Therefore, this particular stupa is emblematic of a literal quality in its representation of the final triumph over the stages of life and death of Buddha. This temple was used to perform religious rituals and was visited as a pilgrimage site. Adherents would circle it with their right shoulders facing it, indicative of a correctness aligned with this religion. Although this and other stupas covered religious artifacts, they served as the means of open air rituals to be performed around them. Both Hindu and Buddhist temples are used to reflect the cosmology that religious adherents believed in. These structures combined elements of visual art (in the form of painting and drawing) with physical representations of conceptions of heaven, gods and goddesses, and of earth's place within the cosmos. Not only were the particular shapes of these structures influential in conveying this representation -- such as the fact that squares represented the earth in Buddhist temples, while ovular circular images were indicative of the heavens and its hierarchy above the other -- but the particular measurements with which they were...
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