The power of making offerings

Even just making one sound, or a cymbal offering
Even just offering one single flower
To the form of one who has gone to bliss (buddha) on a stone wall,
Even if they make the offering with an angry attitude
Those living beings will gradually see ten million buddhas.
White Lotus Sutra
 

Bodhgaya's significance and the Mahabodhi Stupa

It is said that the merit created from any virtuous activity in Bodhgaya is multiplied eight times due to the blessings that have arisen from all the holy activities accomplished here by numerous holy beings. To fully explain this, we have a page on why Bodhgaya is so significant.
On this basis, Root Institute supports students, centres and projects who wish to sponsor specific activities or offerings throughout the year. This includes pujas, prayers, sutra recitations and material offerings such as water, flowers, fruit, lights, robes to the statue of Lord Buddha, and so forth.
 

Festival of Light and Merit

Festival of Light and Merit (FLAM) offerings
Our Festival of Lights and Merit is held four times a year according to the Tibetan calendar and provides an opportunity to purify obstacles and accumulate great merit during a time when every action is multiplied a further 100,000 times.
Offerings of thousands of lights are made during these four celebrations at the Mahabodhi Stupa, along with offering prayer flags and special pujas at Root Institute.
 

Sponsoring pujas

We also perform the following pujas according to the Tibetan Calendar, as drop-in sessions which anyone can attend:
  • Tara puja
  • Medicine Buddha puja
  • Guru puja with tsog
  • Protector puja
You are welcome to sponsor and provide your dedications through the Root Institute donation form on the FPMT website. Once you have made a donation, please contact us to confirm the details. Your dedications will be made with sincere effort.

Bodhgaya's significance and the Mahabodhi Stupa

Why Bodhgaya is so significant

Root Institute is appreciated as a tranquil, quiet place, an ideal setting for a restful stay. Yet our location offers so much more. For Buddhists, Bodhgaya is the very centre of the world.
The following was dictated by our Spiritural Director, Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche, to Venerable Sarah Thresher at Root Institute, February 4, 2014:
Bodhgaya is not only the place where the Buddha showed the holy deed of achieving enlightenment under the bodhi tree but also where all the great pandits such as Nagarjuna and Asanga practised and made so many prayers. Also, many great enlightened beings and yogis from Tibet, China, Nepal and other countries came here and made so many prayers to benefit us sentient beings so there would be unbelievable, unbelievable opportunity for us to purify negative karma and accumulate merit as quickly as possible.
That is why it is so important to come to Bodhgaya to practice; to circumambulate and make prayers under the tree. Even if you don’t know much Dharma, try to circumambulate as much as possible. It makes your life so special; there is unbelievable purification and it collects so much merit to quickly be free from the oceans of samsaric suffering and achieve enlightenment.
[The Mahabodhi Stupa] is so precious that if you don’t get to circumambulate it for even one day, it’s worse than losing skies filled with wish-granting jewels or billions of dollars.

Rinpoche's advice for those on pilgrimage

Lama Zopa Rinpoche's recommendations are collected in these two texts:
May all beings benefit!

Bodhgaya's significance in the life of Lord Buddha

Bodhgaya is home to many holy sites where Shakyamuni Buddha spent time practising, teaching and meditating. The most famous and most blessed site is that of the Mahabodhi Stupa, the place where Prince Siddhartha (as he was known prior to Enlightenment) gained enlightenment some 2,600 years ago. This was where Buddhism began.
Prince Siddhartha had been practising austerities for six years in an area close to the Niranjana River. Realising that this harsh, ascetic way of life could not lead to nirvana, he abandoned his practices and went to bathe in the Niranjana. The physical hardships had taken their toll on the prince's body. Weakened by lack of food and drink, he collapsed on the riverbank, unable to move.
At the same time a young girl named Sujata was passing nearby with an offering of kir, milk-rice, for the local spirits. She felt great compassion for the weary holy man and offered him the kir instead. Strengthened by this, the prince bore himself up and continued on his way. Finding what looked to be a most suitable place, he took some kusha grass for a mat and sat under a pipal tree facing east. He resolved not to rise until he attained enlightenment.
Throughout the night, Mara, Lord of Illusion (symbolising the delusions of one's own mind) tried tirelessly to break the prince's deep meditation. Desire, jealousy, pride and many other powerful afflictions arose to serve as distraction but the prince did not flinch. It was by morning that he had overcome his innate suffering and achieved ultimate nirvana. The prince was no longer, the Buddha was revealed in his stead.
For seven days after the attainment of enlightenment, Buddha continued to meditate under the tree without moving from his seat. Another week passed in walking meditation, and for a third the Buddha contemplated under the bodhi tree.
From here the Buddha strode out into the world and, upon the request of the Naga King, spread the Dharma. These teachings, or sutras, became the foundation for the many different Buddhist traditions we know in the world today.

