The Search for Kapilavastu: Tilaurakot or Piprahwa

Buddhist texts say that Siddhartha Gautama was born at Lumbini while his mother was travelling, and grew up in Kapilavastu, the chief town of the Shakya clan, where his father Suddhodana was a leader. He married there, had a son, Rahula, and lived a sheltered life until, at 29, he left the town at night to search for an end to suffering. Years later, as the Buddha, he came back to teach his family.

So Kapilavastu is the setting for most of the stories pilgrims know: the four sights of old age, sickness, death and a wandering ascetic; the Great Departure on the horse Kanthaka; the return and the ordination of Rahula. The texts also tell of the town's end. Late in the Buddha's life, Vidudabha, the son of King Pasenadi of Kosala, attacked the Shakyas and destroyed their town, a story told in the Pali commentaries.

After that, the town faded. By the time the Chinese pilgrim Faxian arrived around 400 CE, he found Kapilavastu largely deserted, with a few monks and some households. Xuanzang, in the seventh century, described a ruined city with palace foundations and many stupas. Then the place dropped out of memory, and its location had to be found again in the modern era.

Buddhist tradition tells the night Siddhartha left Kapilavastu in loving detail. His son Rahula had just been born. The prince looked in on his sleeping wife Yasodhara and the baby, did not wake them, and went out to his charioteer Channa, who saddled the white horse Kanthaka. In some versions the gods muffled the horse's hooves so that no one in the palace would wake, and lifted the city gate so that it opened in silence. At the river Anoma he cut off his hair, gave his jewels to Channa and sent the horse home. The texts say Kanthaka died of grief.

Today the land around Tilaurakot is farmed by Awadhi-speaking villagers, Tharu families and a large Muslim community, and the walled mound is surrounded by wheat and rice fields. The story still shapes how the site is shown: guides point to the eastern gate as the one the prince used, and the small Samai Mai shrine inside the grove is still a working place of worship.

Tilaurakot lies in Kapilvastu district, Nepal, about 3 km north of the town of Taulihawa, on the bank of the Banganga river. It is a rectangular mound enclosed by brick fortification walls and a moat, with gateways on its sides, surrounded by mango and sal trees. The Indian archaeologist P. C. Mukherji explored it in 1899 and argued it was Kapilavastu. Later excavations, including work by Debala Mitra in the 1960s and Nepal's Department of Archaeology, exposed walls, gates and structures inside.

Since 2014, a joint project of Nepal's Department of Archaeology and Durham University, with partners and UNESCO support, has used excavation and geophysical survey to map streets, buildings and the layout of the walled town. Finds from the site include pottery types of the period around the Buddha's time, coins and terracotta, many shown at the Kapilavastu Museum next to the site.

Supporters of Tilaurakot make three main points. It is a real fortified town, the kind of settlement a clan capital would be. Its distance and direction from Lumbini fit the accounts of Faxian and Xuanzang. And the nearby Ashoka pillars at Niglihawa and Gotihawa, linked to the Buddhas Konakamana and Krakuchchhanda, match places the Chinese pilgrims described near Kapilavastu. For Nepal, Tilaurakot is Kapilavastu.

Piprahwa lies in Siddharthnagar district, Uttar Pradesh, India, a short distance south of the Nepal border and roughly 20 km south of Tilaurakot. In 1898 William Claxton Peppé, who managed the local estate, dug into a large brick stupa there and found stone and soapstone caskets containing bone fragments, gems and gold ornaments. One casket bore a short inscription in Brahmi that many scholars read as recording relics of the Buddha enshrined by the Shakyas, though its exact reading has long been debated.

In the 1970s the Archaeological Survey of India, under K. M. Srivastava, excavated the stupa and the monastery remains at nearby Ganwaria. They found further relic caskets in a deeper level and, crucially, terracotta sealings naming a monastery of Kapilavastu, dating to the early centuries CE. For India, this was direct written evidence: a place calling itself Kapilavastu.

Supporters of Piprahwa argue that an inscribed name outweighs distances recorded by travellers centuries after the Buddha, and that the Shakya relic stupa would stand near the Shakya town. Critics answer that the sealings show a monastery called Kapilavastu existed there several centuries after the Buddha, not necessarily that the Shakya town stood on that spot.

The debate has a national edge, and both countries promote their site to pilgrims. But many scholars take a middle view. In this reading, Tilaurakot preserves the walled town of the Shakyas where Siddhartha grew up, while Piprahwa and Ganwaria preserve the great relic stupa and a later monastery that carried the name of Kapilavastu, the wider Shakya territory. The region was one landscape long before the modern border cut through it.

There is also a caution worth knowing. Alois Anton Führer, the archaeologist involved in finding the Lumbini and Niglihawa pillars in the 1890s, was later exposed for faking finds and inscriptions elsewhere, which made later scholars careful with claims from that period. The Lumbini pillar's inscription itself is not in doubt; its text has been studied by many scholars since. But the episode is one reason both sides insist on careful excavation.

Our view, as people who guide here, is simple. Visit Tilaurakot and you stand in a town of the right age and shape in the right place. Visit Piprahwa and you stand at a stupa that held what its builders believed were the Buddha's relics. Neither visit is wasted.

The table sets out the main evidence on each side, in brief. Your guide can walk you through it on site.

From Lumbini, Tilaurakot is about an hour by road, and a full day covers it with Kudan, Gotihawa and Niglihawa. At Tilaurakot, walk the line of the walls to the eastern gate, the one tradition says Siddhartha rode through on the night he left, and sit for a while in the grove by the small shrine of Samai Mai, honoured by local villagers. Visit the museum before or after; it helps the ruins make sense.

Piprahwa can be visited from Lumbini, but it means crossing into India, which requires the right visa and a border crossing, so most of our guests see it as part of an onward journey on the Indian Buddhist circuit. If you plan to cross, check current status before you travel.

• Kudan: stupa mounds linked by tradition to the Buddha's meeting with his father
• Gotihawa: Ashoka pillar stump and stupa linked to Buddha Krakuchchhanda
• Niglihawa: inscribed Ashoka pillar recording the stupa of Buddha Konakamana
• Kapilavastu Museum: finds from Tilaurakot and the surrounding district