This week’s meditation session is led by Sharon Salzberg and the theme is Community. The guided meditation begins at 14:20.

While this copper stupa is only a few feet tall, stupas can range in size from a few inches to several stories. They have been used as burial mounds for important religious teachers since before the Buddha’s lifetime. According to legend, when the Buddha passed away, eight princes divided his ashes, with each creating a stupa in his own kingdom. During the third century BCE, the great Indian king Ashoka took the contents of those eight stupas and spread them across eighty thousand stupas, symbolizing the dissemination of the Buddhist religion throughout his empire. Today large stupas still serve as the centers of communities. The practice of circumambulation, known as kora in Tibetan, is a common activity involving circling around a stupa.