Stupa

The stupa is older than Buddhism. Cairns were raised in ancient India over the remains of kings and heroes, and the stupa's architecture grew out of the pre-Buddhist grave mound. In the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the Buddha tells Ananda that a stupa should be raised for him at a crossroads, as for a universal monarch, and names four kinds of person worthy of one: a Buddha, a paccekabuddha, a disciple of a Buddha and a universal monarch. After his cremation, the same text says, his relics were divided into eight equal portions, "so it came about that there were eight stupas for the relics, a ninth for the urn, and a tenth for the ashes". In the earliest Buddhist reliefs the stupa is one of the signs that stand for the Buddha, who is not shown himself: Foucher connects it with Kushinagara, the place of his death, and Grünwedel with the stupas raised in his memory. Alice Getty (1914) describes the form that followed: a square base of several steps, a dome, and a spire carrying five to twelve discs, one above another, which stand for parasols as signs of authority. As stupas developed, she writes, the base and the spire grew at the expense of the dome.