The century when a great many people in the Gangetic plain stopped accepting the answers they had been given and went into the forest to work out better ones. Two of them founded religions.
15 entries on this part of the floor. 563 BCE – 322 BCE.
c. 528 BCE
Chert cubes in perfect binary ratios, identical from Gujarat to Afghanistan. The first person on this floor to make anyone follow a standard, and honestly the last one who fully succeeded.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
India's first individual Olympic gold, in the 10m air rifle, won by a man who had built a shooting range in his own house and treated the whole thing as an engineering problem.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Has selected an auspicious time that suits absolutely nobody and is entirely correct about it.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
The hardest part was not the broadcasting. It was carrying a valve transmitter through a city under surveillance without looking like a person carrying a valve transmitter.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Trained in dance in Germany in the 1930s, toured the world with Uday Shankar, ran a dance school in Lahore until Partition took it, acted with Prithvi Theatres in Bombay, moved to London for decades of television work, and came back to Indian cinema in her eighties. Worked for roughly seventy years and was funnier than everyone around her for all of them.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
The most consequential shade in Indian history.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Mahapajapati Gotami walked a long way with a shaved head to ask, was refused, and asked again. The Therigatha — poems by the women who joined — is among the oldest women's writing on earth.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Left a palace because he could not stop thinking about old age, sickness and death. Tried starving himself half to death, decided that was also stupid, ate some rice, sat under a tree, and worked it out.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Took non-violence further than anyone before or since — down to the insects, the water, the air. Also gave the world the idea that any statement about reality is only true from a particular standpoint, which is either profound humility or the world's first disclaimer.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Remembered every discourse word for word and recited them all at the first council. Every Buddhist text that begins "thus have I heard" is quoting his memory.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
A descendant of that fig tree still grows at Bodh Gaya. Pilgrims from thirty countries sit under it. Most of them are on their phones, which the Buddha would have had thoughts about.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
A bandit who kept a grim tally of his victims, stopped mid-chase by a monk who simply kept walking and said he had stopped long ago. Became a monk himself. The redemption arc, invented.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
The most celebrated woman in the republic, who hosted the Buddha for a meal and then gave away her mango grove and her entire fortune. The princes of Vaishali were extremely annoyed.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Delivered to five former companions who had walked out on him in disgust a few weeks earlier. He talked them round.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove
Denied the afterlife, denied the soul, denied ritual, and insisted that this world is the only one there is. Their texts were almost entirely destroyed, so we mostly know them from people arguing against them, which is a very Indian fate.
Find it on the floor: The Bodhi Grove