The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  Artistic and visual aesthetics in both architecture and sculpture generally arose from the requirements of Buddhism, and many of these were made possible through the patronage of wealthy merchants, guilds and some royal donations. Buddhist religious architecture consisted of viharas, monasteries, stupas and chaitya halls, some freestanding and some cut into rock at hillsides. The idea of a distinctive building to identify a religious location was relatively new. The earlier worship at stupas and chaityas had been on a small scale and Vedic yajnas left few traces. The new architecture would have been determined in pan by religious requirements and the need to distinguish these buildings from domestic architecture. Votive inscriptions also had to be clearly displayed, narratives in the life of the Buddha made accessible together with the message they carried, and the occasional congregations for worship on particular days had to be accommodated, all of which required the structure to be impressively large. Size was also a pointer to power and prestige and this is demonstrated in the increasing size of the stupa.

  The freestanding complex had early beginnings at Kaushambi, Sanchi and Bharhut, but with the spread of Buddhism monastic complexes gradually became more elaborate, as with the magnificent monastery at Takht-i-Bahi near Peshawar. Cave monasteries probably grew out of the initial attempt at seeking isolation, an attempt that the system soon outgrew. Where the location of a monastery was on a trade route in a hilly area, the rock-cut complex was natural, particularly in the western Deccan with its layered volcanic rock, relatively easier to excavate. The ground-plan of the vihara, monastery, was based on its being the residence for a group of monks and therefore evolved from domestic architecture. A large courtyard space was surrounded by rows of small rooms – the cells for the monks. The courtyard sometimes had a votive stupa which was used for the convocation of monks. It could also be used for community meals.

  The origin of the Buddhist stupa, traced to pre-Buddhist burial mounds, was a hemispherical mound built over a sacred relic either of the Buddha himself or of a sanctified monk or saint. The relic was generally kept in a casket that was placed in a smaller chamber in the centre of the stupa. A circular platform provided the base for the semi-spherical drum or tumulus. This was flattened at the top to accommodate a small square platform from which a shaft ran down for the relic casket. At the centre of the square was a post with a series of superimposed umbrellas. Encircling the drum was a fenced path symbolically separating the sacred from the profane. The interplay of all these features has been read as a cosmic pattern linking the terrestrial to the celestial, but this reading could be subsequent to the original intention of venerating relics and embedding the sacred. It was in many ways the antithesis of a Vedic sacred enclosure. Unlike the temporary sanctification of the location of an area for the sacrifice, the stupa was a permanently demarcated sacred place. The burial and the worship of bodily relics were incompatible with the pollution rules of Brahmanism that preferred to dispose of the cremated remains. The relics symbolized the presence of the Buddha or the person being venerated, and the stupa became an object of worship.

  1. Plan of a Buddhist monastery

  Underlining the separation of the sacred and the profane areas was the spilling out of daily life, as depicted in the bâs-reliefs carved on the railings and gateways. Townspeople are shown standing on balconies, curious about passers-by and drawing attention to the cityscape. Apart from ritual features, the separation of the sacred from the profane was probably influenced by the concept of the city and its surroundings. The rampart, moat, towers, palaces, streets and gateways, all depicted in the cityscape of the reliefs, demarcated the town from the surrounding landscape. The barrel-vaulted roofs of buildings, some of more than one storey, are a recognized feature of this architecture. Buddhist narrative art became a genre, with the narratives of the life of the Buddha and illustrations of the Jataka stories. The latter drew on folk-tales that were cleverly woven into the biography of the Buddha and stories of his previous births. These depictions are infused with a liveliness and occasional humour that make them a pleasure to view, while providing incisive vignettes of daily life.

  At each of the four cardinal points there was a break in the railing for a large gateway, giving the sculptors further scope to show their skill. Of the stupa railings that have survived, the ones at Bharhut (now dismantled and lodged in the Indian Museum at Calcutta) date to about the second century BC. The stupa at Sanchi was renovated and enlarged during this period. The renovation was due to the efforts of traders, artisans, cultivators and some members of royalty from the Deccan and central India. The recently discovered stupa at Sanghol (Punjab) had its railings neatly packed and buried in the ground nearby, presumably to save them from destruction by those hostile to Buddhism.

