Why were stupas built?

The Buddha was not worshipped as a god during his lifetime. After his death, his followers needed a way to keep his memory alive and express their devotion. This led to the building of stupas.

A stupa is a mound-like structure. The tradition of building such mounds may have existed before Buddhism, but it was Buddhism that gave them a new and lasting meaning. What made a stupa sacred was what lay inside it: relics of the Buddha. These relics could be his bodily remains — fragments of bone, teeth, or ashes — or objects he had used, such as his alms bowl or robes. Because these relics were considered sacred, the entire stupa came to be venerated as an emblem of both the Buddha and Buddhism.

The Ashokavadana, a Buddhist text, tells us that Emperor Ashoka played a key role in spreading this practice. According to the text, Ashoka took the Buddha’s relics and divided them into portions. He sent these portions to every important town in his empire and ordered the construction of stupas over them. This was a deliberate act: by placing relics in towns across the land, Ashoka made the Buddha’s presence felt everywhere and tied Buddhism to the geography of his kingdom.

By the second century BCE, a number of stupas had already been built. The textbook mentions three important examples:

• Bharhut (in present-day Madhya Pradesh)
• Sanchi (also in Madhya Pradesh)
• Sarnath (near Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh) …