Mount Meru

Also Known As: Sanskrit Meru; also Sumeru, “excellent Meru”, and Mahameru, “great Meru”; Pali Sineru; Tibetan Ri rab; Japanese Shumisen
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Hindu Mythology, Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It is the golden axis of the world, the fixed point around which the sun, moon and stars are turned and by which every direction is defined.
Role in Mythos: Meru stands at the exact centre of the world-disc and carries the cities of the gods on its summit, with the continents of living beings arranged around its base like petals.
Relation to Humans: Nobody climbs it, because humans live on the continent to its south and the mountain is not in the same order of geography as the road out of the village. What people do instead is copy it, in the plan of a temple, the walk around a shrine, the rice heaped in a bowl, and the imagined channel running up the spine.

Gold, and no proper darkness. A commentary on the Aitareya Brahmana says flatly that the sun never leaves Meru, and the puranic geographers, who disagree about nearly everything else, do not argue with that. They do argue about the shape. One authority gave the mountain a hundred angles and another a thousand; one called it eight-sided, one four-sided, one said it was shaped like a saucer and one said it was twisted like braided hair. They were all quite certain. What survived the argument is the gold, the height, and the fact that Meru is wider at the top than at the bottom, which is the wrong way round for a mountain and exactly right for the seed-cup of a flower.

That flower is the point. The Vishnu Purana sets Meru in the middle of Jambudvipa, the rose-apple continent, which sits in the middle of seven ring-shaped lands divided by seven seas, and the seas are not all water: salt, then sugarcane juice, then wine, then clarified butter, then curds, then milk, then fresh water at the outer edge. Meru rises eighty-four thousand yojanas above the ground and sinks sixteen thousand below it. Four buttress mountains stand against its flanks at the compass points, and on each of them grows a single tree, a kadamba, a rose-apple, a pipal and a banyan, each spreading eleven hundred yojanas and standing up off the ridge like a banner. The rose-apple gives the continent its name. Its fruit is the size of an elephant, and when the fruit goes soft it drops and bursts on the crest, and the juice runs off the mountain as a river. Everyone who drinks it stops sweating, stops smelling, stops ageing. The mud on the riverbank soaks up the juice, dries in the wind, and turns into a particular gold that the Siddhas make their jewellery from.

On the summit is Brahma’s city, fourteen thousand leagues across. Around it, at the cardinal and intermediate points, stand the cities of Indra and the other guardians of the quarters, so that the top of the mountain is a ring of capitals looking inward. The Ganges falls out of the sky onto Brahma’s city, runs right round it, and then divides into four rivers that go off in four directions and never meet again. Lower down, in the valleys between the spur ranges, the Siddhas and Charanas keep their favourite resorts, there are four lakes the gods drink from, and the Yakshas and Rakshasas and Daityas amuse themselves in the folds of the hills. It is a good address. The Vishnu Purana says nobody there feels sorrow or hunger or fear, and that the wicked do not arrive even after a hundred births.

None of this is in the Vedic hymns. Meru turns up in the post-Vedic literature and comes into full flower in the puranas, growing out of an older and simpler idea, the pillar that holds heaven and earth apart. Because the cosmic mountain is a wide-travelling motif, it has often been claimed for Mesopotamia: Robert von Heine-Geldern argued in the 1930s and 1940s that the further-Asian cosmic mountain derives specifically from the ziggurat, and that view became something close to received wisdom. It has not held up well. The Assyriologist W. G. Lambert pointed out that Mesopotamian cosmology cannot be shown to have centred on a peak under a sky-dome at all, and that the image was partly built on a mistranslation. The pillar looks indigenous.

Buddhist cosmology takes the same mountain and puts a rim on the world. In Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosa, Meru rises eighty thousand yojanas out of the water and drops the same distance beneath it, and around it run seven concentric ranges of gold, each half the height of the one inside it, with names that sound like a countdown: Yugandhara, Isadhara, Khadirika, Sudarsana, Asvakarna, Vinataka, Nimindhara. Beyond them is an iron wall, the cakravala, and between wall and ranges lies the ocean holding four islands. Purvavideha in the east is a half moon. Godaniya in the west is a full moon. Uttarakuru in the north is square, and its people live a thousand years. Jambudvipa in the south is shaped like a chariot, and the people there get anything from an incalculable lifespan down to ten years, which is precisely why they, and nobody else, notice that things do not last. The faces of the inhabitants are shaped like the island they live on. Under Jambudvipa are all the hells. On top of Meru is the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, and Indra, called Sakra there, rules it. The whole arrangement rests on golden earth, and the golden earth rests on water, and the water rests on wind, and the wind rests on nothing at all.

