Shrines Thoughts- Ralston Hartness

The reading for today, "What Makes a Stupa," was incredibly fascinating and really resonated with me and my thinking about the relationship between secular memorials and sacred shrines, stupas, or other holy axis mundii. This is a thought and question that has persisted in my thinking throughout the term, but this reading in particular really got me thinking about how, if there are such powerful textual, traditional, and dogmatic elements of powerful stupas and shrines, do very secular memorials and monuments take on incredibly profound and spiritual lives that draw forth reverence, pilgrimage, and offering. In the article about stupas, I was surprised but also intrigued to hear that it was not the dharma relics that made a structure a stupa for many people. Rather, they said that they "looked like stupas." This was a moment of remembering the power of tradition and visual representations of communal ideals in orienting a person's perspective towards something. However, it is clear that countless secular monuments, museums, memorials, and other structures can draw forth equally powerful sentiments of reverence and honor and wonder. While some of them function within a distinct tradition, or pull elements from religious traditions, some are apophatic in their symbolic approach. I am continually amazed by the social and spiritual phenomenon that occurs in the elevation of those memorials to bear potent spiritual status in the minds of countless people.