Amitābha Buddha — West-direction of Pure Land

Amitābha at Bodhnath

The Buddha of Infinite Light and the stupa of Kathmandu

Amitābha (Amitāyus) is the Dhyāni Buddha of the west, the Buddha of Infinite Light, and the buddha of the Pure Land Sukhāvatī. In the five-buddha mandala he heads the Amithābha family, is of red colour, and his virtue is the "discriminating wisdom" that distinguishes phenomena without grasping at them. Alongside him is Avalokiteśvara/Amitāyurdhāna in the same land, and the two functions — the buddha's own birth and the bodhisattva's guidance of beings — are often collapsed in popular accounts; keeping them apart is a correction the tradition itself makes.

Bodhnāth (Boudhanath), a five-storeyed caitya in mandala form in Kathmandu, is the principal Newar and Tibetan stupa of the valley. Tibetan Buddhists call it Cho Wo Rinpoche; the Newar tradition associates it with the Licchavi-period religious landscape of the Kathmandu valley, and the shrine has been served for centuries by both Newar bhajñ communities and Tibetan lamas, who live in monasteries around the stupa. The kora — circumambulation — is made clockwise by Newar devotees and anticlockwise by Tibetans, following their different canonical orientations, and both are done constantly through the day. The stupa was badly damaged in the 2015 Nepal earthquake, along with the sūra around it, and was restored with external assistance and reopened in 2016; the restoration was itself a contested episode, and a full account of it should be sourced before it is described here.

The stupa's presence in Kathmandu matters for the Amitābha question because it is one of the principal places in the Himalayan world where the Pure Land is ritually approached — through circumambulation, through the dhāraṇī, through the offering of lamps — rather than only described. Whether the stupa contains relics is a question that has been asked and answered in the affirmative by some traditions and left open by others; this entry does not claim relics.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism — for the Dhyāni Buddhas and the Pure Land.
• The Sukhāvatī literature — Larger Sukhāvatī Sūtra, Lotus Sūtra, and the Tibetan Amitāyurdhyāna sūtra (work level; no chapter cited here).
• A monograph on Newar (khat) Buddhist ritual and the Tibetan monasteries of Kathmandu — a specific title and author must be supplied by a guardian; none is currently held in this corpus, and none is invented here.
• The 2015–2016 restoration of Bodhnath is described from press reporting only; a conservation or heritage report is required before the reconstruction claims are repeated as fact.