The Ramabhar Stupa

A little east of the reclining Buddha, in open ground, rises the Ramabhar Stupa — a great circular mound of brick some fifty metres across, marking the Mukutabandhana Chaitya, the place where the Buddha's body was cremated by the Malla people of Kushinagar.

The eighth week

After the parinirvana, the tradition tells, the Mallas honoured the body for seven days before the cremation, and afterwards the relics were divided into eight shares among the kingdoms and peoples who claimed them — the origin of the first stupas across the Buddhist world. Ramabhar marks the fire itself. What stands today is the weathered core of a once far larger monument, ringed now by lawns and the quiet of the countryside.

Circumambulation at dusk

The Ramabhar Stupa is at its most moving in the last light. Monks and pilgrims walk clockwise around the mound, prayer flags strung between the trees, and the flat land is silent enough to hear cloth move in the wind. We come here at the close of the Kushinagar day, after the long sit at the reclining Buddha — the end of a life, and the beginning of everything that followed from it.