There's a moment when you first approach the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya - the place where the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree and became enlightened—when you expect to feel only one thing. Peace, perhaps. Reverence. The hum of something ancient and sacred.

And you do feel that.

But you also feel something else. Because before you even reach the temple gates, you're surrounded by beggars. More than anywhere else I've traveled in India. Hands reaching, eyes following, voices calling. The poverty is immediate, insistent, impossible to look away from.

So there you are, standing at the threshold of enlightenment, and the question becomes: What do you do with this?

Holding Two Truths

Inside the temple grounds, the energy shifts. There's a palpable quality to the air—devotion accumulated over centuries, prayers whispered in dozens of languages, the presence of something that hasn't left since a man sat down under a tree and refused to move until he understood suffering.

The beauty is real. The sacredness is real.

And just outside those gates, the poverty is equally real.

For a while, I was confused by this. It felt like a contradiction—such enlightenment with such suffering. As if one should cancel out the other, or at least exist in separate spaces. But they don't. They're right there together, asking something of you.

What Bodh Gaya seems to ask is this: Can you hold both?

Can the prayer and the poverty sit side by side in your awareness without one erasing the other? Can you feel the sacred energy without using it to bypass what's uncomfortable? Can you witness the suffering without letting it collapse the beauty?

The Buddha Didn't Eliminate Suffering

Here's what struck me as I sat beneath that tree: The Buddha became enlightened here—in a world that included poverty, sickness, death. His awakening didn't make those things disappear. He woke up within a suffering world and offered a path through it, not around it.

The beggars at Bodh Gaya aren't separate from the teaching. They're part of it.

Enlightenment isn't about transcending reality into some purified version where only light exists. It's about seeing clearly—all of it—and responding with an open heart. Not from pity or guilt or the need to fix, but from a deeper place of recognition: This too. This also.

What Opens When We Stop Choosing Sides

I've noticed something in my own practice. When I can be with both the beauty and the difficulty—when I can witness without needing to make one of them go away—something opens. There's more space. More clarity. Spirit speaks more easily when I'm not busy defending or interpreting or trying to make things tidier than they are.

This isn't about being detached or uninvolved. It's not spiritual bypassing. It's actually the opposite—it's feeling more, not less. Feeling the sacredness fully. Feeling the suffering fully. Letting both move through without getting stuck in either.

The witness doesn't choose sides. The witness simply sees: This is what's here.

And from that place, something truer can emerge. You might hand money to a beggar—or you might not. But if you do, it comes from a different space. Not from guilt or the need to fix or make the discomfort go away. More like: I see you. I honor your journey. The action, when it comes, flows from presence rather than reaction. Not a battle to slay suffering. Not a retreat into only the light. But a wholeness that includes both.

An Invitation

If you visit Bodh Gaya, or any place where the sacred and the difficult sit side by side, I invite you to notice what arises. Notice if there's an impulse to focus only on the beautiful energy. Notice if the poverty makes you want to look away or fix or feel guilty.

And then, if you're willing, see if you can simply be with both.

Not as a problem to solve, but as an invitation into something larger—a way of seeing that doesn't require reality to be other than it is before you can meet it with an open heart.

This is what the Buddha under the tree discovered. This is what Bodh Gaya still teaches.

The light and the shadow, equally sacred. Held together in one vast, compassionate awareness.

Can you hold both?

With love and blessings,

Susan