The Stupa

Long before the Buddha, peoples of the Indian subcontinent raised earth mounds over the remains of chiefs and holy men. Buddhist texts take up this custom at the very end of the Buddha’s life. According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the Buddha told his followers that his remains should be honoured like those of a universal king, enshrined in a stupa at a crossroads. After his cremation, the account continues, his relics were divided among eight claimants, and ten stupas were built over the relic portions, the vessel and the embers.

The emperor Ashoka, who ruled most of the subcontinent in the third century BCE and became a patron of Buddhism, is remembered in tradition as the great builder of stupas. The legend that he opened the original mounds and redistributed the relics among 84,000 new monuments cannot be taken literally, but Ashokan pillars and brick cores at several sites, including Sanchi, show that he sponsored Buddhist building across his empire. Over the next centuries kings, merchants, monks and nuns enlarged these mounds and added railings, gateways and sculpture.

Sanchi, on a hill in central India near the ancient city of Vidisha, preserves the best example of this early phase. The Great Stupa’s Ashokan brick core was doubled in size and faced with stone around the second century BCE, and its four richly carved gateways followed around the turn of the era. Other early sites, such as Bharhut in central India and Amaravati in the south, survive mainly as sculpture in museums. Sanchi was abandoned in the medieval period, rediscovered by British officers in 1818 and restored in the early twentieth century under John Marshall.

The stupa was not an exclusively Buddhist form. Jains also built stupas in the early centuries, and excavations at Kankali Tila in Mathura uncovered the remains of a Jain stupa with carved railings much like Buddhist ones. Over time, however, the stupa became the defining monument of Buddhism, while Jain worship came to centre on temples with images. In the northwest of the subcontinent, in Gandhara, stupas grew taller, rising on square, decorated bases and surrounded by monasteries, a form that pointed the way to the towers of Central and East Asia.

A stupa is not a hall for gatherings but an object of veneration. In Buddhist understanding the relics within carry the presence and power of the awakened one, and the monument itself recalls his final release, his parinirvana. Over time the stupa was also read as a map of the path to awakening and a model of the cosmos, with the dome as the world and the mast rising through the heavens. Scholars such as Adrian Snodgrass have traced these layers of symbolism.

The main act of worship is the clockwise walk around the monument. Pilgrims circle once or many times, reciting verses or mantras, and leave flowers, lamps, incense and small gifts at its base. Early inscriptions show that lay people and monastics alike paid for parts of stupas to earn merit, often dedicating that merit to their parents or to all beings. Gregory Schopen has shown how closely early monasteries were tied to the cult of relics, contradicting the older image of monks interested only in texts and meditation.

Stupas are built at every scale. Great monuments stood at the sites of the Buddha’s birth, awakening, first sermon and death, drawing pilgrims from across Asia. Monasteries raised stupas over the remains of their own teachers, and pilgrims dedicated small votive stupas, some no larger than a hand. Not every stupa holds bodily relics: many enshrine verses of scripture, considered the Buddha’s teaching embodied, while others commemorate events.

In the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions the stupa came to be understood as a symbol of the Buddha’s awakened mind, and building, repairing or even circling one was held to bring great merit. Tibetan Buddhism recognises eight classic types of chorten, each recalling a major event of the Buddha’s life, from his birth to his final passing. Consecrating a new stupa is an elaborate ceremony, in which the hollow core is filled with relics, scriptures, prayers and offerings before it is sealed, and a central wooden or metal axis, the “life-tree”, may be set up inside.

As Buddhism spread, the stupa changed shape while keeping its meaning. In Sri Lanka, where it is called a dagoba or chetiya, the dome often takes a bell or bubble form. The great stupas of Anuradhapura, such as the Ruwanwelisaya and the Jetavanaramaya, were among the largest structures of the ancient world, the latter built of brick to an original height that scholars put at over 100 metres.

In the Kathmandu valley the stupas of Boudhanath and Swayambhunath have painted eyes on all four sides of the harmika, gazing out over the land. Tibetan chortens raise the dome on stepped bases and crown it with a tall spire of thirteen rings, symbolising the stages towards awakening. In Myanmar the gilded zedi, of which Yangon’s Shwedagon is the most famous, tapers into a slender spire, and the related chedi of Thailand takes a similar bell shape.

In Java the ninth-century monument of Borobudur turned the stupa into a whole mountain of terraces, lined with relief panels and crowned by circular platforms carrying 72 perforated stupas around a central one. Further east, in China, Korea and Japan, the stupa met native traditions of multi-storeyed timber towers and became the pagoda, where a small stupa form often survives as the spire on top. In modern times new stupas continue to rise, from monastery chortens in the Himalayas to the white Peace Pagodas built by the Japanese order Nipponzan Myōhōji in many countries, among them the one in Battersea Park, London, opened in 1985.