Birth Place Of Lord Buddha

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• Lumbini (Garden): The world heritage Site of Religion. Lumbini is the sound birthplace of Lord Siddhartha Gautam Buddha the Apostle of Compassion & Non-Collide. He is not only the Light of Asia but the Messenger of Universal Peace as well. The auspicious garden of Lumbini is situated amidst the newly established town of (Bhairahawa) Siddharthanagar in the hot Terai plains of west Nepal. The broken Ashokan pillars, holy remnants of an old Buddhist monastery, divine images of the Buddha's mother Great Mayadevi, are still well preserved here. Extensive excavation task is being carried out with promising effects. The Buddhist Monasteries: The monastery of the Buddhist temple is built inside the surrounding complex of Lumbini in the manner of modern Buddhist shrines in Nepal. The prayer hall contains a big image of Lord Shakyamuni Buddha in the medieval style. Colorful artistic murals decorated the large walls.
  
  
• The Ashokan Pillar: Discovered by the famous German archaeologist Dr. Fuhrer, the pillar is the first epigraphic evidence relating to the life history of Lord Buddha and is also the most visible landmark of the auspicious garden. The historical importance of the pillar is evidenced by the inscription engraved on the pillar (in Brahmi characters). It is said that the Hindu Indian Emperor Ashok the Great, who got converted, visited the site in the twentieth year of his accession to the throne and as homage to the pure birth place erected the pillar. The inscription on the pillar roughly translates as " King Piyadesi the beloved of the Gods having been anointed 20 years came himself and worshipped saying Here Buddha Sakyamuni was born. He caused to make a stone capital representing a horse and he caused (this) stone pillar to be erected. Because here the worshipful one was born the village of Lumbini has been made free of taxes and recipient of wealth."
  
  Sanctum Sanctorum of the Birthplace: The single most important place LUMBINI (and to the entire Buddhist world for that matter) is the stone-slab located deep Sanctum Sanctorum. Revealed after a hard and meticulous excavation under the three layers of ruins over the site of a famous Mayadevi Temple, the stone-slab foundation pinpoints the location of the original place, marking the precise spot of the birthplace of Lord Buddha.
  
  Image of Maha Mayadevi: In additional to the Ashokan Pillar, the other shrine of importance is the bas- relief image of Maha Mayadevi, the Queen of King Suddhodan. Enshrined in a small pagoda-like structure the image shows Mayadevi, the mother of Drown Prince Siddhartha Gautam. She is seen supporting herself by holding on with her right hand to a branch of Sal tree, with the newly born infant Buddha standing upright on a lotus pedestal on an oval halo. Two other celestial figures are depicted in an act of pouring holy water and lotuses bestowed from heaven. Earlier the image was placed in the famous white temple of Mayadevi besides the pillar mow totally dismantles to make way for the excavations which revealed the Sanctum Sanctorum the exact spot where out Lord was born.
  
  Puskarni: the Sacred Pool: South of the Ashokan Pillar, there is the famous sacred pool named "Puskarni" believed to be the same holy pool in which Mayadevi took a pious dip just before giving birth to the Lord and also where the infant Buddha was given its first purification bath. Architecturally the pool has three projecting terraces in the ascending order and is revealed with fine brick masonry.
  
  Kapilvastu / Tilalurakot: Located some 27 kilometers west of Lumbini lies the ruins of the historic town of "Kapilvastu". Believed to be the capital of Shakya republic where the Lord lived and enjoyed his life until his thirteenth year , Kapilvastu has been identified with Tilaurakot by the archaeologists. Also, the place is believed to have been associated with different important episodes. There are ruins and mounds of old stupas and monasteries made of kiln-burnt bricks and clay-mortar. The remains are surrounded by a moat and the walls of the city are made of bricks. Infant the ruins of the ancient city of Kapilvastu are in such a grand scale that it could easily be visualized as a high seat of authentic culture.
  
  Arorakot: About 10 kilometers northwest of Taulihawa there is a rectangular fortified area, which is popularly known as Arorakot. The famous Indian archaeologist P. C. Mukherji as the natal town of Kanakmuni Buddha identified the fortified area. Remains of the old moat and the brick fortification around the Kot can still be clearly located. A brick lined well is seen to the south and an elevated mound towards the northwest corner.
  
