Believed to be a site visited by Gautama Buddha, Rangkut Banasram in the forest of Cox’s Bazar is the oldest monastery in Bangladesh, and a reminder of the country’s rich Buddhist past.
Only around 1 million people profess Buddhism in Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim country of 170 million. Most of them live in the country’s coastal southeast where, as legend has it, Buddha had himself chosen to become a teaching center.
It was circa 600 B.C. as Buddha was on the way from India to Arakan, now in Myanmar, when he and his main disciple, Ananda Bhikkhu, visited the place where centuries later the monastery was built.
“Gautama Buddha rested here on the Rangkut hill for one night. During that visit, Buddha said that a pagoda would be built here with a bone coming from his chest,” the monastery’s caretaker, Jyoti Sen Mahathero, told Arab News. The visit did not immediately yield a foothold for the new religion, but Buddha’s prophecy was fulfilled under the reign of Ashoka the Great, the third Mauryan Emperor of Magadha, whose empire covered a large part of the Indian subcontinent.
“In 268 B.C., Emperor Ashoka started building 84,000 pagodas in different parts of this region, marking 84,000 speeches of Buddha. The Rangkut Banasram is one of them,” Mahathero said.—Agencies
