Buddhist Monasteries of South Asia and China

Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Asian History, 2019

Two themes provide unity to Buddhism across Asia: one is the image of the Buddha that has been venerated by communities in all regions through time; and the other is the worship of the relics. Both these practices brought the monastics and the laity together in celebration of the eightfold path shown by the Buddha in the middle of the first millennium BCE, which was founded on wisdom, morality and concentration. The challenge is to trace the historical trajectory for the expansion of Buddhism across Asia, as donations were made and patronage provided both by the laity and the monastics in the building of stupas and relic shrines. Huge images of the Buddha were transported across South Asia and installed as evident from inscriptions recording details of the patron and the date of installation. This underscores the active participation and mobility of learned monks and nuns in the stupa and relic cults across Asia as new monastic complexes developed and the histories of these complexes came to be recorded. The introduction of archaeology in Asia from the eighteenth century onward, which was then under colonial rule and the search by European powers for the ancient civilizations of their colonized territories accelerated the search for sites associated with the ‘historical’ Buddha and the religion that he introduced, which was termed ‘Buddhism’. Several factors need to be considered, such as the role of European missionaries who first wrote about this new religion of Asia, academics who studied manuscript collections from the colonies in libraries in Europe, and archaeologists who sought answers to new discoveries in ancient texts. A good example of this is the work of Alexander Cunningham the newly appointed Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861 who used the Sri Lankan Chronicle the Mahavamsa dated to the 4th century CE as the basis for understanding the archaeology of monastic complexes that he discovered in north India in a period that predates the Mahavamsa by at least six hundred years. Cunningham’s reliance on texts far removed from the region under study and his faith in the veracity of accounts by Chinese pilgrims who visited India in the 5th to 7th centuries led to several controversial results, which have been rectified by more recent archaeological research, as discussed in this paper.

2018

The paper would aim to look at the historical, conceptual and monastic development of the Buddhist monasteries (mahāvihāras), built under the aegis of the Pala and Bhaumakara rulers (8th-12th century CE) of the Eastern India, while outlining the cultural, artistic and architectural interrelationships which these religious edifices shared with the contemporaneous Buddhist buildings of Southeast Asia. These edifying buildings stood the test of time as the cultural landmarks reminiscent of the religious, pedagogic and artistic endeavours and served an archetypal model for the Southeast Asian traditions. While serving as institutional strongholds, these monastic universities upheld the idea of faith, peace and harmony. Grounded on the ideals of Vajrayana Buddhism, they ministered the notion of all-inclusiveness, gradually eliminating the patriarchy and misogyny as seen in their radical approach. They also efficaciously manifested the notion of geographical diffusionism by encouraging th...

Monasteries, Mountains, and Maṇḍalas: Buddhist Architecture and Imagination in Medieval Eastern India, 2024

Around the turn of the ninth century, architects in eastern India began to build vast new Buddhist "mega monasteries" (mahāvihāra) underwritten by gifts in land from royal patrons and their subordinates. These monumental "temple-monastery" complexes were organized around new types of "stūpa-temples" built on an unprecedented scale to shelter multiple images of the Buddha and the bodhisattvas. This new kind of architecture amalgamated several long-established architectural ideas and reorganized the Buddhist monastery in support of a new mode of production. I argue that these temple-monasteries constituted a response to a moment of significant political tumult and social change-as rival dynasties fought for supremacy over the subcontinent and its cosmic imaginary and religious groups competed for mastery of a nascent tantric system-in the shadow of an emergent "Temple Hinduism." My dissertation writes a history of Buddhist architecture in India after the eighth century around this new mode of royal temple-monastery. I trace the physical histories of four buildings and built environments at Nalanda, Antichak, Paharpur, and Mainamati in India and Bangladesh over the centuries between c. 750 and 1250. I produce new architectural illustrations, maps, and digital models to visualize and resolve significant problems in their history and to describe a coherent typology and periodization of Buddhist architectural production in medieval eastern India for the first time. iii In a period of rapid and significant architectural invention after c. 750, I argue, architects, patrons, and religious experts used architectural design and production to support the overlapping and divergent ritual and visionary agendas and to satisfy the spiritual and mundane aspirations of an increasingly diverse Buddhist community (saṃgha). The significance of this new mode of Buddhist sacred architecture was not limited to its built environment; rather, I maintain that it provided a structuring principle around which a constellation of visual, literary, and religious ideas took shape. This dissertation traces the invention, construction, and renovation of the Buddhist temple-monastery across eastern India, and into the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. Alongside this material history, I plot the transformation of a developing Buddhist architectural imaginary over time, through which the Buddhist monastery-the paradigmatic ascetic residence-was retold as a charismatic and otherworldly domain with geo-cosmic referents. The Buddhist monastery was transformed, I argue-in a single moment and gradually, over time-from a mundane monastic community to an assembly atop the cosmic mountain. And the path and goal of Buddhism were rearticulated as a hierarchy of sight and access to a transcendent architecture whose founding king was remembered as the paradigmatic lay patron and a Supreme Lord (parameśvara), a King of Kings (mahārājādhirāja). I plot this trajectory as an architectural history and a movement from monastery to mountain and maṇḍala.

Asian Perspectives, 2019

Asian Perspectives Journal, 2019

Manohar Publishers and Distributors and SAARC Cultural Centre, Colombo, New Delhi, 2017

2020

H-Buddhism, 2022

Commissioned by Jessica Zu (USC Dornsife, School of Religion) Gregory Adam Scott's Building the Buddhist Revival is a remarkable study documenting the material, religious, and social reconstruction of Buddhist monasteries in China from the end of the Taiping war in 1866 to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It is based on a large typology of historical sources, including local and temple gazetteers, stele transcriptions, and Buddhist periodicals-a diversity itself attesting to the major historical changes that occurred in the one hundred years considered in the study-and it also makes use of digital tools to collect historical data. Focusing on a selection of religious sites

Buddhism, Law and Society 7, 2021

In this paper, largely based on archaeological data, I argue that colonial intervention between the 18th and 20th centuries in South and Southeast Asia, not only altered the nature of linkages that had existed across Asia from at least the middle of the first millennium BC onwards, but more significantly redefined our understanding of monuments, essentially religious structures, from being abodes of spiritual power to objects of artistic and aesthetic appreciation. This had far-reaching implications for the study and understanding of the nature of Indic religions and here I focus on Buddhism. The paper highlight changes introduced as a result of colonial intervention in three major monuments of South and Southeast Asia, viz. Bodh Gaya in eastern India, Borobudur in central Java and the Angkor complex in Cambodia.