Texts About Stūpas

The Avalokinī Sūtra takes place in the city of Rājagṛha, where the Buddha teaches on the benefits that result from honoring the stūpas of awakened beings. The major part of this teaching consists in the Buddha detailing the many positive rewards obtained by those who worship the buddhas’ stūpas with offerings, such as flowers, incense, and lamps.

The Buddha’s disciple Ānanda is on an alms round in Śrāvastī when he notices an immaculate palace. He wonders whether it would be more meritorious to offer such a palace to the monastic community or to enshrine a relic of the Buddha within a small stūpa. He poses this question to the Buddha who describes how the merit of the latter far exceeds any other offerings one could make. The reason the Buddha cites for this is the immense qualities that the buddhas possess.

While the Buddha is residing in the Realm of the Thirty-Three Gods with a retinue of deities, great hearers, and bodhisattvas, Avalokiteśvara asks the Buddha how beings can gain merit from building a stūpa.

The Dhāraṇī for a Caitya is a short manual on the ritual preparation for and casting of small caityas from clay. The ritual has three main parts: a description of the general transformative power of the dhāraṇī, the preparation rituals for the ground and clay, and rituals for the consecration of the cast images. The main dhāraṇī, with the name vimaloṣṇīṣa, “stainless uṣṇīṣa,” was widely used in central and northeast Asian Buddhism, especially in the context of purification, consecration, and inauguration rituals.