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-Temples and Pagodas give the real exotic and mysterious touch to every Buddhist country.

it wont matter where you are, Buddhist temple and pagodas dominate the rural landscape in Japan, China, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar or Burma, Tibet, India, Malaysia or elsewhere.

In Asia Buddhist temples are in cities and towns, on the banks of a river and sometimes right in rivers and on islands in the seas. A oriental Buddhist temple and pagoda always shows the deep dedication to Buddhism. In recent years people create garden temple and pagodas for decorative purposes.

Perched atop hills and mountains, gleaming golden or glinting white in the sunlight and symbolizing the firm faith in Theravada Buddhism. A Buddhist temple and pagoda is almost always of golden, yellow or white color.

Buddhist temple and pagodas are constantly renovated to get away with the damages of the monsoon floods and to gain merit.

Buddhist temple and pagodas always look more or less the same, thats the same in China, Japan, Tibet, Thai, Myanmar or elsewhere. The main difference is how the Buddha is depicted, the environ of the Buddhist temple and decorations such as snakes and colors.

A Buddhist temple has its origins in the caves used by Buddhists of the very early days in India.

The Buddhist temple has a hollow structure to allows a visitor to enter. With the time and the emergence of different construction techniques the layout of Buddhist temples grew more sophisticated expanding into chambers and

passageways. But Buddhist sacral buildings are not only temples, actually most of the Buddhist religious buildings in south east Asia are not temples, they are pagodas.

A Pagoda or Stupa is a solid structures, the layout is usually square or a with five sides.

Enshrined in a pagoda are sacred relics or a particular image or figure of the Buddha, Buddhist scriptures and precious items.

A pagoda structure is always terraced, three or five times and has a bell shaped top. The terraces of a pagoda symbolize the slopes of the cosmic mountain Mt. Meru, the abode of Hindu gods. The pagoda or stupa is a symbol of the Buddha and functions as a structure encasing relicts.

-There is another Buddhist temple version,

the zedi. This is a rudiment of the original four-square temples. The zedi consists of a pyramidal or polygonal base with niches for images of the Buddha.

Buddhist Temple Layout	Buddhist Temple Cross Section
Pagoda or Stupa Layout	Pagoda or Stupa Cross Section

-For most people, the sacral architecture of Buddhism is synonymous

with its most typical feature, the pagoda, a tiered structure with a bell like top. Pagoda pictures are most typically shown of remote mountain sites which seem particularly appropriate to the silent inner quest, the meditation and renunciation which are characteristic of Buddhist practice, plus in some inner cities like the Shwedagon Temple complex at Yangon and the Maha Muni at Mandalay, plus hundreds others all over Asia.

In China, Korea and Japan the temple and pagoda have a little different picture. It dominates a cluster of buildings which stand inside an enclosure whose wide gates give it the appearance of a walled city. This complex of buildings consists usually of temples and a monastery.

Buddhist temples are usually shared by monks who live there permanently and members of the lay community This is different to the Christian architecture where there always is a distinction between cathedrals and churches which are built in the center of a community and monasteries which are elsewhere.The temple-monastery complex is the product of a long period of development.

Pagoda in northern Myanmar

Buddhist temples at Bagan Burma or Myanmar

In early Buddhism, the religious ideal was exclusively by communities of monks. It was in India, the cradle of Buddhism, that monks and public first began to share monastic precincts. Buddhist temple and monastery were also raised in the Tang dynasty in China during the seventh and eighth centuries AD.

The first Buddhist temples was the burial mound housing the relics of the spiritual master, Gautama Buddha, the "Enlightened One", who lived in the fifth century BC in northern India.

As a cosmic symbol, this stupa was a hemispherical construction surmounted by a mast and surrounded by

a circular balustrade with a gateway at each of the four cardinal points.

Crowning the central temple axis were a number of discs corresponding to the celestial domains of other worlds. Later stupas and pagodas were conical or shaped like a four-sided pyramid. Later still tower-like stupas and Buddhist temples were built also in China.

The first Buddhist communities had neither meditation halls nor fixed abode. The monks lived as wandering preachers of the Buddha teaching who renounced possessions and begged for their food like the Buddha and the traditional holy men of India.

The first Buddhist temples of communal devotion date from the second and first centuries BC when monks in western India began to create cave

Buddha teaching in a monastery at Bagan

pagodas for this purpose.

This type of architecture was so useful and simple that cave temples and pagodas continued to be used in the Buddhist world as well as free-standing temples, especially in central Asia and China.

In some cases, as at Dunhuang in China's Gansu province, a wooden facade was placed in front of the entrance to the caves or the rock was carved in imitation of a wooden construction.

In Buddhist religious architecture there were thus two types of building, the meditation hall, which was a development of the monk's cell, and the stupa or reliquary monument. At first these two types were distinct, but when the temples at Karli and Bhaja in western India were built some three or four centuries after the death of the Buddha, they merged into a single construction.

Two types of Buddhist temple and pagoda architecture, cave-sanctuaries hewn out of the rock and precincts containing temples, a monastery and a stupa, developed in the oases on the Silk Road in China which became focal points of Buddhist culture after the eclipse of Buddhism in India.

Rock-cut shrines such as those at Yunkang in China's Shanxi province and Powintaung in Myanmar are often called "caves of a thousand Buddha's" (a term which distinguishes them from temples in the strict sense) owing to their rows of stone Buddha's carved from the cliff face or just Buddha statues placed into the cave.

In central Asia the Buddhist pagoda is a quadrangular pillar, each face of which may be adorned with a statue of the Buddha, who is often flanked by attendants. Pagodas of this kind express the ancient link, which originated in India, between the symbolic monument and the sacred image.

