The city of Kushinagar sits at the end of a road that most people take by accident. It is not on the way to anywhere. There is no airport. The trains stop at Gorakhpur, forty-seven kilometres west, and from there you take whatever is running. This is appropriate. The places that matter tend not to be convenient.

In 483 BCE — the date is approximate, debated by scholars across several Buddhist traditions — a man named Siddhartha Gautama lay down in a grove of sal trees between the twin cities of Kushinara and Pava, and did not get up again. He was eighty years old. He had been walking, teaching, and walking again for nearly five decades. He asked his attendant, Ananda, to prepare a place between the trees. He lay down on his right side. He spoke to the monks gathered in the grove. His last recorded words, as preserved in the Pali Canon: all compounded things decay. Strive with diligence.

That is not a complicated sentence. It does not require interpretation. It is the kind of thing a person says when they have run out of time for qualification.