incredibly rich history; it was the ances-
tral homeland of the Maurya dynasty,
which ruled over much of the Indian
subcontinent between the fourth and
third centuries before the common era.
The capital city was at Pataliputra, iden-
tified with modern Patna. Bihar also
contains the town of Bodh Gaya, where
the Buddha attained enlightenment,
in addition to many other places
associated with events in his life.
Despite this lush past, modern Bihar
is an extremely difficult place to live;
illiteracy and infant mortality rates are
very high, life expectancy is fairly low,
and social conditions can best be
described as feudal. Most of its citizens
can barely make a living and do so
through agriculture, while a small per-
centage are fabulously wealthy. Bihar is
also a textbook example of what modern
Indians call the “criminalization of poli-
tics,” in which known criminals are
either agents for politicians or are them-
selves holding political office. Although
Bihar has abundant mineral resources,
its pervasive corruption virtually ensures
that their benefits will reach only a few.
Despite all of these disadvantages, Bihar
does have well-known sacred sites
(tirthas). One of these is the town of
Gaya, famous as a place to perform
funerary rites (antyeshthi samskara).
Another sacred place is the temple at
Vaidyanath, which is one of the twelve
jyotirlingas, a group of sites especially
sacred to the god Shiva. For general
information about Bihar and all the
regions of India, an accessible reference
is Christine Nivin et al., India. 8th ed.,
Lonely Planet, 1998.
Bijak
(“inventory”) One of the three main col-
lections of verse ascribed to the poet-
saint Kabir(mid-15th c.?); the other two
are found in the Adigranth and the
manuscripts of the religious organiza-
tion Dadupanth. Kabir is the best
known of the sants, an umbrella term
for a group of central and northern
Indian poet-saints who share several
concepts: stress on individualized, inte-
rior religion leading to a personal expe-
rience of the divine; disdain for external
ritual, particularly image worship; faith
in the power of the divine Name; and a
tendency to ignore conventional caste
distinctions. Of all the sants, Kabir is the
most iconoclastic with regard to estab-
lished religious practices and authori-
ties. He invariably emphasizes the need
for individual searching and realization.
Given the content of Kabir’s message,
it is notable that the Bijakis the scrip-
ture of the Kabirpanth, a religious com-
munity claiming to be his followers.
Certainly Kabir himself would have con-
demned the notion of making him the
founder of anything, or of his verses
gaining the authority of a scripture. In
content, the Bijakcontains verses of
varying types: short epigrams that have
become proverbial wisdom, longer stan-
zas in the chaupaiform, and shorter
two-line verse (doha). Linguistic fea-
tures identify the Bijakas belonging to
the eastern part of the Hindilanguage
region, hence its common name as the
“eastern” recension. For translations of
the text itself, see Linda Hess and
Shukdev Singh (trans.), The Bijak of
Kabir, 1983.Bijakshara
(“seed syllable”) In the esoteric ritual
tradition known as tantra, a bijakshara
is a particular set of syllabic utterances
that is believed to have an intimate con-
nection with a deity—either as a way of
gaining access to the god’s power or as
the subtlest form of the deity itself.
These syllables are usually meaningless
sounds (for example, aum, hrim, klim),
although at times they may contain
actual words. Bijaksharas are important
not for their meaning but for the power
inherent in the sounds themselves. The
transmission of such seed syllables and
the entitlement (adhikara) to use them
is an important feature of tantric initia-
tion(diksha). For further information
see Swami Agehananda Bharati, The
Tantric Tradition, 1977; and DouglasBijak