CROSSROADS in religion belong to the general phenomenon of sacred places and are a specific instance of the sacrality of roads. Wherever two or more roads intersect—forming a T or a fork or, most significantly, a junction of two roads at right angles to form a cross—there religious people often feel that the divine has intersected with the mundane. The nature of this divine presence may be positive but is very often negative. Most often, however, the divinity associated with a crossroads is paradoxically both good and evil: It seems that the meeting of different roads attracts and then expresses very well the meeting of opposites within the god.

Buddhist pilgrims travel with pleasure to a crossroads, for it is there that they are likely to find a reliquary structure containing precious remains of the cremated body of the Buddha. The Lord himself stated in the...