The Symbolism of the Stupa

Adrian Snodgrass is a scholar of Buddhist architecture and symbolism, and this book, published in the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program's studies series, is an academic study of the stupa, the Buddhist reliquary monument, examining its symbolic and cosmological meaning across Buddhist tradition through architectural and textual analysis. Its strength is Snodgrass's combination of architectural expertise with close reading of the doctrinal texts that explain the stupa's symbolism, treating the structure as a deliberately encoded cosmological diagram rather than simply describing its physical form. Its limit is that stupa symbolism and construction vary meaningfully across different Buddhist regions and schools, and a single synthetic study necessarily generalizes across that variation, so a claim about one specific regional stupa tradition is best checked against a source focused on that tradition.