The Chakrasamvara tantric literature describes not only a visualized mandala palace but an external network of twenty four sacred sites, called pithas, said to correspond to real places across the Indian subcontinent, each associated with specific deities, body parts of the mandala's central figures, and ritual significance for advanced practitioners.
Scholars working on the historical geography of tantric Buddhism, building on identifications proposed by earlier Indian and Tibetan commentators, have worked to match many of these named pithas to actual historical locations, projects complicated by the fact that different traditions sometimes disagree on which real place corresponds to which named site, and by the possibility that some pithas functioned more as symbolic geography than as places practitioners literally visited.
Nonetheless, this external, geographic dimension of the Chakrasamvara system gave the tradition a real-world pilgrimage significance in parts of South Asia and, through Tibetan transmission, in the Himalayan world, where specific mountains, caves and shrines came to be identified by practitioners with individual pithas, layering an esoteric Buddhist sacred geography onto landscapes that in many cases already carried older, non-Buddhist significance, including sites also associated with Shaiva tantric traditions, a further overlap alongside the direct textual borrowing scholars such as Sanderson have documented. This mapping of an interior, visualized mandala onto an exterior network of real pilgrimage sites recurs across mature tantric systems generally, in which the practitioner's own body, the visualized deity palace, and the physical landscape are treated as parallel, mutually reinforcing expressions of one sacred structure.