Buddhist sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Buddhist site of any kind recorded in OpenStreetMap — temples and the grounds they stand in, but also stupas and wayside shrines, monasteries, temple graveyards, ruined temples, schools and offices. Just under 135,000 worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by footprint area and coloured by what kind of site it is. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the building's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

This is the companion to the places of worship map, which colours every religion's places of worship by religion. This one takes a single religion and shows everything of it that is mapped.

Click any site to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — the kind of site it is, and its denomination where that was recorded. Where the site has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every site links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Where it is, and how much of that to believe

The top eight countries hold 91% of this map:

| | | | |---|---|---| | Japan | 41,589 | 30.5% | | Myanmar | 34,690 | 25.5% | | Thailand | 20,383 | 15.0% | | China | 12,464 | 9.2% | | Sri Lanka | 5,611 | 4.1% | | South Korea | 5,424 | 4.0% | | Vietnam | 2,788 | 2.0% | | United States | 1,029 | |

Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka being dense is real. These are majority-Buddhist countries with a temple in most villages, and the map is showing you something true about them.

Japan's 30.5% is partly real and partly not, and the two cannot be separated from this data. Japan genuinely has tens of thousands of Buddhist temples, and it is also among the best-mapped countries on earth. Both are true; how much of the 30.5% belongs to each is not something OpenStreetMap can tell you, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Vietnam's 2,788 is low for a reason that is about tagging rather than mapping. A great many Vietnamese religious sites are recorded as `vietnamese_folk` or `taoist` rather than Buddhist, and so appear on other religions or on the Taoist map. Practice in Vietnam does not divide as neatly as a single tag requires, and the tag is what this map has.

China's 12,464 cannot be judged either way from this data.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is, not which religion — the religion is the whole map. All ten kinds appear:

Place of worship — the temple itself. 80.5% of this map.
Marker — a stupa, a chorten, a pagoda, a wayside shrine: something you pass or circumambulate rather than enter. 11.3%, and see below.
Grounds — the temple precinct mapped as its own polygon rather than the building.
Monastery — 5,141 of them, far the largest monastic count on any of these nine maps.
Burial site — mostly Japanese temple graveyards.
Former site, religious building, office, school, community building — each present.

The marker row is here because it was very nearly missing. The rules this family of maps was first designed with had no line for `man_made=stupa` at all — 4,910 objects, the emblematic structure of the religion, absent from a map of Buddhist sites. Stupas, chortens and pagodas now have rules of their own. Beyond that, a stupa is Buddhist by construction — of 4,912 tagged instances, 4,910 say Buddhist — so stupas carrying no religion tag at all are included on that evidence.

The monastery row is the one place in this family where that class is a major feature rather than a curiosity. On the Sikh map it holds a single site. Here it is a living monastic tradition with thousands of houses, and the map shows it as one.

Which sites count as Buddhist

A site is on this map when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `buddhist`, or when it is a stupa, which is taken as Buddhist on the evidence above.

Note what is deliberately not inferred. Roughly 23,000 objects are tagged `building=temple` with no religion recorded, and they are left off every one of these maps rather than assigned to one. Buddhism holds the largest single share of temples whose religion is recorded — about 35% — but that is nowhere near enough to call an untagged one Buddhist, and Hinduism's 23% is close behind. Guessing would have added tens of thousands of phantom sites to this map.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

About 52% of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, and so have no footprint. Rather than draw them all at the smallest size, they are given a nominal, typical size. Whether a site is mapped as a point or an outline is mostly a matter of how thoroughly it was mapped, not of how large it stands.

Temples are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, and the only one on the map. It earns its place here: this map holds five thousand monasteries and nine thousand religious plots, and both cover far more ground than the temples among them. The weighting is small enough to leave the real order intact.

The largest site on this map is the Western Xia Imperial Tombs at 34 square kilometres, recorded as a former site. It is a genuine archaeological landscape, not a mapping error — it is simply much larger than a building.

Sites with no name

62% of the sites here carry a name, and the unnamed ones are shown just the same. A site with no name is one nobody has recorded a name for, not one that is not there.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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