Buddhist Stupas: Sacred Architecture of the Awakened Mind
The stupa is the fundamental architectural form of Buddhism — a solid hemisphere of brick or stone, capped by a spire, built to contain a relic of the Buddha or an enlightened teacher, and consecrated as a focus of circumambulation, devotion, and meditation. Its form is not arbitrary. The hemisphere represents the dome of heaven; the square base represents the four directions and the earth; the central axis (the harmika and its spire) represents the axis mundi, the cosmic axis connecting earth to heaven. To walk clockwise around a stupa (pradakshina) is to align the body with the movement of the cosmos, to make the self a satellite of the sacred center. The stupa form has spread from its origins in northern India across the entire Buddhist world, transforming as it travels: from the flat-domed Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh to the golden Shwedagon in Rangoon to the white Boudhanath in Kathmandu to the towering pagodas of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia — each a local expression of the same ...