108

Buddhist temples across Japan ring a bell 108 times at midnight on New Year's Eve, a practice called Joya no Kane, the strikes corresponding to the 108 bonnō — the earthly desires or afflictions of Buddhist teaching. The broadcast of the ringing is a fixture of Japanese New Year television. The count is shared with the mala's beads and with Chinese and Korean temple practice, which is why 108 recurs across Buddhist cultures that otherwise share little liturgy.

A mala used for counting recitations traditionally carries 108 beads, a convention shared by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain practice across South Asia and the Tibetan and East Asian Buddhist world. The bead count is a practical counting device: one circuit of the mala marks 108 repetitions of a mantra or name.

The top of the FM broadcast band is 108 megahertz (ITU Regions 1 and 2).

The average distance from the Sun to Venus is about 108 million kilometres (the Solar System). Venus has the most circular orbit of any planet, so unlike Mercury this figure barely varies.

108 is sometimes cited as an approximate ratio between the Sun's diameter and Earth's diameter, and separately between the Earth–Sun distance and the Sun's diameter. These are popularised approximations rather than precise astronomical constants, and the degree of coincidence is disputed.

108 recurs as a fixed count in specific named canons rather than only as a general association: the Muktikā canon lists 108 Upanishads, and Sri Vaishnava tradition recognises 108 Divya Desams — temples celebrated in the Tamil Nalayira Divya Prabandham. These are documented enumerations. Explanations offered for why the count itself is 108 are interpretive and vary between traditions, and are not recorded here as fact.

108 is considered a sacred number in Hindu and Buddhist tradition; a traditional mala (prayer bead string) has 108 beads, and 108 recurs in the naming of scriptures, temple steps and ritual repetitions.

In Hindu, Buddhist and Jain practice, a mala of one hundred and eight beads is used to count recitations. The number is explained several ways within the traditions themselves — as the product of nine and twelve, as a count of Upanishads, as an astronomical ratio — and no single explanation is authoritative. That there are competing explanations is itself part of the record.

Presented as belief or tradition, not as an established fact.

A regulation baseball is closed with 108 double stitches of waxed red thread, sewn by hand — the seams have never been successfully machine-stitched at the required tolerance. The figure is fixed by the specification and by the fixed shape of the two figure-eight leather panels, so it is a manufacturing constant rather than a tradition. It is unrelated to the number's religious significance, and the two are frequently conflated online.

Each interior angle of a regular pentagon measures 108°, which follows directly from the exterior angles of any polygon totalling 360: five turns of 72° leave 108° inside at each corner. 108 is also 2² × 3³, and it is the smallest number that is the product of a square and a cube of distinct primes in this arrangement — but the pentagon is the fact a reader can check with a protractor.