Shrines, Temples & Pilgrimage on Buddhist Resources

Setting Up a Home Shrine

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:24:13 +0200

A home shrine is the most common Buddhist practice after the precepts, and the one most often skipped by Western practitioners who arrived through meditation and treat the devotional side as optional decoration.

The Four Great Pilgrimage Sites

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:25:11 +0200

On his last night, the Buddha named four places that a devout person should visit with reverence and awe: where the Tathagata was born, where he attained supreme awakening, where he set the wheel of Dharma in motion, and where he attained final nibbana.

Buddhist Art and Symbols

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:26:16 +0200

Buddhist art is a system with a grammar. The hand positions mean specific things, the postures mean specific things, the objects a figure carries identify it, and the conventions hold across a startling geographic range — a hand gesture on a Gandharan relief and on a Japanese temple statue fifteen hundred years and six thousand kilometres apart are the same gesture, meaning the same thing.