Meru (Sumeru) stands at the center of Puranic and Buddhist cosmography: 84,000 yojanas high, surrounded by concentric seas and continents, with Indra's city on its summit and the pole star fixed above. Temples from Borobudur to Angkor were built as its scale models.
The geographic temptation: believers have placed Meru at the North Pole, in the Himalayas, under the earth, tying it to Hyperborea and Agartha. The texts treat it as cosmic architecture, not a trekking destination, but the hunt never stops.
Eliade's reading: every sacred center, temple, ziggurat, mosque, home altar, is a local Meru, the axis mundi where worlds meet. The mountain never needed to exist; the human requirement for a center did, and Meru is the requirement given altitude.
Is Meru a geography that failed, or a geometry that succeeded?