It was the second day of the three-day Raja festival this year. The festival is observed by agrarian people of Odisha at the onset of monsoon. They refrain from work and give rest to Mother Earth. Children clad in new dress eat cakes specially prepared for the occasion, play and do merrymaking. As decided earlier, we started our journey to visit Buddhist sites of Ratnagiri, Udaygiri and lalitgiri, called the Buddhist Diamond Triangle.
Monsoon had set in and there was intermittent rain. When we took a diversion from Daitary-Paradip national highway at Krushnadaspur towards Ratnagiri, the rain had stopped. On the one side of the road from Krushnadashpur to Ratnagiri, there were green sugarcane fields and on the other side, there were hills and here and there, date and palm trees. Boys and girls were playing in swings hung from the branches of mango or banyan trees near the road side villages. Used to city life, we felt like entering into a different world.
We reached Ratnagiri at around 11 am. Bishnu Charan Charan Mohanty, a social worker and an active member of Puspagiri Parisad, an organisation dedicated for development of the Buddhist sites was waiting for us. Hiuen Tsang, the Chinese traveller visited India to study Mahayan Buddhism. Since he was not permitted to travel to India, he secretly came and reached Ganghara in 630 AD. He passed through Odisha and visited Buddhist sites during 638-641 AD. He had mentioned in his accounts a famous monastery pu-sie-po-ki-li or Puspagiri which has not yet been identified satisfactorily by the historians. He has also mentioned existence of a stupa north to Puspagiri, which is identified as Ratnagiri. Hiuensa Tsang’s accounts testify that Odisha’s Buddhists were of Mahayan sect.
Odisha’s relation with Buddhism was from the early times, from days of Buddha himself. Two merchants of Utkal, Tapassu and Bhallika while passing through the middle country met Buddha and offered him rice cakes and honey. They became his disciples. Ashoka, emperor of Magadha had won Kalinga war fought in 261 BC, but after his victory he shunned violence forever, embraced Buddhism and propagated message of peace.
The elephant figure, hewn in those times at Dhauli was the symbol of the birth of Buddha and was, perhaps, intended to remind the people of Kalinga of the Buddha and his teachings. Taranath, a historian speaks of the Ratnagiri monastery which was built on the top of a hill, where three copies each of Mahayan and Hinayan Buddhism and other scriptures were kept. Bishnu Babu acted as our guide. The Buddhist relics of Ratnagiri were first brought to notice of the scholars in 1905 by Manmohan Chakravarti, then Sub Divisional Officer of Jajpur district.
Excavation was conducted under the direction of Debala Mitra during the year 1958-61. Excavations revealed a massive stupa, two monasteries, shrines, and numerous votive stupas, a large number of terracotta and stone sculptures, and Buddhist antiquities including bronze, copper and brass objects. The centre of attraction here is a massive seated Buddha in bhumisparsa-mudra flanked by the standing figures of Padmapani and Vajrapani holding chamaras on each side, in the central sanctum. The finest relic of Buddhist art is the gate of Ratnagiri monastery, an aesthetically planned three terraced building housing an archaeological museum which was completed in 1990, and started functioning in August 15, 1998. The museum consists of four galleries displayed with various antiquities mainly related to tantric
Buddhism including small votive stupas, sculptures of different medium and dimensions in stone, bronze, ivory, copper and stone inscriptions and terracotta seals. Udayagiri, also known as “Sunrise Hill,” is only nine km away from Ratnagiri. This Buddhist site is enriched with a brick stupa, two brick monasteries, a stepped stone deep well which never goes dry even in hot summer. The deep well was constructed during those days when use of rope for lifting buckets of water was not known.
The stupa at Udayagiri has four seated stone statues of Buddha, enshrined and facing each direction. There is an extensive monastic complex with 13 cells and a towering statue of Budhha seated in bhumisparsa mudra. Besides, sculptures of Buddha and other Buddhist divinities like Tara, Majusri, Hariti, Chunda, Vasudhara etc have been discovered in large numbers at the site. lalitagiri is about 10 km far from Udayagiri. Excavations have unearthed an apsidal chaitya hall or chaityagriha, four monasteries and stone sculptures of Buddha and Buddhist divinities.