  Chaatradei: Some 5 kilometers north to Taulihawa there is a village called Chatradei situated on the right bank of the Banganga River. West of the village the habitat ional ruins extend in the form of al large triangular mound. Most of the pottery and antiquities found here belong to the Sunga- Kushana period while the virtual remains of the structures may be related to the early medieval times.
  
  Gotihawa: About 5 kilometers southwest of Taulihawa, there is a village called Gotihawa. In the village there exists an Ashokan Pillar standing in a slab. The upper portion of the pillar is broken and lost and only the lower portion of the pillar 3.5 meters high remains still intact. Adjoining the pillar, towards its northeast there is a colossal stupa with successive rings of wedge shape Mauryan bricks.
  
  Kudan: Roughly 2 kilometers South west of Taulihawa on the left side of the shoratgarh- Taulihawa road, stands the village of Kudan having a huge structural ruin with a cluster of four mounds and a tank. The mounds were excavated in 1962 only.
  
  Niglihawa: About 8 kilometers north- west of Taulihawa, there is another site of archaeological importance. The site has a quadrangular tank surrounded by bushes locally known as Niglisagar. On the western bank of the tank there appear two broken pieces of the Ashokan Pillar, the longer one laying flat and the shorter one stuck unto the ground. The pillar bears 2 peacocks in the top part and Devnagri script inscription reading Om -Ma - Ni - hum Ripu Mallasya Chiran Jayut 1234. The shorter portion of the pillar which is partly buried in the ground measures 1.52 meters in length containing four lines of Ashoka inscription in the Brahmi letters which roughly translates as "King Piyadasi, believed of the Gods after 14 years of his coronation enlarged for the second tine the Stupa of Buddha Kanakmuni and after 20 years of his coronation he came himself and worshipped and he caused this stone pillar to be erected."
  
  Sagarhawa: About 12 kilometers north of Taulihawa there exists a forest area called Sagarhawa. In the midst of the forestation there is a huge rectangular tank, which is popularly known as Lumbusagar, or a long tank. The ancient tank ruins, which were excavated and identified by Dr. Alois A. Fuhrer as the "Place of the Massacre of the Shakyas" in 1859, can still, be located on the Southwest banks of Sagar.
  
• Day 1 Kathmandu Arrival Kathmandu. Transfer to hotel. Evening sightseeing or rest.
  
  Day 2 Kathmandu
  Lumbini Drive (7 to 8 hours) or flight (45 minutes) to Lumbini. Evening, local sightseeing or a visit to Lumbini Garden.
  
  Day 3 Lumbini
  Kapilvastu Lumbini An early morning visit to Lumbini Garden for worship, then drive (35 minutes) to Kapilvastu to visit all the pilgrimage-sites. Return to Lumbini in the evening.
  
  Day 4 Lumbini
  Kathmandu Drive or flight to Kathmandu. Sightseeing or shopping trip in the evening.
  
  Day 5 Kathmandu
  Next Destination Transfer to airport. Departure from Kathmandu.
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Buddha was born in Lumbini of modern Nepal.

Buddha was born around 565 B.C. in Lumbini in modern day Nepal. His name was Siddhārtha Gautama (Sanskrit: सिद्धार्थ गौतम; Pali: Siddhattha Gotama)' means 'descendant of Gotama whose aims are achieved/who is efficacious in achieving aims', he later became the Buddha (literally Enlightened One or Awakened One). He is also commonly known as 'Shakyamuni' or 'Sakyamuni' (lit. "The sage of the Shakya clan") and as the Tathagata (lit. "thus come" or "thus gone").

Siddhartha Gautama was born in Kapilvastu Lumbini (a town situated in modern Nepal, near the Indian border but clearly Buddha was not born in India) under the full moon of May to the clan of the Shakyas, a warrior tribe. His father, Suddhodana, was the ruler of the Sakya people and Siddhartha grew up living the extravagant life of a young prince. His mother name was Mayadevi.

