902 sacred sites: Europe own important place in Chinese religion He was expected to speak with the gods on behalf of the Chinese In addition to building shrines on already-sacred sites, people made some sites sacred through rituals and the building of religious structures In India people built stupas, originally tombs of dirt piled in the shape of hemispheres Stupas took on great importance after the death of Siddhartha Gautama (ca 563–ca 483 b.c.e.), who was the Buddha Parts of his body were entombed in several stupas Emperor Asoka (r 268–233 b.c.e.) of India had seven of these stupas opened and their contents divided among 84,000 stupas scattered through India The most important was the Great Stupa in Sanchi, north of the Narmada River in Madhya Pradesh in central India Over hundreds of years, people added to it, coating it in brick, surrounding it with a wall, and building ornate gates alive with sculptures of gods and goddesses A stupa typically had a circular crown projecting around its top The one for the Great Stupa looks like many fi ngers thrusting out horizontal to the ground The crown was called chatra, meaning “umbrella.” The dome of the stupa was the garbha, meaning “womb.” Garbha referred not to a physical birth but to the Buddha’s passing out of the cycle of birth and rebirth into nirvana, a blissful spiritual state in which the soul escapes the pain of life in the physical world The dome was also sometimes called an anda, meaning “egg,” because it symbolized the fi rst egg from which the universe emerged Hindus used the concept of the garbha to create the garbhagriha, a shrine where a person might be seen by a god Hindu shrines and temples often had images of gods inside them, but the Hindus did not believe that the statues were gods, and they did not believe that gods ever actually entered the statues The statues frequently were placed in a shadowy part of a shrine, because it was intended to set an observer’s mind to thinking about the mysteries of spirituality It was this train of thought that could bring a person into touch with a supernatural being This encounter with a supernatural being was darshana, meaning “viewing.” Sacred sites were also built with the intention of inspiring awe in visitors In India, during Asoka’s reign, people began carving sacred sites into large stones At first these were just caves where a monk could sit by himself and meditate Eventually, they became huge temples that are amazing even today The best may be at Ajanta in western India From the 100s b.c.e to the 600s c.e temples were carved into immense rocky cliffs Some temples began in natural caves, but others were carved either from the side of a cliff or from the top down into a cliff Cracks were hammered into the rocks and fi lled with wood that was then doused with water, which slowly widened the cracks as the wood swelled Rock masons carved openings into spaces that became rooms and corridors, with columns and statues The detail work was done by artisans using tools as fine as those of jewelers Walls were then painted with religious scenes The central shrines were often in shadows, with openings allowing light to highlight statues representing the Buddha or gods Both Hindus and Buddhists carved such temples EUROPE BY AMY HACKNEY BLACKWELL Long before the Celtic peoples arrived, prehistoric Europeans created sacred sites by arranging giant stones, or megaliths, in ways that were to them spiritually significant These stones remained standing during Celtic times, and the Celts adopted some of them as their own sacred sites Celts and Germans also found spiritual power in many natural formations, such as groves of trees, mountains, caves, and islands Hundreds of megalithic sites remain throughout Europe, from Ireland to the eastern Baltic area, containing stone structures and graves erected between 4500 and 2000 b.c.e Many megalithic sites were tombs, and human remains have been found in some of them Others reveal no obvious purpose, consisting only of upright stones arranged in a pattern but without burials The most accepted explanation is that megaliths had religious or ceremonial significance Many of them are aligned in such a way that they catch the sun on specific days of the year, which may be evidence that prehistoric peoples used them in sun worship There are several common types of megalithic structures A menhir is a single standing stone Some standing stones are arranged in circles or rows, called alignments A dolmen is a tomb made of several large upright stones supporting a flat stone roof, while a passage grave consists of a corridor lined and roofed with large stones leading to a stone burial chamber Many megalithic tombs were once covered with mounds either of earth or of small stones The earthen mounds are known as tumuli; the stone mounds are called cairns Most surviving megalithic sites are in northwestern France, Britain, and Ireland The largest known menhir, the so-called grand menhir brisé (“great broken stone”) in Brittany, France, stood about 67 feet high before it was broken in an earthquake in 1722 Carnac, another site in Brittany, contains over 3,000 standing stones arranged in straight lines, all erected between 4500 and 3300 b.c.e Carnac also has several tumuli and several dolmens Gavrinis Island off the coast of Brittany holds a huge megalithic cairn that dates to about 3500 b.c.e Inside the cairn a passage leads to a grave chamber constructed of large granite stones The walls of the passage and chamber are elaborately carved with spiral decorations Ireland is home to several similar tombs, the most famous of which is Newgrange, built about 3200 b.c.e Newgrange is especially notable for the way the rising sun of the winter solstice shines directly on a design in the main chamber Perhaps the most famous sacred site in prehistoric Europe is Stonehenge in England, which was built in several stages between 3100 and 1600 b.c.e Stonehenge is a complex monument, and the standing stones that are visible today are only the most recent version of it Moreover, it was at the center of a landscape of monuments that all had some sort