Document Type

Honors Project

Publication Date

6-5-2024

Abstract

This paper is a discussion of the complex relationship between the Great Boudhanath Stupa in the Kathmandu Valley, and the diverse Buddhist community that surrounds it. I argue that liberative sense experience and movement-encoded cultural knowledge make the community of practitioners a part of the stupa—and thus necessary to any examination of it. My argument is contextualized by a background on stupas and etymology of several Sanskrit and Tibetan terms, and I utilize a framework of religious studies concepts of sacred space and pilgrimage as well as on-site anthropological fieldwork focusing on practitioners’ daily lives. I investigate how the stupa impacts the community (and vice versa), how movement plays a role in religiosity, how the iconography of the stupa engages the senses, and how practitioners understand these sensory interactions with the structure. In particular, I place the Boudhanath Stupa in conversation with Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s essay on Tibetan liberation through the senses. This paper examines how the stupa interacts with the people who create it; not as a static structure or public monument, but an alive, richly symbolic, and quite literal center of religious community life.

Level of Honors

magna cum laude

Department

Religious Studies

Advisor

Constance Kassor

Comments

*This honors project was awarded the 2023 Richard A. Harrison Award.

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