According to custom, he married at the young age of sixteen to a girl named Yasodhara. His father had ordered that he live a life of total seclusion, but one day Siddhartha ventured out into the world and was confronted with the reality of the inevitable suffering of life. The next day, at the age of twenty-nine, he left his kingdom and newborn son to lead an ascetic life and determine a way to relieve universal suffering.

For six years, Siddhartha submitted himself to rigorous ascetic practices, studying and following different methods of meditation with various religious teachers. But he was never fully satisfied. One day, however, he was offered a bowl of rice from a young girl and he accepted it. In that moment, he realized that physical austerities were not the means to achieve liberation. From then on, he encouraged people to follow a path of balance rather than extremism. He called this The Middle Way.

That night Siddhartha sat under the Bodhi tree, and meditated until dawn. He purified his mind of all defilements and attained enlightenment at the age of thirty-five, thus earning the title Buddha, or "Enlightened One". For the remainder of his eighty years, the Buddha preached the Dharma in an effort to help other sentient beings reach enlightenment.

Today is the 255th birthday of Lord Gautam Buddha.The day of his birth is widely celebrated in Buddhist countries as Vesak. 2554th birthday of Lord Buddha is being celebrated today all over the world. 

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, has died

Kim Jong Il, North Korea's mercurial and enigmatic leader whose iron rule and nuclear ambitions dominated world security fears for more than a decade, has died. He was 69.
Kim's death 17 years after he inherited power from his father was announced Monday by the state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The country's "Dear Leader" — reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine — was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.
North Korea has been grooming Kim's third son to take over power from his father in the impoverished nation that celebrates the ruling family with an intense cult of personality.
South Korea put its military on "high alert" and President Lee Myung-bak convened a national security council meeting after the news of Kim's death.
In a "special broadcast" Monday, state media said Kim died of a heart ailment on a train due to a "great mental and physical strain" on Saturday during a "high intensity field inspection."
Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but he had appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media.
Kim Jong Il inherited power after his father, revered North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, died in 1994. He had been groomed for 20 years to lead the communist nation founded by his guerrilla fighter-turned-politician father and built according to the principle of "juche," or self-reliance.
In September 2010, Kim Jong Il unveiled his third son, the twenty-something Kim Jong Un, as his successor, putting him in high-ranking posts.
Even with a successor, there had been some fear among North Korean observers of a behind-the-scenes power struggle or nuclear instability upon the elder Kim's death.
Few firm facts are available when it comes to North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, and not much is clear about the man known as the "Dear Leader."
North Korean legend has it that Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, one of Korea's most cherished sites, in 1942, a birth heralded in the heavens by a pair of rainbows and a brilliant new star.
Soviet records, however, indicate he was born in Siberia, in 1941.
Kim Il Sung, who for years fought for independence from Korea's colonial ruler, Japan, from a base in Russia, emerged as a communist leader after returning to Korea in 1945 after Japan was defeated in World War II.
With the peninsula divided between the Soviet-administered north and the U.S.-administered south, Kim rose to power as North Korea's first leader in 1948 while Syngman Rhee became South Korea's first president.
The North invaded the South in 1950, sparking a war that would last three years, kill millions of civilians and leave the peninsula divided by a Demilitarized Zone that today remains one of the world's most heavily fortified.
In the North, Kim Il Sung meshed Stalinist ideology with a cult of personality that encompassed him and his son. Their portraits hang in every building in North Korea and on the lapels of every dutiful North Korean.
Kim Jong Il, a graduate of Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University, was 33 when his father anointed him his eventual successor.
Even before he took over as leader, there were signs the younger Kim would maintain — and perhaps exceed — his father's hard-line stance.
South Korea has accused Kim of masterminding a 1983 bombing that killed 17 South Korean officials visiting Burma, now known as Myanmar. In 1987, the bombing of a Korean Air Flight killed all 115 people on board; a North Korean agent who confessed to planting the device said Kim ordered the downing of the plane himself.
Kim Jong Il took over after his father died in 1994, eventually taking the posts of chairman of the National Defense Commission, commander of the Korean People's Army and head of the ruling Worker's Party while his father remained as North Korea's "eternal president."
