The Swayambhunath of today, with its gilt copper covered shrines, steeple and spire, its encircling prayerwheels, and surrounding plethora of temples and votive stupas, is not the same structure that the chronicles tell us was raised in the fifth century A.D. Only by peeling away the sheaths of successive centuries reconstruction could the original stupa be revealed, for time and natural disaster have taken their toll.
Swayambhunath may be the most venerated stupa of the Valley , but the great stupa of Boudhanath is the biggest. It lies to the easst of Kathmandu, on the old road to Tibet, surrounded by a vital village community and recent accretions of Tibetan monasticism. The Tibetans,who have a seven-hundred-year association with Boudhanath, believe that the relics of Kasyapa, the Buddha of the previous aeon, are enshrined within. The Valley people relate how a famine struck the land in the fifth century.
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