Though the torana is most closely associated with early Indian Buddhist stupa architecture, particularly the famous carved gateways at Sanchi, the freestanding gateway form was not exclusive to Buddhism and was absorbed into Hindu temple architecture as well, where a torana can appear as an ornamental arch framing a temple entrance, a doorway, or even the backdrop set directly behind a deity's image within the garbhagriha, a much smaller decorative use of the same underlying concept of a bounded, sacred threshold.
As Buddhism spread beyond India, the torana traveled with it in varying forms: Southeast Asian temple complexes built gateway structures drawing on the same basic post-and-crossbeam vocabulary, and in Japan the form is most enduringly preserved, transformed and renamed, as the torii gateway marking the entrance to Shinto shrine precincts, a connection scholars debate in its exact historical mechanism even as the formal and terminological resemblance between torana and torii is widely noted.
Within India itself, the torana's decorative carving program at sites like Sanchi is treated by art historians as a uniquely important early visual record of Buddhist narrative art, since these gateways were carved centuries before figural images of the Buddha became standard, using symbols such as an empty throne, a wheel or a pair of footprints to represent his presence instead.