Footsteps of the Buddha in Google Earth

[Note: Footsteps of the Buddha now has it's own web page! This blog entry contains old information. Please check out the new web page here!]

Today is Visakha Puja (Vesak), otherwise known as Buddha Day or the day of the Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and passing away. Actually, the day is either today (May 19th, 2008) or tomorrow depending on who's lunar calendar reckoning you're using.

A couple of days ago I started working on a tour of the Buddha's life in Google Earth and, even though I wouldn't consider it to be 100% complete yet, I thought I'd release it today to commemorate the occasion.

So I present to you Footsteps of the Buddha for Google Earth. Google Earth is free and can be downloaded here. Please let me know if any of the locations are wrong or if there's a more correct chronological order.

[EDIT: Please visit the new web site here.]

If you stop the playback and click on the location, a description will appear which, for many places, begins with a sutta excerpt of something that the Buddha said in that location or about his life in that location. Descriptions also contain links to sources of material included in the descriptions.

Again, please let me know if you have any suggestions, places to add, or corrections of any sort. All help with this will be greatly appreciated. You can either leave comments in this post or send email to the address listed in the description in Google Earth (which is also visible in the photo above.)

Have a Happy, Compassionate, Sympathetic, and most importantly Equanimous Visakha.