Where the Father Met the Son
The Buddha had been gone for seven years when his father sent the last of ten delegations to bring him home. When he finally returned to Kapilavastu, it was here, in a grove of banyan trees, that the reunion happened.
The site now known as Kudan, named after the village nearby, stands about six kilometres south of Tilaurakot — the ruins of ancient Kapilavastu, where the Buddha spent his first twenty-nine years. In Buddhist texts, it appears as Nigrodharam or Nigrodharam Bihar: a banyan grove that belonged to a Sakyan monk named Nigrodha. When the Buddha returned to his family’s kingdom in the year following his enlightenment, Nigrodha offered this grove as his residence. A monastery was built there for him and his sangha.
The stories of what happened at Kudan are among the most deeply human passages in Buddhist literature. King Suddhodana, who had spent years sending emissaries to bring his son back, arrived at the grove and found the Buddha walking the streets of Kapilavastu on an alms round — begging, bowl in hand, in a city that had once been his by right of birth. Suddhodana was shaken. This is not the custom of our royal lineage, he told his son. The Buddha is said to have replied: ‘You belong to the warrior lineage, dear king. I belong to the lineage of the Buddhas. That is the lineage in which one walks for alms.’
Suddhodana listened to his son’s teaching and attained the first stage of awakening. Queen Prajapati Gautami came to the grove and offered the Buddha a robe of golden cloth she had woven herself — described in the texts as one of the most significant acts of generosity in the early history of Buddhism. The Buddha’s wife Yasodhara, whose long separation from Siddhartha had been borne in quiet dignity, also came to the grove, and Siddhartha’s son Rahula was brought to him here for the first time. Rahula asked his father for his inheritance. The Buddha responded by ordaining him as a novice monk — a stupa at the southeast corner of the Kudan complex commemorates this ordination.
It was also at Kudan that one of the most consequential debates in Buddhist history took place. Prajapati Gautami petitioned the Buddha three times to allow women to be ordained into the monastic order. Three times he initially declined. It was finally through the intervention of his disciple Ananda, speaking on Prajapati’s behalf, that the Buddha relented — and in doing so, Prajapati Gautami became the first bhikkhuni, the first Buddhist nun. The first nunnery in Buddhist history was established in Kapilavastu, and the women of the Sakya and Koliya clans who entered it became the founding members of the female monastic tradition.
The monk Nigrodha, who had given the grove to the sangha, later converted Emperor Ashoka to Buddhism in the third century BCE. Ashoka’s Ashokan pillars are still found in nearby villages and towns, and the archaeological excavations at Kudan — especially those of 2007 — have revealed gravel and brickwork confirming ancillary structures including a well, several stupas, and the remains of a large pond. The main Bihar structure at Kudan stands approximately seven metres high and covers around 1,400 square metres, one of the largest monastic remains in the wider Lumbini region.
