Boudha Stupa
Buddhist stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal

Boudha Stupa (Nepali: बौद्ध; Newari: खास्ति चैत्य), Boudhanath Stupa (Standard Tibetan: བྱ་རུང་ཁ་ཤོར།, Wylie: bya rung ka shor), also known as Khasti Chaitya or Khāsa Chaitya, is a stupa and major spiritual landmark seen as the embodiment of the enlightened mind of all the Buddhas, located in Boudha, within the city of Kathmandu, Nepal. Located in the northeast of Kathmandu Valley and originally surrounded by rice paddies, the stupa is said in one text to have given birth to Tibetan Buddhism. It is believed to contain consecrated substances, and its layout as a massive mandala makes it the largest spherical stupa in Nepal and one of the largest in the world.
The present structure was most likely built in the 14th century, although Newar chronicles mention the construction of a stupa here as early as the 5th century. In 1979 the Boudha Stupa was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The stupa's consecrated body relics include bone pieces held to be those of Kassapa Buddha and of Shakyamuni Buddha, together with dharmakaya relics, dharma relics, cloth relics, and body, speech, mind, mind qualities, and activity representations among its other relics. It is located on the ancient trade route from Tibet to India which enters the Kathmandu Valley by the village of Sankhu in the northeast corner and continues to the ancient and smaller stupa of Chabahil named Charumati Stupa, often called "Little Boudhanath". The route then turns directly south, heading over the Bagmati River to Lalitpur and the ancient Malla Kingdom in Patan. Tibetan merchants have rested and offered prayers at Boudha Stupa for many centuries.
Following the 1959 Tibetan uprising, a large number of the Tibetan refugees migrated to Nepal and settled around the stupa in Boudha.
“Boudha Stupa” enters the record as buddhist stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Boudha, Stupa and Buddhist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q889902. Authority coordinates are 27.721, 85.362. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boudha Stupa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.