The Jains put Meru at the centre too, one hundred thousand yojanas high, the axis of a Jambudvipa exactly one hundred thousand yojanas across, with the rose-apple tree standing beside it. Their Meru does one thing the others do not. When a tirthankara is born, Indra comes down, makes himself fivefold to carry the child safely, takes the infant to the summit and bathes him there. A fourteenth-century Kalpasutra folio in the Metropolitan Museum shows the moment: the baby Mahavira on Sakra’s lap, two gods holding the water jars up and waiting, and a few sharp painted rocks standing in for the whole mountain.

Meru’s one famous piece of narrative trouble comes from the wind. In the story as the puranic compendia carry it, the sage Narada worked on Vayu until the wind resented the mountain, and Vayu came at the summit with a storm that lasted a year. Garuda spread his wings over the peak and held it. Then Garuda went away, the wind came back, and the summit broke off and fell into the southern ocean, where it became Lanka. It is a good origin for an island and a rare instance of anything moving Meru at all.

Because it does not move, everything else can be measured against it. The sun runs its circuit around Meru and the moon and stars run theirs, dividing up the month; the pole star was held to stand directly above the peak, tied by ropes of wind to every other body in the sky. The circling of the sun is why worshippers walk clockwise round a shrine. The temple tower is Meru, capped with the ridged amalaka in which the sun sits like the seed of a lotus, and the word meru is a technical term in Indian architecture for a particular many-storeyed design. Balinese temples call their tiered shrines merus outright. The five-shrine pancayatana plan, one high sanctum with four smaller shrines at the corners, is the four buttress mountains in stone, and it is what you are looking at from the air at Angkor Wat. In Tibet the mountain is offered daily as a heap of rice, or made in an instant by lacing the fingers together with the middle fingers pointing up back to back. In tantric practice the meru is the channel running from the perineum to the space above the skull, and the mountain has stopped being out there at all.

Its limits are the limits of the frame it holds up. Meru cannot be reached by walking, cannot be surveyed, and grants nothing to anyone who has not already reorganised their imagination around it. It ends only when everything does, when the serpent Vasuki wakes at the close of the age and stretches.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mount Meru?

Mount Meru is the golden mountain that stands at the centre of the universe in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cosmology. The continents where living beings dwell are arranged around its base, the cities of the gods sit on its summit, and the sun, moon and stars circle it. It is also called Sumeru and Mahameru.

Is Mount Meru a real mountain?

No. Mount Meru is a cosmological mountain, not a surveyed peak, and no text treats it as somewhere a person could walk to. It is frequently confused with Mount Kailash, a real mountain in western Tibet that Hindu and Buddhist tradition also holds sacred, but the two are separate subjects and the identification is a later conflation.

How tall is Mount Meru?

The figures differ by tradition. The Vishnu Purana gives eighty-four thousand yojanas above the earth and sixteen thousand below it, Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosa gives eighty thousand above the water and eighty thousand below, and Jain cosmology gives one hundred thousand. A yojana has been reckoned at anything from two and a half to nine miles, so none of these is a measurement in the ordinary sense.

What is on top of Mount Meru?

In the puranic account the summit carries Brahma’s city, fourteen thousand leagues across, ringed by the cities of Indra and the other guardians of the directions. In Buddhist cosmology the peak holds the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, ruled by Indra under the name Sakra. In Jain tradition it is where Indra carries each newborn tirthankara to be bathed.

Why are so many temples built to look like Mount Meru?

A temple reproduces the centre of the world so that the ritual performed inside it happens at the centre of the world. The tower over the sanctum stands for the mountain, the five-shrine pancayatana plan repeats Meru with its four buttress mountains, and Balinese temples call their tiered shrines merus. Angkor Wat is the best-known example of the plan.