History of the Mahabodhi Stupa

Bodhi tree
The magnificent bodhi tree
The Mahabodhi Stupa was built on the original site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, with the bodhi tree continuing to grow alongside it. Its origins are lost in time, but it is known that Emperor Ashoka erected a shrine to the Buddha here in the third century B.C.
The modern temple is a fifty-metre-tall pyramidal tower, crowned with a bell-like stupa. The base is a fifteen-metre-square twosome structure supporting four smaller towers shaped like their central counterpart. Inside the temple sits a large gilded statue of Shakyamuni Buddha in earth-touching mudra. This image is said to be 1,700 years old and is facing east exactly at the place where the Buddha, sitting in meditation with his back to the bodhi tree, was enlightened.
The earliest records of the bodhi tree are in the Kalingabodhi Jataka, which gives a vivid description of the tree and the surrounding area prior to the enlightenment, and the Asokavadana, which relates the story of Emperor Asoka's conversion to Buddhism in the third century. His subsequent worship under the sacred tree apparently angered his queen to the point where she ordered the tree to be felled. Ashoka then piled up earth around the stump and poured milk on its roots. The tree miraculously revived and grew to a height of 37 metres.
Xuanzang
Xuanzang, Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled to India in 6th–7th century
In 600 A.D., King Sesanka, a zealous Shivaite, again destroyed the tree. The event was recorded by Xuanzang, along with the planting of a new bodhi tree sapling by King Purnavarma in 620 A.D.
Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveller, and translator, who extensively chronicled his travels to India, wrote:
The tree stands inside a fort-like structure surrounded on the south, west and north by a brick wall. It has pointed leaves of a bright green colour. Having opened a door, one could see a large trench in the shape of a basin. Devotees worship with curd, milk and perfumes such as sandalwood, camphor and so on.
The present bodhi tree is most likely the fourth descendant of that original tree to be planted at this site. It still performs a very important role to Buddhists of all traditions, being a reminder and an inspiration, a symbol of peace, of Buddha's enlightenment, and of the ultimate potential that lies within us all.
On 27th June, 2002, the Mahabodhi Temple was declared a UNESCO protected World Heritage Site.
To learn about other holy sites around the stupa grounds, you may like to visit Bodhgaya Mahabodhi Temple – Important Places. 

Festival of Lights & Merit

Those who offer one thousand lights will be reborn when Maitreya Buddha shows the deed of gaining Enlightenment and receive his first Dharma teaching.
Arya Maitreya Sutra

Four auspicious events celebrated each year

The four most important events of Shakyamuni Buddha's life according to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition are honoured every year on dates in the Tibetan calendar:
Check below for our next festival dates according to the Western calendar.

Every festival:

  • is held principally at the Mahabodhi Stupa, though extensive light offerings are also made at Root Institute
  • allows people from around the world to sponsor lights, pujas and prayer flags, and
  • includes reading out all the names of sponsors and their prayers of dedication.

Each Festival of Light & Merit includes

New! Offerings of support to the Maitreya Universal Education School

Students with His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Students with His Holiness the Dalai Lama after reciting the Heart Sutra in Bodhgaya, December 2018
Maitreya School is a social programme of Root Institute and offers free, high quality education and life skills to local children from impoverished and marginalised families in Bodhgaya. The school opened in 2012 serving 62 students and in 2019 we have grown to a record number 306. Classes range from Lower Kindergarten to Class 8 and our academic standards are certified through the Indian Central Board of Secondary Education.
More importantly, Maitreya School offers life-skills training such as honesty, compassion, kindness and loyalty – presented through the Mahayana Buddhist vehicle and the "16 Guidelines" which is a programme that provides a simple and flexible framework for developing empathy, compassion and resilience in daily life and is based on "Universal Principles". Rinpoche hopes our school will become a model for other schools throughout India. Our fundamental vision is to give our students a strong foundation to make their lives deeply meaningful.