  Because the stupa was an object of worship maintained by a monastery, its location was generally at places where people collected. As was sometimes the case with sacred monuments, the location could have been an existing sacred site, a place of pilgrimage where people would congregate; or it could be at a nodal point along a route where travellers would stop. Among the more interesting of these is the stupa at Amaravati, close to an impressive megalithic burial.

  The stupa itself did not offer much scope to an architect. The gateways were based on wooden prototypes used in villages and towns. The adherence to the themes of wooden architecture was carried through into cave-architecture as well. Huge caves were dug into hillsides, following the plan of a monastery or of a chaitya, hall. The use of the word chaitya is suggestive of the pre-Buddhist sacred enclosures that were a regular part of the ritual of worship in the early gana-sanghas. Where the excavation of a cave was accompanied by a generous donation from a patron, ambitious attempts were made to simulate in a series of caves the entire complex of a stupa, a hall of worship and a monastery, as it had been established in contemporary freestanding complexes. Thus the more elaborate caves, such as those in the

  3. Chaitya hall at Karle: plan and elevation western Deccan, especially at Karle and Bedsa, consist of fairly complicated structures all cut into the rock. Where rock formations permitted such excavations of caves, they occur in large number, for example at Barabar in Bihar, in Orissa and in the western Deccan. Interestingly, megalithic rock-cut caves containing burials and grave furnishings are found south of the Deccan in Kerala.

  At Karle, the cave is entered through a small entrance area, which leads into the hall of worship, rectangular but with an apse at one end to accommodate a votive stupa. The apsidal form is often associated with chaitya halls. A row of pillars on each side separates the nave from the aisle. The ceiling of the Karle hall is in imitation of a barrel vault with wooden ribs, although the representation of ribs here is probably architecturally irrelevant. Cells for monks, in the form of caves, are cut into the hill on both sides of the chaitya. Buddhist rock-cut structures of the subsequent period, at Ellora and Ajanta, are more elaborate in plan and richer in sculpture than the early ones. At the former site, the tradition later extended to Jaina, Vaishnava and Shaiva temples cut into rock. Jaina rock-cut monasteries were parallel in time with the Buddhist ones, and at Udayagiri and Khandagiri (Orissa) many such caves were dedicated to Jaina monks, carrying the patronage of the Chedi rulers.

  Rock-cut monasteries and chaityas did not permit much evolution in architectural style. But they occur with remarkable consistency at sites controlling the trade routes and the passes of the Deccan, such as at Bagh, Nasik, Junnar, Kanheri, Bhaja, Kondane and Karle. A chain of largely freestanding stupa sites and monasteries along the eastern coast also suggests a route. The early centuries of the Christian era saw much artistic activity at Amaravati, Ghantashala and Nagarjunakonda. Although the most striking images were related to Buddhism, in some of these areas there was an emerging interest in representations of other religious sects. The ekamukhalingam, the lingam incorporating anthropomorphic elements, emerged here at this time. Equally impressive in the north-west are the stupa sites along the Swat Valley, or on
the routes across the Hindu Kush at what became the once remarkable Buddhist centres of Hadda and Bamiyan, both recently destroyed. Such locations encouraged monasteries to participate in the trade. Those with endowments of land claimed rights over property, which required maintenance. This was a prelude to what became monastic landlordism in a later period.

  Portraiture had its patrons among royalty, where depictions of kings moved from the coins of the Indo-Greeks to the life-size statues of the Kushanas. Devotees of Jainism patronized a school of freestanding sculpture in which the craftsmen of Mathura were particularly adept. Mathura was also a centre for images of the Buddha, perhaps a parallel to Jaina icons, or, as others would argue, deriving from the Hellenistic fashion for representing deities. In the earlier stupa sculptures there is no image of the Buddha, his presence being indicated by symbols such as a horse to represent renunciation, a tree (ficus religiosa) to suggest his enlightenment, a wheel indicating the first sermon that he preached, and a stupa to evoke his death and nirvana. When the image came to be established as a part of worship, it took on local styles, such as in the portrait statues of the Buddha from Gandhara, Mathura and Amaravati.

