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.
The site today is a compound of temples, monasteries, and pilgrimage infrastructure, with countries represented — Thailand, Japan, Sri Lanka, Korea, China, Myanmar — each building according to its own tradition, each pointing to the same unremarkable ground. The Nirvana Temple stands over the spot where the sal trees were. Inside, a sixth-century reclining figure in red sandstone, six-point-one metres long, rests on its right side. Archaeologists found it buried under rubble in 1876. The posture is exact. The expression suggests nothing dramatic, which is perhaps the point.
We named the brand after this place. Not after the moment of enlightenment, which happened elsewhere, under a fig tree in Bihar. Not after the first sermon, delivered to five men in a deer park in Sarnath. After the end. After the last grove. After the point at which everything that had been set in motion over fifty years was finally complete.
There is a quality to Kushinagar that distinguishes it from the other four pilgrimage sites. Lumbini is a garden with construction. Bodh Gaya is effectively a cathedral. Sarnath is an archaeological park with a museum and signs. Kushinagar is quieter than all of them. The pilgrims who come are mostly not tourists. The quiet is not performed.
We put the name on cloth because cloth is the thing you carry with you through ordinary time. You take it off at the end of a day and fold it and put it somewhere. The next morning you put it on again. It participates in both the beginning and the end of things, every day, without ceremony. This seemed like the right object to carry the name.