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In Bodh Gaya in Bihar, the Buddha sits inside the Mahabodhi Temple with a brilliant crystal bowl in his lap. The Buddha’s gilded figure is placed on a plinth, inside a glass enclosure, rising more than seven feet above human height. His beautiful hooded eyes are downcast, his eyelids and irises lined with a shade that is the blue of water and bright skies. And his full lips are painted pink and fixed, for all eternity, in a quiet, imperturbable smile.

The Mahabodhi Temple, completed sometime during the reign of the Gupta kings in the seventh century A.D., was built on the site where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment during the sixth century B.C. Early in the morning on July 7, a bomb blast damaged a small section outside the temple. There were three additional blasts inside the temple premises that morning, and five more at other places of Buddhist worship in Bodh Gaya.

The damage was surprisingly small, injuring only two worshippers. Tenzing Dorjee, a Tibetan Buddhist who has been living in India since 1959, was one of the injured. A five-inch-long shrapnel pierced his left foot. Vilas Ga, a monk from Myanmar and a graduate student in Buddhist studies at the nearby Magadh University, was more seriously hurt. Mr. Ga was meditating when the explosion under his bench drove shrapnel into his arms and face.

Nine blasts and no fatalities. Nangzey Dorjee, the secretary of the Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee, smiled and said, “It is a miracle. It is beyond reason.” He drew attention to the fact that one of the bombs had been put under the diesel tank of the ambulance parked outside what is called the Butter-lamp House. But other than shattered windows, there was no damage to the structure. Mr. Dorjee was at the temple when the explosions took place. He was aware of his own happy escape.

Inscribed in red stone outside his office are the words of the Dhammapada: “Do not judge the faults of others nor what they did not do; check what is right or wrong for you to do or not to do.” Mr. Dorjee said that he had no “expectations” from the investigations into the identities of the bombers. He wasn’t speaking with any bitterness; he was simply conveying a spiritual attitude.

On Wednesday, a little after dawn, the police arrived at the 80-foot stone statue of the Buddha, a five minute walk from the temple, and asked all the vendors outside to remove their carts and disassemble their makeshift shops. I tried to find out the reason and was told that the Indian home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, was to arrive in two hours. The terrorists had managed to put a bomb on the statue at a height of about 20 feet above the ground. That bomb didn’t explode and was defused. The Buddha retained his mysterious stone smile.

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Two siblings — Sonu, 13, and Supriya, 8, children of a Chinese-food cook at the nearby Sujata Hotel — were walking together to school. They walk past the 80-foot statue every day. On the day after the blasts, their school had remained closed. Sonu had a theory. “Pakistanis had done it,” he said. “Pakistan had done such things before too.” His sister said shyly she didn’t know what her brother was talking about.

Back at the Mahabodhi Temple, those waiting for the home minister heard that the Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi was also arriving in an hour. Suddenly, among the assembled journalists, there was excitement. Television reporters, microphones in hand, marched toward their cameras.

The number of white Tata Sumo and Tata Spacio cars parked near the temple multiplied. A fire engine drew up the neem tree, and so did an ambulance. Police officers and soldiers from different battalions and in a variety of uniforms and headgear gathered in groups. More officers commenced their inspections, and two female police officers carrying sticks jogged toward the gates of the temple.

The premises were cleared of visitors. Constables from Bihar Police tied a long and heavy nylon rope from tree to tree, marking a clear line of control for the journalists massed on the other side. A bomb-clearing squad arrived, and with them a bomb-sniffing dog named Dimpy. Commandos climbed on to the roofs of nearby shops and stood guard with their AK-47 rifles.

A long wait ensued. One hour turned to three.

There was time available now to exchange news. The Indian Mujahideen, or somebody claiming to be the Indian Mujahideen, had posted tweets claiming responsibility for the blasts. The I.P. address of the Twitter account had been traced to Pakistan, but the language was all mixed up and wrong.

There was further confusion. The young men and women who had been detained because they had appeared on the closed-circuit TV footage from the night of the blasts had been allowed to go. They were innocent. Why else would they have approached the guards and chatted with them before planting bombs? The low boundary wall at the back of the temple would have provided a much easier access. Three reporters went to inspect the wall at the back and passed two bearded youth wearing skullcaps coming out of the mosque that shares a street with the Mahabodhi Temple. A reporter wondered aloud, “Have they been investigated?”

Then came the news that two men had been detained. But they weren’t Muslim. They had Hindu names. People took bets on which politician would jump on this new development first.

Manish Kumar, a Patna-based journalist for NDTV channel, predicted that all the politicians in Mrs. Gandhi’s entourage, including Mr. Shinde, were going to bear appropriately sombre expressions. Around noon, Mrs. Gandhi arrived at the temple wearing a creamy-lemon sari and a look of gloom.

She wasn’t smiling. Mr. Kumar, the television journalist, said that Indian politicians have become experts at “terror tourism.” Such attacks provided opportunities for the politics of compassion and outrage, he contended.

Mr. Kumar had also predicted that Mrs. Gandhi would not visit the local hospital where the two injured victims had been admitted. In an hour, after Mrs. Gandhi’s cavalcade had departed, I returned to the hospital where the Tibetan Buddhist and the Burmese monk were being treated. Mr. Kumar was right: Mrs. Gandhi had skipped the visit to the hospital.

In Ward 2 of the intensive care unit, Mr. Dorjee was lying on his side, his arm cradling his head. On the bed next to him, Mr. Ga sat surrounded by half a dozen fellow monks from Myanmar. The monks were taking pictures.

The previous evening, a cheerful Mr. Dorjee told me that he lost his parents as a child when they were making the difficult crossing from Tibet to India in 1959, fleeing from the Chinese Army. Mr. Dorjee was only 8 years old. Once he found himself in India, he lived for a while in Ladakh and then in the Tibetan colony in Mankot village, Uttarakhand, until 1967. For more than a quarter century, from 1976 to 2002, Mr. Dorjee served as an infantryman in the Indian Army. Since his retirement, he has been working as a staff supervisor in a Tibetan monastery in Bodh Gaya.

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For the past eight years, Mr. Dorjee has prayed at the Mahabodhi Temple from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. When asked about his prayers, Mr. Dorjee said he prayed for world peace.

On the next bed, Mr. Ga communicated in monosyllables with fellow monks. His face was swollen with shrapnel wounds. His eyes were red with conjunctivitis and his right ear hurt. Mr. Ga’s arms and hands were covered in blood-stained bandage.

A senior investigating official, who didn’t want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that the bomb blasts had a possible link with Myanmar. Last October, after the bomb blasts in Pune, an operative from the Indian Mujahideen had been arrested by the police. The arrested man had revealed that his group intended to attack Bodh Gaya to avenge the violence against Muslims in Myanmar by Buddhist extremists.

Could the official be certain of the Myanmar connection? The investigating official said, “If I threaten you today and three days later you are found dead, I am the prime suspect.” There wouldn’t be grounds for certainty, he said, but there would be reason to forcefully pursue a particular line of investigation.

Under the current circumstances, however, with the parliamentary elections around the corner in 2014, “everyone is being coy,” the official said. The ruling party would be happy if a Hindu extremist was arrested and the opposition would like to blame a Muslim outfit, he said.

I asked Mr. Ga if the killings of Muslims in Myanmar could possibly have led to the bomb attacks in Bodh Gaya. “No,” he said. Was he angry at what had happened? “No,” he repeated. Was he at peace? “Yes,” he said.

Amitava Kumar is the author of “A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna,” to be released this month by Aleph Book Company. He is a professor of English at Vassar College in New York.