He faithfully carried out his father's policy of "military first," devoting much of the country's scarce resources to its troops — even as his people suffered from a prolonged famine — and built the world's fifth-largest military.
Kim also sought to build up the country's nuclear arms arsenal, which culminated in North Korea's first nuclear test explosion, an underground blast conducted in October 2006. Another test came in 2009.
Alarmed, regional leaders negotiated a disarmament-for-aid pact that the North signed in 2007 and began implementing later that year.
However, the process continues to be stalled, even as diplomats work to restart negotiations.
North Korea, long hampered by sanctions and unable to feed its own people, is desperate for aid. Flooding in the 1990s that destroyed the largely mountainous country's arable land left millions hungry.
Following the famine, the number of North Koreans fleeing the country through China rose dramatically, with many telling tales of hunger, political persecution and rights abuses that officials in Pyongyang emphatically denied.
Kim often blamed the U.S. for his country's troubles and his regime routinely derides Washington-allied South Korea as a "puppet" of the Western superpower.
U.S. President George W. Bush, taking office in 2002, denounced North Korea as a member of an "axis of evil" that also included Iran and Iraq. He later described Kim as a "tyrant" who starved his people so he could build nuclear weapons.
"Look, Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He's a man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps. And ... there is concern about his capacity to deliver a nuclear weapon," Bush said in 2005.
Kim was an enigmatic leader. But defectors from North Korea describe him as an eloquent and tireless orator, primarily to the military units that form the base of his support.
The world's best glimpse of the man was in 2000, when the liberal South Korean government's conciliatory "sunshine" policy toward the North culminated in the first-ever summit between the two Koreas and followed with unprecedented inter-Korean cooperation.
A second summit was held in 2007 with South Korea's Roh Moo-hyun.
But the thaw in relations drew to a halt in early 2008 when conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in Seoul pledging to come down hard on communist North Korea.
Disputing accounts that Kim was "peculiar," former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright characterized Kim as intelligent and well-informed, saying the two had wide-ranging discussions during her visits to Pyongyang when Bill Clinton was U.S. president.
"I found him very much on top of his brief," she said.
Kim cut a distinctive, if oft ridiculed, figure. Short and pudgy at 5-foot-3, he wore platform shoes and sported a permed bouffant. His trademark attire of jumpsuits and sunglasses was mocked in such films as "Team America: World Police," a movie populated by puppets that was released in 2004.
Kim was said to have cultivated wide interests, including professional basketball, cars and foreign films. He reportedly produced several North Korean films as well, mostly historical epics with an ideological tinge.
A South Korean film director claimed Kim even kidnapped him and his movie star wife in the late 1970s, spiriting them back to North Korea to make movies for him for a decade before they managed to escape from their North Korean agents during a trip to Austria.
Kim rarely traveled abroad and then only by train because of an alleged fear of flying, once heading all the way by luxury rail car to Moscow, indulging in his taste for fine food along the way.
One account of Kim's lavish lifestyle came from Konstantin Pulikovsky, a former Russian presidential envoy who wrote the book "The Orient Express" about Kim's train trip through Russia in July and August 2001.
Pulikovsky, who accompanied the North Korean leader, said Kim's 16-car private train was stocked with crates of French wine. Live lobsters were delivered in advance to stations.
A Japanese cook later claimed he was Kim's personal sushi chef for a decade, writing that Kim had a wine cellar stocked with 10,000 bottles, and that, in addition to sushi, Kim ate shark's fin soup — a rare delicacy — weekly.
"His banquets often started at midnight and lasted until morning. The longest lasted for four days," the chef, who goes by the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto, was quoted as saying.
Kim is believed to have curbed his indulgent ways in recent years and looked slimmer in more recent video footage aired by North Korea's state-run broadcaster.
Kim's marital status wasn't clear but he is believed to have married once and had at least three other companions. He had at least three sons with two women, as well as a daughter by a third.
His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, 38, is believed to have fallen out of favor with his father after he was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake passport in 2001 saying he wanted to visit Disney's Tokyo resort.
His two other sons by another woman, Kim Jong Chul and Kim Jong Un, are in their 20s. Their mother reportedly died several years ago.