The Buddha reportedly sketched the stupa with a folded robe and upturned bowl
Asked what a stupa should look like, the Buddha, according to some early sources, folded his robe on the ground, set his begging bowl upside down on it and placed his staff on top. After his cremation, his ashes were shared out among eight such mounds.
The Sanskrit word means heap. A stupa is a solid hemispherical dome holding relics such as statues, metals or the remains of monks and nuns, with no interior to enter. Pilgrims walk around it clockwise, a devotional practice called pradakhshina, so every stupa has a path encircling it. The classic South Asian form sets the dome on a drum above a square base, ringed by carved railings with gateways, usually four, and topped by a mast carrying symbolic umbrellas. Among early Indian examples, none survives in better shape than Sanchi's Great Stupa, in Madhya Pradesh.
Its roots may be older than Buddhism. One theory links it to pre-Buddhist burial mounds of seated ascetics; others point to conical tombs from Phrygia to Phoenicia, such as the 8th-century BCE tomb of Midas. At Dholavira, an Indus Valley site, excavators found brick-built hemispherical tumuli over rock-cut chambers, one coated with pinkish-white clay plaster, which may have inspired later stupas. Early Buddhist burials also tend to sit close to much older megalithic sites.
The eight relic mounds stood at places including Rajagriha, Vaishali and Kushinagar, with two more covering the urn and the embers. The archaeologist Lars Fogelin considers the Relic Stupa of Vaishali probably the earliest stupa known from excavation.
As Buddhism travelled the Silk Road, the form kept changing: it became the pagoda of East Asia and the chorten of Tibet, while Southeast Asia stretched the dome into tall, slender spires. Smaller votive stupas, sometimes less than a metre high and paid for by pilgrims, could be laid out by the hundred, as at Ratnagiri in Odisha.
Source: Stupa
