Stupas are enclosed by a railing that provides a path for ritual circumambulation. They attract pilgrims from far and wide who come to experience the unseen presence of the Buddha. Such stupas constitute the central monument of Buddhist monastic complexes. The cremated relics of the Buddha were divided into several portions and placed in relic caskets that were interred within large hemispherical mounds known as stupas. When he died, his body was cremated, as was customary in India. The Buddha spent the remaining forty years of his life preaching his faith and making vast numbers of converts. And it is their own karma-the sum total of deeds, good and bad-that determines the circumstances of a future birth. Humans are born many times on earth, each time with the opportunity to perfect themselves further. For most beings, nirvana lies in the distant future, because Buddhism, like other faiths of India, believes in a cycle of rebirth. Buddhism proposes a life of good thoughts, good intentions, and straight living, all with the ultimate aim of achieving nirvana, release from earthly existence. His is the Middle Path, rejecting both luxury and asceticism. He was known henceforth as the Buddha, or “Enlightened One.” He then sat down in yogic meditation beneath a bodhi tree until he achieved enlightenment. Giving up the pleasures of the palace to seek the true purpose of life, Siddhartha first tried the path of severe asceticism, only to abandon it after six years as a futile exercise. It was the latter conquest that came to pass. His was a divine conception and miraculous birth, at which sages predicted that he would become a universal conqueror, either of the physical world or of men’s minds. Siddhartha, the prince who was to become the Buddha, was born into the royal family of Kapilavastu, a small kingdom in the Himalayan foothills. In India, it was the age of the Buddha, after whose death a religion developed that eventually spread far beyond its homeland. It was an age of great thinkers, such as Socrates and Plato, Confucius and Laozi. were a time of worldwide intellectual ferment.
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