In some lands a mound erected as a memorial to great leader are called stupas, elsewhere pagodas. In Sanskrit the term is chaitya and in Pali it is cetiya or thupa.

The custom of building such memorials seems to date from very ancient times in India. It is mentioned in Mahãparinibbãna Sutta, the discourse recording the last days of the Buddha, that ten stupas were constructed to house his remains.

One of these is thought still to be standing at Kushinagar in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, making the spot where the Buddha's body was cremated.

Traditional accounts credit the Emperor Asoka with building 84,000 stupas all over his realm, each containing a relic taken from the original ten. Archaeological evidence confirms that extensive construction was undertaken in Asoka's time, two hundred years after the Buddha.

The best preserved of the Asokan stupas are at Sanchi in central India, where the relics of the Buddha's chief disciples, Sãriputta and Moggallãna were found. The boxes contained small fragments of bone in white soapstone caskets, along with precious stones and fragments of sandalwood, perhaps from the funeral pyres. They relics were removed to Britain but were returned to India after it gained independence, and are now again enshrined at Sanchi.
  

Still more astonishing is the discovery of caskets identified as containing relics of the Buddha himself, made at Peshawar in Pakistan, site of the ancient city of Purushapura and at Piprahva in Uttar Pradesh, where a rare pre-Asokan stupa stands. Some of the relics are kept at Saranath, Now some of the relics are enshrined at Sarnath, where the Buddha began his teachings, others are enshrined in a temple in mandalay, Myanmar.

As the Dhamma spread beyond the frontiers of India, the practice of building stupas followed. The largest is the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar. Legend has it that this was the first stupa built to honour the Buddha, established to enshrine the hairs that he had given as relics to two Burmese merchants who paid respects to him soon after his enlightenment. Although the largest and most highly venerated, Shwedagon is only one of countless stupas in Myanmar, which is sometimes called "the Land of Golden Pagodas." The landscape is dotted with these monuments and every village has its stupa, though sometimes of modest size.