Who is "Buddha Boy"? (video)

George Saunders, The Incredible Buddha Boy (GQ, May 2006); Discovery Channel; Zaron Burnett III (Mel Magazine, Feb. 2019); Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

How it all began: Buddha Boy under a giant pipal tree in Nepal (Gopal Chitrakar/Reuters)

The year is 2005 when National Book Award-winning author George Saunders travels to Kathmandu, Nepal to meet “Buddha Boy,” as the Western press had dubbed him, born Ram Bahadur Bomjon.

Saunders treks deep into the jungle far from the Himalayan range in the north of this tiny country on an adventure for GQ magazine. He reports back that he feels he’s experienced a miracle, a divine presence. He published his account in GQ:

We reach the inner fence: as far as anyone is allowed to go. At this distance, I can really see him. His quality of nonmotion is startling. His head doesn’t move. His arms, hands, don’t move. Nothing moves. His chest does not constrict/expand with breathing. He could be dead. He could be carved from the same wood as the tree.

He is thinner than in the photos; that is, his one exposed arm is thinner. Thinner but not emaciated. He still has good muscle tone. Dust is on everything. His dusty hair has grown past the tip of his nose. His hair is like a helmet. He wears a sleeveless brown garment.

His hands are in one of the mudras in which the Buddha’s hands are traditionally depicted. He is absolutely beautiful: beautiful as the central part of this crèche-like, timeless vignette, beautiful in his devotion.

I feel a stab of something for him. Allegiance? Pity? Urge-to-Protect? My heart rate is going through the roof.

Buddha Boy after months (Riedel Jeff/GQ)

Later, George Saunders added:

Soon I’m sitting canoe-style between Lama One and Lama Two. I can hear Lama One mumbling mantras under his breath. Suddenly he turns to me, again makes the gesture, points into the Enclosure.

I get it now: The gesture means, “Look, there is something emanating from the boy’s forehead!”

Do I see it? Actually, I do: Vivid red and blue lights (like flares) are hovering, drifting up from approximately where the boy is sitting, as if borne upward on an impossibly light updraft.

“What the heck,” I think. My face goes hot. Is this what a miracle looks like, feels like, in real time?

I close my eyes, open them. The lights are still drifting up.

A noise begins, a steady drum-like thumping from inside the Enclosure, like an impossibly loud heartbeat.

For several concept-free seconds, it’s just: colored up-floating lights and the boy’s amplified heartbeat.

DOCUMENTARY

There is a Discovery Channel documentary, The Boy With Divine Powers, filmed roughly at the time Saunders visited.

It discusses the doctors and medical professionals who had come to confirm whether this teen boy really had subsisted -- as a breatharian without food, water, or sleep -- under a tree for 10 months.

• Read George Saunders' whole account in GQ
• Zaron Burnett III's looks into it for Mel Magazine
• What Buddha Boy wants to tell humanity (2017)
• Where's Buddha Boy today? (maitriya.info/en)