Stupa

Form

The classic Indian stupa is a hemispherical mound of brick or rubble faced with stone, set on a circular drum, crowned by a square railing enclosing a mast with tiered umbrellas. A railing surrounds the whole, with gateways at the cardinal points, and a path allows circumambulation clockwise around the base and sometimes at an upper level.

The elements are read symbolically — the dome as the world, the mast as the axis, the umbrellas as the heavens — but the form derives from pre-Buddhist burial mounds.

Function

Stupas were raised over relics: of the Buddha, whose remains tradition says were divided among eight claimants after his cremation and later redistributed by Ashoka; of prominent monks; and over objects of association or texts. Some mark places where events occurred, and some were built as votive offerings, in miniature and in quantity, by pilgrims.

The practice is circumambulation rather than entry: a stupa is solid, and worship is performed by walking round it.

Development

Early stupas at Sanchi, Bharhut and Amaravati are Indian in form. As Buddhism travelled the shape changed — elongated in Sri Lanka, tiered in Nepal with painted eyes, transformed into the multi-storeyed pagoda in China and Japan, and into the chorten of Tibet.

The railings and gateways of the early stupas carry the earliest substantial Buddhist narrative sculpture, which makes them the primary evidence for early Buddhist art and, in their donative inscriptions, for who was paying — largely ordinary monks, nuns, merchants and guilds rather than kings.

Aniconism

On the earliest stupa reliefs the Buddha is not shown in human form. His presence is indicated by an empty throne, a pair of footprints, a parasol, a riderless horse or the bodhi tree. Whether this represents a doctrinal prohibition or a convention of narrative has been debated for a century; the Buddha image appears later, in Gandhara and Mathura, in the early centuries CE.