Seven Temples

DhammaCakraTra USA

Tiger's Nest (Vajrayana) Monastery is perched on the edge of a 3,000-foot high cliff in the Paro Valley, in the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

Wat Rong Khun (Theravada) Temple is splendidly situated high atop Chiang Mai, the northern capital, which is Thailand's second largest city.

Shwedagon Pagoda (Theravada) is a massive temple complex in Rangoon, Burma. No one knows exactly when it was built but it houses hair relics of the Buddha. Legend states that it is 2,500 years old, but archaeologists estimate that it must have been built (at least in its present form) between the 6th and 10th centuries.

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Chion-in Temple in Japan was built in 1234 to honor Jodo, the founder of Pure Land Buddhism.

In the 19th century, Dutch invaders in Indonesia found massive ancient ruins deep in the jungles of Java. They discovered the complex of Borobudur (Theravada), a gigantic structure built with nearly 2,000,000 cubic feet of stones. The temple has nearly 2,700 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues.

The largest temple in history and the inspiration to countless novels and Hollywood movies: Angkor Wat, Cambodia (Theravada). It was swallowed by the encroaching jungle and lost for centuries until Western archaeologists went in to recover its magnificent history. Not only is it a massive mandala-shaped temple, there are suburbs that once were home to million people with an extraordinary water distribution system to rival the scale of Egypt's pyramids in scale.

Hsi Lai (Mahayana) Temple, Los Angeles County, is the largest Buddhist temple complex in the Western hemisphere. It is designed in the shape of a giant Bodhi leaf (as seen from the air) on a suburban mountainside overlooking the San Gabriel Valley and foothills. Take a virtual tour. (Photo: sacred-destinations.com)