, via AWS Terrain Tiles. Rivers and lakes © OpenStreetMap contributors. The settings of the discourses were read from the Pāli texts of the Mahāsaṅgīti edition as published by SuttaCentral, counting the texts as SuttaCentral presents them, so that a text standing for a series of abbreviated discourses counts once. The English titles are those of Bhikkhu Sujato’s translations, released into the public domain.