New! Flower offerings

Flower mandalaHanging prayer flagsAt the Mahabodhi Stupa a spectacular mandala will be created using petals and whole flowers from thousands of beautiful floral offerings. As we make these offerings, we are reminded of the ten benefits of offering flowers as written in the sutra Distinguishing the Aspects of Karma.
  1. We become like a flower in the world, very beautiful. Others will be attracted to us; we will be remembered and have many friends.
  2. Our sense of smell will never degenerate even when ill and into old age.
  3. We will never have bad body odor.
  4. A smell of scented nectar will come from our body.
  5. Others will be able to smell our high ethics and morality and it will spread in all directions and corners.
  6. We will be a leader of the world, of people or of holy beings.
  7. We will achieve beautiful attractive things.
  8. We will have great wealth.
  9. We will be reborn in a higher rebirth.
  10. We will quickly achieve enlightenment, the great liberation.

Extensive light offerings

Tens of thousands of electrical light offerings create the illusion of a starry sky surrounding the stupa itself, a beautiful and inspiring sight. Together with the thousands of electrical lights at Root institute, these lights are offered and dedicated each evening by Root Institute on behalf of sponsors.

Three special pujas

Three specific pujas are specially arranged:
  • Tara Puja
  • Protector Puja
  • Guru Puja with Tsog
with monks from the Bodhgaya branch of Namgyal Monastery.

Hanging of blessed prayer flags

Traditional Tibetan prayer flags are blessed, raised beside the Mahabodhi Stupa and dedicated on behalf of sponsors. The blessings of which are spread across the stupa grounds and inner Bodhgaya city.

Dedications

In addition, all the offerings are dedicated to:

  • the long lives of our holy gurus
  • the preservation and spread of the pure Dharma
  • the temporal and ultimate happiness of the sponsors and their loved ones
  • the quick enlightenment of all sentient beings
  • peace and harmony around the world and
  • the removal of all obstacles and the quick success of FPMT projects.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche has advised Root Institute that each single recitation of the actual light offering prayer is equivalent to the number of lights offered. Therefore, on one night during the 15 Days of Miracles, if 100,000 lights are offered by 10 students, according to Rinpoche’s advice, one million lights would be offered on that night alone!

Sponsorship of FLAM also helps the Root Institute family

Retreat – at Stupa Garden of Compassion

A serene space for individual or group retreats

Our Stupa Garden of Compassion is a beautiful place ten minutes walk from Root Institute, and a ten minute rickshaw ride from the Mahabodhi Stupa.
It features a magnificent, 24-foot high Kadampa Stupa consecrated by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, towering above a shrine room suitable for up to 12 retreatants, surrounded by eight smaller stupas.
Nearby is a new accommodation building which makes this an excellent location for individual and group retreats. From the veranda the Mahabodhi Stupa can be seen, making it an auspicious place to do prostrations, yoga and other practices.

Features of the place

  • Seven rooms, of which five have private bathrooms
  • All rooms have a view of the Kadampa Stupa and, in the distance, the holy Mahabodhi Stupa of Bodhgaya
  • Kitchen and amenities to suit group retreats
  • An organic vegetable and rose garden
  • Some of our liberated animals reside on the grounds.

Retreat support

  • Retreatants may borrow our meditation cushions, water bowls, incense burners, and other retreat supplies
  • For those in strict retreat, regular tsog purchases can be arranged and delivered
  • For those who require it, fire pujas can be requested and led by monks from Namgyal monastery.

Individual retreats can still be done at Root Institute itself

Root Institute also has an area within our compound which is still available for individual retreats.
Our onsite personal retreat space is located in one corner of our property. It is a quiet, shady area with several retreat huts. Silence is maintained at all times in this area.

Booking your individual retreat

We have a pre-requisite that retreatants fill in our medical form. Please read the rules of personal retreat discipline, below, before completing the form.
As retreat can sometimes be a condition for mental turbulence and stress, it is very important that each person completes our medical form as honestly, and with as much detail, as possible. Health services are very limited in Bodhgaya and, on rare occasions, Root Institute is required to connect people who experience very intense mental health issues with their family and relevant embassies.
For individuals, please complete the book your personal retreat form in detail. Applications not correctly filled-in will not be considered.

Arranging your group retreat

If you are interested in holding a group retreat here, please contact our Spiritual Programme Coordinator: .

Book your personal retreat

Participation in a personal retreat at Root Institute depends on abiding by our guidelines of behaviour in a Dharma environment and personal retreat discipline. Please check, below, that you have read and understood them.
For individual retreats, please fill out this form, but if would like to hold a group retreat here, please first contact our Spiritual Programme Coordinator: .