Lumbini is where the story begins. In the foothills of the Himalayas, in what is now the Rupandehi district of southern Nepal, a woman named Maya Devi stopped at a garden on her way to her parents' home and gave birth to a son. The date is contested across traditions — 563 BCE or 480 BCE, depending on which scholars you read — but the location is fixed. Emperor Ashoka visited in 249 BCE and erected a sandstone pillar. The Brahmi inscription, still legible, reads: here the Blessed One was born.

The garden is called the Sacred Garden now. Inside its boundaries, the Mayadevi Temple sits over a marker stone that archaeologists, after decades of careful excavation, believe identifies the precise spot. The evidence — the stratigraphy, the alignment with the Ashokan pillar, the nativity sculpture in red sandstone found within — is strong. Pilgrims treat it as certain. This is the appropriate response to some kinds of evidence, when the alternative is to keep the question open indefinitely.

Lumbini is unusual among the five sacred sites in that it feels less finished than the others. Bodh Gaya has a cathedral. Sarnath has a museum and an archaeological park with proper signage. Kushinagar has its quiet compound. Lumbini, by contrast, is still being built. The monastic zone surrounding the Sacred Garden is an ongoing project of dozens of countries, each constructing a monastery according to its own tradition on land allocated by the Lumbini Development Trust. German Theravada. Japanese Zen. Korean Won Buddhism. Vietnamese, Chinese, Myanmar. The construction does not stop. This, too, is appropriate. Beginnings are always being added to.