The City as Mandala — From a Temple of Mount Meru to an Avenue of Stars

You walk cities built not as a single temple but as a model of the whole cosmos. From Angkor, ringed by a moat as the cosmic ocean with Mount Meru at its center, to Borobudur, a mandala of stone you climb from the world of desire to the formless, to Teotihuacan across an ocean, its avenue of the gods laid out to the stars — you pass, one by one, three sacred cities built in the image of the cosmos.