Stupa: Meaning, Parts, History and the Pagoda

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 1 June 2026 · Updated 10 November 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

A stupa is a Buddhist commemorative monument that usually houses relics of the Buddha or of other holy persons. The classic Indian stupa is a solid dome on a round base, crowned by an umbrella, with the relics sealed inside. Buddhists honour it by walking around it clockwise and by offering garlands and scent. As Buddhism spread, the form became the Sri Lankan dagaba, the Tibetan chorten and the pagodas of East and Southeast Asia.

What is a stupa?

The stupa’s hemispherical form appears to derive from pre-Buddhist burial mounds in India. The first stupas were built to hold the earthly remains of the historical Buddha and his associates, and stupas are almost always found at sites sacred to Buddhism. The dome is massive and solid, and even when a building shelters it, a stupa stands free: it is walked around, not entered. Jains built stupas too, for their own saints (see Buddhism and Jainism). Our glossary has the short definition.

Later the idea of a relic was extended to sacred texts, and miniature stupas became votive offerings throughout Asia. A venerated stupa often became the nucleus of a monastery; for its place in the temple compound, see Buddhist temples and the Thai wat.

The names: stupa, thupa, cetiya, chorten, dagaba

Stūpa is Sanskrit; the Pali form is thūpa. The Pali Text Society’s dictionary traces it to Vedic stūpa, “crown of the head, top, gable”, and defines thūpa as a mound or dome, “esp. a monument erected over the ashes of an Arahant … or on spots consecrated as scenes of his acts”. Bhikkhu Sujato translates it “monument”. English tope, another name for the stupa, comes from Hindi top, probably from Prakrit thūpo.

Cetiya (Sanskrit caitya) is a near-synonym: “a tumulus, sepulchral monument, cairn” in the same dictionary, though caitya can also mean a holy place or natural object, such as a cave or tree, or the shrine that marks it.

Tibetan uses one word for both, chöten (mchod rten), the English “chorten”: literally a support (rten) for offering or veneration (mchod). Sri Lanka’s dagaba, which Britannica glosses “heart of garbha”, is what the Pali dictionary calls dhātugabbha, from dhātu, a relic, and gabbha, an interior or womb.

In Chinese and Japanese one character, 塔, serves for stupa and pagoda alike: 造塔功德經 is The Sūtra on the Merit of Building a Stūpa, while Japanese tou 塔 means a pagoda. English pagoda, which can itself mean a stupa, comes from Portuguese pagode, whose own origin is uncertain.

Where stupas began: the Buddha’s relics

The founding text is the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16), on the Buddha’s last journey and death. When Ānanda asks how to treat the body of the Tathāgata, the Buddha first says the monks should leave the rites to devoted lay people. Asked again, he says to treat it like a wheel-turning monarch’s: wrap it, cremate it, and build a monument at the crossroads.

Here, Sujato’s note observes, the Buddha “is said to be explicitly instructing his followers to adopt the building of monuments from the local customs”.

Four people are worthy of a monument (DN 16:5.12; also AN 4.247): a Buddha, an independent Buddha, a disciple of a Buddha and a wheel-turning monarch. Each monument is there so that many people will “inspire confidence in their hearts” and be reborn “in a good place, a heavenly realm”.

After the cremation, seven groups sent envoys to claim relics, and the Mallas of Kusinārā, where the Buddha died, refused to share them. The brahmin Doṇa averted a fight: “Let us make eight portions, worthy sirs … Let there be monuments far and wide”. He kept the urn; the Moriyas, arriving late, took the embers. “Thus there were eight monuments for the relics, a ninth for the urn, and a tenth for the embers” (DN 16:6.27.11). The line after it, “That is how it was in the old days”, the commentary says was added at the Third Council, Sujato notes.

Ashoka, Sanchi and the early stupas

Buddhist stupas appear to date from at least the time of Ashoka, in the third century BCE. He built a number of stupas and monasteries, and probably the first major Buddhist monuments; in his reign above all, the relics were distributed more widely and housed in many stupas across the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia. Sri Lanka’s chronicle, the Mahāvaṃsa, has him raise cetiyas “on those spots which the Conqueror himself had visited” (ch. V, trans. Wilhelm Geiger). (See how Buddhism spread.)

Sanchi, in Madhya Pradesh, shows the classic form: its Great Stupa (2nd–1st century BCE) is a circular base, a massive solid dome and an umbrella, encircled by a railing and four gateways carved with Jataka tales, scenes of the Buddha’s life and popular mythological figures. 84000’s knowledge base adds that Sanchi’s stupa may have been built by one of Ashoka’s queens and housed relics that may be those of Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, and counts Bhārhut and Amarāvatī, once India’s largest stupa, among those built in his reign. Our greatest Buddhist monuments page gives UNESCO’s account of Sanchi’s phases.

The parts of a stupa and what is inside

Regional forms differ, but most stupas share these parts:

The Sūtra on Dependent Arising praises the merit of building one even the size of a fruit, “with a central pillar the size of a needle and a parasol the size of a flower”.

Relics come first, and not only the Buddha’s: arahants, teachers and monastic officials were commemorated too. Stupas also hold hair, nails and clothes, statues, jewels, medicines, sacred texts and rolled-up mantras and dhāraṇīs, and need not hold bodily remains at all: ritually empowered statues, texts or mantras can represent a buddha. The same sūtra has the builder place inside the verse on dependent arising beginning ye dharmāḥ, “Those things…”, a practice well attested in archaeology and inscriptions. In China, relics went into a small underground room called the “dragon palace”.

