BodhgayaNews

About This Site

Melbourne, January 23 2012. I have run this site now for coming up on ten years I realise. Unfortunately I am not working much on Bodhgaya at the moment so I am not updating the news that much these days. However, I hope to keep the site running and put other sorts of things up that reflect my current activities. Nowadays I am again teaching Hindi and Buddhist Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne. My contact details are:

Peter Friedlander
Asian Studies
La Trobe University
VIC 3086 Australia
Tel: 94791400
Email: p.friedlander[the at symbol]latrobe.edu.au

Singapore, (September 14, 2009). It has now been seven years that I have kept this site running. The main content continues to be stories about Bodhgaya, there are around two hundred and fifty or so. The other main thing on the site is the database version of the Pali text of the Pali canon, which many people have found useful. There are also some miminal Hindi glossaries which learners may find useful.

Peter Friedlander

This site is run by Peter Friedlander who taught Hindi and and a course called Language Culture and Identiy in South Asia at the National University of Singapore in Singapore from March 2008 to June 2010.

New Search Translations Facility
March 29, 2008. Peter Friedlander. I have today put the 248 translations of Hindi news stories on this website into a searchable form. This is now available by using the 'Search Translations' facility in the navigation links bar. The links to archived stories on the right hand side still link to the archive pages that include links to other stories, such as stories from the English press, and pieces I and others wrote for Bodhgayanews.

Bodhgayanews seventh annual report
Mar 17 2009. Peter Friedlander. Its seven years now that Bodhgayanews has been running. Thank you for visiting the site, I have renewed the subscriptions again for another year so the site should certainly be running for another year now. If you are curious about who else visits the site read on, as this is a kind of seventh annual report.

There were 529,122 'hits' on the site in the last year. Of those around 200,000 were page requests , an average of about 450 page requests a day over the last year.
The most viewed aspect of the site, apart from perhaps the home page, was the searchable text of the Pali Canon which had around 166,000 hits.
Particularly, striking was the popularity of MP3 versions of Conference talks I have given, with almost 29,000 downloads of talks on the Dhammapada. But, I suspect somehow that almost all of those downloads were by robots crawling the net.
There were about 25,447 requests for image files, quite a few of which were for paintings in my collections of artworks.

Sorry that the frequency of updates is low nowadays, but remember there are still lots of stories in the archives and I still keep a watch on stories in the Hindi press on Bodhgaya, so do visit again.

Third Annual Report
Melbourne, (23 March, 2005). It has been three years now since I began this site. For the last year I also have to say my enthusiasm for updating it with stories about Bodhgaya has also been low as I have been involved in lots of other projects. However, I have found a new, more economical web hosting service, and so will maintain the present pages for the moment. I also hope to add articles as and when I see things that excite me.

First Annual Report
Melbourne, (December 13, 2002). I started running this site in March this year and its amazing how much has happened since then, the giant Buddha project has been shifted, the temple has received world heritage listing and the issue of the custodianship of the temple has received fresh fuel, and Gaya International Airport has been opened. Meanwhile, the people of Bodhgaya have struggled with drought, strikes, administration issues, law and order concerns and the daily challenge of surviving in one of India's poorest and disadvantaged states. I hope that by collecting together these stories on this website it may help people to understand the complexity of the issues in this most sacred of sites, Bodhgaya the place of the Buddha's enlightenment.

Original introduction to the website.

This website aims to present a picture of what's happening in the Buddhist pilgrimage centre of Bodhgaya in the state of Bihar in India.

The intention is to cover four main areas of news about Bodh Gaya: what's in the press, both English and Hindi, about Bodh Gaya, what events are happening there, what kind of meditation programs are scheduled and news about development activity in Bodh Gaya.

News about Bodh Gaya is not prominent in the international Media. Every so often there are articles in the Indian English language newspapers. But, everyday there are articles about Bodh Gaya in the local Hindi language press.

For the most part these are not available on the net, however, the Dainik Jagran's internet edition often includes news from Gaya which sometimes includes news from Bodh Gaya. However, the news often needs some commentary to to be comprehensible if you are not following the kind of stories which are curent in Bodh Gaya.

What I intend to provide here is a collection of past and current stories from the Hindi press, mostly in the forms of translations or summaries, with some notes to help explain the context of the story in some cases.

I have a lot of older stories from Bodhgaya, mostly in the form of Hindi texts with vocabularies and notes for students learning Hindi.

This site is run by Peter Friedlander. I have a long standing interest in Bodhgaya and have been visiting it off and on since the late 1970s when I first set eyes on the Mahabodhi Temple.

Currently I am interested in what is happening in Bodhgaya on many levels, spiritual, social and historical. My intention is through this website to foster awareness of the complexity of Bodhgaya as a sacred site.