Buddhist Pilgrimage Tour in Nepal – 8 Days

Our representative meets you at the airport and transfers you to your hotel.

In the late afternoon we go to Boudhanath, the largest stupa in Nepal and the centre of Tibetan Buddhist life in the country. Arrive as the light drops and walk the clockwise kora with the crowd — monks, Tibetan families, traders from the Khumbu and Mustang — while butter lamps are lit and horns sound from the monastery roofs.

The stupa has stood here since at least the fourteenth century and was rebuilt by the community after the 2015 earthquake within two years, largely by donation.

Overnight in Kathmandu.

Swayambhunath in the morning, climbing the eastern stairway to the hilltop stupa. The site is older than Boudhanath — parts of it date to the fifth century and the tradition holds it self-arose from a lotus on the primordial lake that filled the valley.

The painted eyes of the Buddha look out over Kathmandu from all four sides, and the platform holds shrines to both Buddhist and Hindu deities, which is the valley's religious character in one place.

The afternoon visits the monasteries around Boudha — Shechen, Kopan on its hill, and the smaller gompas where teaching goes on daily — and the traditional thangka workshops where painters still work in mineral pigment.

Overnight in Kathmandu.

A morning flight south-west to Bhairahawa on the Terai — 35 minutes, with the Himalaya along the right-hand windows — and a short drive to Lumbini (150 m).

The afternoon enters the sacred garden. The Maya Devi temple stands over the marker stone identifying the exact birthplace, with the excavated brick foundations of earlier shrines beneath it. Beside it is the Ashokan pillar, erected in 249 BCE by the emperor Ashoka, whose inscription is the oldest evidence that this is the place.

The Puskarini pool where Maya Devi is said to have bathed lies in front, under the Bodhi tree hung with prayer flags.

Pilgrims sit and meditate here through the afternoon; there is no need to hurry. Overnight at Lumbini.

An early meditation session with monks in one of the monasteries, arranged in advance — the quietest hour of the day in Lumbini and, for many pilgrims, the point of coming.

The rest of the day covers the monastic zone, a planned area where more than twenty countries have each built a monastery in their own tradition: the Thai wat in white and gold, the Myanmar Lokamani Pula pagoda, the German-built Great Lotus Stupa, the Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Sri Lankan foundations. Walking between them is an education in how differently one teaching is expressed.

The World Peace Pagoda and the crane sanctuary sit at the northern end of the site, reachable by cycle rickshaw along the central canal.

Overnight at Lumbini.

A drive west to Tilaurakot, identified by most archaeologists as Kapilvastu — the capital of the Shakya kingdom where Prince Siddhartha spent his first twenty-nine years before leaving through the eastern gate.

The site is excavated rather than reconstructed: brick foundations, the gateways, the moat and the road, set in quiet sal woodland. It is far less visited than Lumbini and considerably more affecting for it.

Nearby are Kudan, where the Buddha is said to have met his father after his enlightenment, and Gotihawa with its Ashokan pillar stump.

The route back can include Ramagrama, the only one of the eight original relic stupas never opened — the earth mound still holds its share of the Buddha's ashes.

Overnight at Lumbini.

The morning flight back to Kathmandu, then a drive south-east out of the valley through Banepa and Dhulikhel into farming country.

Namobuddha (1,750 m) is one of the three most sacred Buddhist sites in Nepal. The stupa marks the place where, in a previous life, the Buddha as Prince Mahasattva is said to have given his body to a starving tigress and her cubs — the jataka of compassion that the site is named for.

Above the stupa stands Thrangu Tashi Yangtse, a large working monastery with several hundred monks, and you can usually sit in on the afternoon prayers.

The guesthouse is simple and the setting — a ridge with terraced fields falling away and the Himalaya on the northern horizon — is the quietest night of the tour. Overnight at Namobuddha.

Morning prayers at the monastery, then the kora — the circuit around the hilltop past the shrine that holds the relief of the tigress story, with prayer flags across the ridge.

The drive back stops at Panauti, a small Newar town at the confluence of two rivers with a thirteenth-century Indreshwar Mahadev temple and an old quarter that has barely changed. It is one of the best-preserved medieval settlements in the valley and almost nobody stops there.

You reach Kathmandu (1,400 m) in the late afternoon.

The evening is free — many pilgrims return to Boudha for a last kora at dusk. Overnight in Kathmandu.

The morning is free. The shops around Boudha sell thangkas, prayer wheels, incense and texts, and the workshops there will explain what you are looking at if you ask.

We collect you from your hotel three hours before your flight and transfer you to Tribhuvan International Airport.

The route has run from the garden where the Buddha was born and the palace he left, to the stupas where the tradition is still practised every evening — the beginning of Buddhism and its living continuation in one journey.