At the same time, the cave walls were gradually covered with Buddhist art paintings and murals illustrating scenes from the lives of the Buddha.

The cave temple layout has its origins in the caves used by Buddhists of the very early days in India.

The hollow structure of a temple invites the visitor to enter. With the time Buddhist temples grew more sophisticated including chambers and passageways.

Pagoda or Stupas are solid structures, the base layout is usually square or five sided.

The pagoda structure is terraced, three or five times, with a bell shaped top. The terraces of pagodas indicate the slopes of the cosmic mountain Mt. Meru, the abode of Hindu gods. The stupa is a symbol of the Buddha and naturally functions as a protective structure for the relicts.

Enshrined in a pagoda are sacred relics or a special potent image or figure of the Buddha, scriptures and / or donated precious items. One of the most famous pagoda is the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar or Burma.

A great pagoda precinct is around the Shwezigon Pagoda at Bagan, Myanmar the pagoda has a magical touch nobody can escape, its just great, I would say its one one the destinations everyone must see during his life, otherwise he or she missed something !

Cave Pagodas

Cave Pagoda

Pindaya Cave Temple

Shwedagon Pagoda

Shwezigon Pagoda

Wat Chalong

- A typical Thai Buddhist Temple is Wat Chalong in Phuket Thailand.

or Chai Tararam Temple, is the most famous temple at Phuket Island.

The Chalong temple show a rather modern styling with a lot of beautiful decoration elements but the basic structure and overall architecture is very similar to Wat Benchamabopit (19 century) in Bangkok, it also show some structure elements from originally Khmer architecture.

Some other impressive buildings within the temple compound are a showcase of Thai workmanship.

Thailand has also some other Buddhist Temples in Lanna style, mainly

Buddhist Shrine at Chiang Mai

at Chiang Mai. This are very decorative wooden structures who are a real optical pleasure, something different by any means but shine in real Buddhist art tradition of Thailand's northern region.

The left picture shows another Buddhist shrine about hundred meters distance from the temple pictured at right on the other side of the road in central Chiang Mai within the old city still marked by fragments of the old city wall.

Its a masterpiece of Thai workmanship including Buddhist symbols and in particular Thai white elephants which are a very positive symbol in Thailand and Myanmar or Burma.

Buddhist Temple Thai Lanna style

Htukkant Thein and Shite-thaung Temple Myanmar or Burma

Htukkant Thein and Shite-thaung Temple at Mrauk U in north west Myanmar or Burma

Somehow different in architecture are the Buddhist temples of Borobudur in Indonesia, a ninth-century Mahayana Buddhist temple, the Buddha temples at Mrauk U in north west Myanmar, the Thambuddhe Buddhism Temple at Monywa in central Myanmar or Burma and some very unique Buddhist temples such as the Ananda Temple at Bagan and the Mahamuni Temple in Mandalay.

They all stand for a very special Buddhist temple evolution where new architecture and ideas have been implemented aside of the usual pagodas and cave temples of the early days of Buddhism.

Borobudur

Thambuddhe Temple at Monywa Myanmar or Burma

Buddhism Temple

Mahamuni Buddha and Temple

Buddhist Temple Complex at Mahamuni Mandalay Myanmar or Burma

This small Buddhist temple, the Sein Yaung Kyi
Pagoda with beautiful glass mosaics is optically a real treasure, Yangon Myanmar has quite a lot of pagodas but this pagoda is a real highlight. Sein Yaung Kyi means Bright Diamond Hued and it really

Buddhist Glass Temple Entrance

Buddhist Glass Temple Buddha Statue

Buddhist Glass Temple

looks like a mosaic of colored diamonds placed at the walls and some relief.

- One of the most impressive Buddhist temple is the Ananda Temple at Bagan Myanmar or Burma.

The Ananda Temple at Bagan, Myanmar is one of the most impressive Buddhist temple on the planet.

Constructed in the years 1091-1105, a great centric Myanmar Buddhist temple composition.

The Ananda Buddhist Temple is among the 11 biggest temple structures in Bagan, aside of the Ananda Temple other huge temples at Bagan are the Dhammayangyi Temple built in 1165th,

The structural center of the Ananda Temple is the massive square center. In every side of the square center is a niche with a 12 m high Buddha Statue of the last four Buddha: Kakusanda in the north, Konaganama at east, Kassyapa at south and Gautama at the west.

The Ananda Temple has a very expressive silhouette, which also can be seen from far away, rising in a pyramid form, a sacred place where God live.

The construction of the temple structure symbolizes the characteristic Buddhist cosmology, the model of the world and the universe plus the interface between people and the gods. The Temple is built for eternity.

Characteristic are also the colors of the Ananda Temple, inside and outside. Also in the architecture of India, Cambodia, Java harmonizes the color of natural stone and the multicolor painting with the color of the environment - nature and human. The color of the building, as well as his silhouette, is in contrast to the environment.

The Ananda Temple at Bagan Myanmar

Dhammayangyi Temple at Bagan Myanmar. Built under Narathu who reigned form AD 1167-1170, this Buddhist temple is hollow vaulted and the most massive of all Bagan temples. Its strong structure withstood even the serious 1975 earthquake. The temple has a similar plan to the Ananda temple and the brickwork and its enclosure walls is the best that can be found among Bagan's monuments.

Buddhist Temples at Bagan Myanmar or Burma

Ananda Buddhist Temple at Bagan Myanmar

Ananda Buddhist Temple Interior Buddha statues at the wall

Ananda Temple Bagan

Ananda Temple Inside

- Buddhist Temple and Pagodas at Yangon Myanmar
Buddhist Lake Temple	Botathaung Pagoda Yangon Myanmar

Buddhist Temple interior at Bagan Myanmar

Buddhist Temple-Buddhism- Pagoda-
Temples