The Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee Lifts Ban on Entering the Temple While Wearing Shoes
by Danny Fisher
The Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee has apparently decided to lift their ban on entering the Mahabodhi Mahavihara, the temple erected at the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, while wearing shoes. (Though visitors must still remove their shoes within the temple’s “sanctum sanctorum.”) I feel like I should go on some “Dana Carvey as an angry old man”-style tirade here: “In my day, we wore no shoes and we walked uphill through three feet of snow to get to the Mahabodhi Temple…and we liked it!”
Me at the Mahabodhi Mahavihara in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India during the fall semester of 2006. Photo by Ian Bennett.
I wonder what Buddha would think of a stopping one person, who wore shoes, and letting one person, who did not, inside to a place of ‘enlightenment’. I think the shoes are just an illusion afterall.