Mount Meru

Mount Meru (Sanskrit/Pali: मेरु)—also known as Sumeru, Sineru or Mahāmeru—is a sacred, five-peaked mountain present within Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmologies, revered as the centre of all physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes. It is professed to be located at the junction of the four great cosmic continents—Pubbavideha Dīpa, Uttarakuru Dīpa, Amaragoyāna Dīpa and Jambu Dīpa. Despite not having a clearly identified or known geophysical location, Mount Meru is, nevertheless, always thought of as being either in the Himalayan Mountains or the Aravalli Range (in western India). Mount Meru is also mentioned in scriptures of other, external religions to India, such as Taoism—which was influenced, itself, by the arrival of Buddhism in China.
Many Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples have been built as symbolic representations of Mount Meru. The Sumeru Throne (Chinese: 须弥座, xūmízuò) style is a common feature of Chinese pagodas. The highest point (the finial bud) on the pyatthat, a Burmese-style multi-tiered roof, represents Mount Meru.

Etymology
Etymologically, 'meru' in Sanskrit means "high." The proper name of the mountain is Meru (Sanskrit: Meruparvata), to which the approbatory prefix su- is added, resulting in the meaning "excellent Mount Meru" or "sublime Mount Meru". Meru is also the name of the central bead in a mālā.

Geography
The dimensions attributed to Mount Meru — which all refer to it as a part of the Cosmic Ocean, along with several other statements that describe it in geographically vague terms (for example, "the Sun along with all the planets circle the mountain") — make the determination of its location most difficult, according to most scholars.
Several researchers identify Mount Meru or Sumeru with the Pamirs, northwest of Kashmir.
The Suryasiddhanta mentions that Mt. Meru lies at the centre of the Earth ("bhuva-madhya") in the land of the Jambunad (Jambudvīpa). Narapatijayacharyasvarodaya, a ninth-century text, based on mostly unpublished texts of Yāmal Tantr, mentions:

"Sumeruḥ Prithvī-madhye shrūyate drishyate na tu"
(Sumeru is heard to be at the centre of the Earth, but is not seen there).
Several versions of cosmology can be found in existing Hindu texts. In all of them, cosmologically, the Meru mountain was also described as being surrounded by Mandrachala Mountain to the east, Suparshva Mountain to the west, Kumuda Mountain to the north, and Kailasha to the south.

In Buddhism…