What a stupa means

Across its regional forms, Britannica notes, one basic symbolism is retained: “the central relic is identified with the sacred person or concept commemorated and also with the building itself.” The Mahāvaṃsa dramatises it. When the elder Mahinda says the monks in Sri Lanka have nothing to worship, King Devānampiya Tissa asks whether the Buddha has not passed into nirvana; Mahinda answers: “If we behold the relics we behold the Conqueror” (ch. XVII).

Other readings belong to particular traditions and texts; none is a key to every stupa.

Sacred mountains. Britannica’s pagoda entry says the first stupas symbolised sacred mountains.

Body, speech and mind. A stupa stands for a buddha’s body, since it holds relics; for his speech, since in a phrase from the Diamond Sutra a place where a scripture is recited “becomes a caitya”; and for his mind, the awakened state.

The enlightened mind and the path. In Tibetan and Himalayan art the stupa is viewed as “a physical representation of the unseen enlightened mind of a Buddha”, and later “a symbol incorporating both the blueprint for the path to enlightenment and enlightenment itself” (Himalayan Art Resources).

A seated buddha. Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö’s note on stupa proportions opens with this passage from The Treasury of All-Encompassing Knowledge, on the Kālacakra reading:

The five elements. In Japan the five-storey pagoda is common, each storey representing one of the five elements: earth, water, fire, wind and void (sky, heaven).

How Buddhists honour a stupa

A stupa is worshipped by walking around it clockwise. The Pali padakkhiṇa means “to go round so as to keep the right side turned to a person, a mode of reverential salutation” (Pali Text Society). In DN 16 the gesture is made to the living Buddha: visitors leave having “respectfully circled the Buddha, keeping him on their right”, and at the pyre Mahākassapa circles him three times. (For visitors, see temple etiquette.)

Circumambulation remains one of the main devotional practices for Buddhists in Tibet and around the world, sometimes with prayer, song or mantras. The Tibetan canon keeps a hymn to it, The Verses on Circumambulating Shrines, in which the Buddha answers Śāriputra:

The text travelled: Tibet’s imperial catalogues file it under the “Lesser Vehicle”, it was put into Chinese between 695 and 704, and similar verses are recited in Thailand during merit-making. DN 16 also names four “inspiring places” to visit, the four pilgrimage sites.

Stupa vs pagoda: from dome to tower

The pagoda’s structure derives from the stupa’s. In Central Asia the mound grew smaller and more elongated; in China, influence from the watchtower combined with the Central Asian stupa to form a tall, tiered structure, which spread to Korea and then Japan: a tower of one basic storey repeated in regularly diminishing proportions, each with its own projecting roof. Korea’s distinctive contribution was stone, usually granite. Japan’s Hōryū-ji pagoda is wooden, more flexible than stone or brick in a region of earthquakes, and rises round a central “heart pillar” (shinbashira). (See Buddhism in China, Korea and Japan.)

Its role changed too. Japanese pagodas held the Buddha’s relics from the 6th to the 9th century; with the Esoteric sects that role faded, and the Pure Land sects rarely built pagodas. In general the pagoda is intended primarily as a monument, often with very little usable interior space, though Japan’s wooden five-storey pagodas keep a small altar sanctuary on the ground floor.

The line is not sharp: Britannica’s list of Southeast Asia’s best-known pagodas includes That Luang in Vientiane, which it glosses “Grand Stupa”.

How the traditions differ

South and Southeast Asia (Theravāda). In Sri Lanka the stupa became the bell-shaped dagaba. In the Mahāvaṃsa, King Devānampiya Tissa enshrines the Buddha’s right collar-bone in a thūpa, and the monastery he founds there is named the Thūpārāma for it; four chapters (XXVIII–XXXI) follow King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī raising the Great Thūpa. In Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, where Theravāda also prevails, the form is pyramidal or conical (for the Thai chedi, see what is a wat). See Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand.

East Asia. The stupa became the tower pagoda; in Japan it moved, as new sects spread, from the temple’s central axis to an area apart from the main compound.

Tibet and the Himalaya (Vajrayāna). The chorten takes many forms. Tibetan art keeps eight great stupas for eight events of the Buddha’s life: the Birth, Enlightenment, Dharma Wheel, Great Miracle, Descent from [Tushita] Heaven, Reconciliation, All-Victorious and Parinirvana stupas. See Tibetan Buddhism.

Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Svayambhū, west of Kathmandu, is sacred to Newar and Tibetan Buddhists alike and is believed first built in the Licchavi period (450–750 CE). Boudhanath, to the east, is the Tibetans’ Jarung Khashor, “Permission Slipped Out of the [King’s] Mouth” (Adam Pearcey’s translation); legend credits it to a poultry-woman and her four sons in a former buddha’s era. Sources differ on its historical date: possibly the late fifth century, under King Mānadeva I, for 84000; the early 16th century, by the Nyingma teacher Shakya Zangpo, for Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources. Namo Buddha marks where, in legend, the Buddha in a past life fed his body to a starving tigress. See Buddhism in Nepal.

Mahāyāna sūtras and Java. Mahāyāna sūtras such as the Lotus Sutra praise the merit of building and venerating stupas, and in Java Borobudur has the layout of a maṇḍala, centred on a large stupa surrounded by seventy-two smaller ones.

Famous stupas and pagodas

A stupa began as a burial mound meant, in DN 16, to stir confidence in those who come to it; each Buddhist land rebuilt it in its own materials and meanings. To go further, see Buddhist temples, Buddhist symbols, the history of Buddhism and, for walking practice of another kind, walking meditation.