This dissertation examines one particular aspect of the Buddhist world view, namely the idea that the physical world is disc-shaped with an enormous central mountain called Meru. Just as in the West, where the world was once considered to be flat and circumscribed by oceans, the Buddhist conception of the world (sometimes called the cakravala system) at one time represented the main model through which Buddhists conceived of their place within the universe. Predating Buddhism in India, this cakravala cosmology is so ubiquitous that it serves as a unifying theme in Buddhist literature, ritual, art, and culture all across Asia up to the present day, from popular folk traditions to higher levels of esoteric practice.My project has two main goals. The first is to demonstrate the fundamental importance of cosmology to scholars in the field of Buddhist studies, where the topic has historically been seen as peripheral. Analysis of some of the most important occurrences of cosmological imagery in India, Nepal, and Tibet shows that this world-view is so ingrained in the culture that it can become almost invisible, even to the practitioners (let alone scholars)—but this only makes it more important to understand, given its ubiquitous influence. My second goal is to demonstrate the importance of highly interdisciplinary methods in the study of religion and culture, using evidence from such sources as literature, art, ritual practice, and material culture. By recourse to these sometimes disparate sources, a much more holistic portrait of Buddhist cosmology can be created than could ever be attained using only the traditional, “authoritative” sources like scholastic treatises.Based on these paradigms (that the Meru system is both ubiquitous and better understood as a mutable cultural form than a static scriptural ideal), my thesis is that visualizations of the Buddhist cosmos substantially change in different cultural and ritual contexts to express varied content that is essential to each particular circumstance. In a sense like modern maps, which differ according to whether they are depicting the topography of a region or the current weather radar, visual depictions of the Meru system similarly become altered for different purposes, thereby revealing both their broad conceptual importance and the specific ways in which the cakravala cosmos functioned within Buddhist cultures.The first chapter introduces the motivations for this dissertation, along with presenting a review of scholarly influences. The next chapter treats the most important canonical and authoritative textual sources for the Meru cosmology, including non-Buddhist Indian sources and emphasizing the most cited Buddhist sources, including the Abhidharmakosa and the Kalacakra tantra literature. The scholastic conceptions of the cosmos introduced in this chapter will later be contrasted against representations of that same cosmos in art, ritual, and literature. The third and fourth chapters present a direct comparison of representations of the Meru cosmos in two adjacent Buddhist cultural systems, the Newars of Nepal and the Tibetan cultures that range from Ladakh, India through the Himalayas to Western China and Bhutan. The main point is to show that, despite the ubiquity of the cakravala model in Buddhism across Asia and the similar religious contexts in which Meru appears, visual expressions of this cosmology have taken radically different forms in these two cultures. Further, the analysis of Meru imagery in these cultures is broken down into major themes, such as Meru & the mandala, Meru in architecture, and the role of the Meru cosmos in offering rituals, which also serve as bases for comparison. The final substantive chapter is a fairly thorough (but not exhaustive) comparative iconology of Meru cosmology in Tibetan regions, focusing on contextual reasons for iconographic diversity that relate to the themes of the previous chapters and, to some degree, historical development. Major emphasis is placed on the common cosmological murals that frame entrances to shrines and monasteries, including comparison to other cosmological imagery like the bhavacakra. In addition, some preliminary remarks are made on the role of artists and artistic lineage in the variation of cosmological imagery.This dissertation sheds light on cosmology as a foundational element of Buddhist thought, art, and practice that has previously been neglected. A major motivation for this project is its strongly interdisciplinary nature, with a foundation in canonical textual interpretation upon which is built an analytic framework using visual artworks, photographic documentation of rituals, and even interviews with practitioners. This research represents an important contribution to Buddhist studies in South Asia and the Himalayas, where cosmological concerns have not been given the attention they merit, but it also contributes to the study of religion and material culture in general, currently a small but rapidly growing field.