  Sculpture during this period began as an adjunct of architecture, being essentially ornamental on gateways, railings and entrances, where deep relief was mixed with some freestanding sculpture. Among the latter were figures of yakshas and yakshis – earth spirits of the status of demi-gods and widely worshipped. These also encouraged an increase in the worship of images. Donations of such images were common among religious sects.Icons crafted at established centres such as Mathura were taken to other places, but very soon each region developed its own style. The earlier sculptors were less familiar with working in stone, being used to the softer media of wood and ivory. But by the early Christian era the sculptures of the Deccan show a mastery over stone. In the north-west, at Jalalabad, Begram, Taxila and the Swat Valley, the preferred stone was schist. In the Mathura region red sandstone found its connoisseurs in the images of bodhisattvas and Jaina tirthankaras. These were the precursors to Gupta sculpture. At clusters of sites in the Krishna Valley, such as Amaravati, Nagarjunakonda, Ghantashala and Jaggeyapeta, both the stone and style change to incorporate the local material and aesthetic.

  Stone was not the only medium for artistic expression, with the use of ivory continuing for combs, the backs of mirrors or inlays in furniture. The exquisite and delicate workmanship in ivory is of a different genre from stone sculpture, closer to the making of beads and fine jewellery that had a head-start in India. The art of the goldsmith, similar in some ways to ivory carving, has few spectacular representations although it is a regularly mentioned activity in the texts. More extensive excavation may help in uncovering the best examples. But doubtless they will still be small in number compared with the wealth of gold in the Shaka tombs of central Asia.

  The art of Gandhara reflected a Buddhist patronage, although other deities and themes were not ignored. The mother of the Buddha resembled an Athenian matron and an Apollo-like face went into the making of portraits of the Buddha. Greek gods were depicted paying obeisance to the Buddha. The range of ordinary people shown in various scenes bore the imprint of a distinct Greco-Roman style, although further afield in India and central Asia stylistic identities became more diffuse. Stucco was a popular technique melting into the architectural form. At Hadda, and later at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, monasteries were decorated with an abundance of stucco images of the Buddha and of bodhisattvas, or statues were cut from the local stone. The magnificence of stucco art at Hadda was a high point of the achievement of local artists. Striking figures of immense size, commanding the landscape, were located in a cliff at Bamiyan. Mother-goddess images were abundant, their worship continuing to be popular both in themselves and as part of fertility cults. Buddhist practice incorporated some aspects of popular religion, evident from the symbolic importance of the stupa and the brackets with female figures sculpted on the gateways at Sanchi and elsewhere. Terracotta figures were plentiful, some being toys, others decorative objects or figures used in ritual. Patronized by a different social category from royalty, they provide a fascinating glimpse of the popular fashions of the time.

  This was also the seminal period for the evolution of the temple which housed images that the Vaishnavas and Shaivas were beginning to worship. Early locations can be traced to Besnagar, Nagarjunakonda, Sanchi and the temple at Jandial near Taxila. The last of these may have been heavily influenced by nearby Hellenistic temples, or may have been a temple that was converted to a fire temple by a local sect. Kushana cult shrines built for divinized kings may also have influenced the initial idea of the temple. Temples tended to be small and inconspicuous compared to Buddhist monuments during this period, focusing on a room to house the image, but they come into their own in the subsequent periods.

  The Intermingling of Religious Beliefs and Practice

  Buddhism hovered in the background of most activities at this time, also supported by the rich and the powerful. Buddhist texts such as the Milindapanha, Mahavastu and Saddharma-pundarika were supportive of the ethos created by the mercantile community. It is therefore not surprising that monasteries were well endowed, with huge stupas being built or small ones renovated, and that the Buddhist Sangha became affluent and respected. Some monasteries had large endowments, employing slaves and hired labourers to work the land and labour on other enterprises. The excavating of these structures into hillsides, or the building of freestanding ones, would have required the monks to be proficient in various kinds of management skills: collecting donations, gauging technical expertise, controlling labour, maintaining accounts, supervising construction, to say the least. Some were given special designations to carry out this work, but most, being untrained, would have merely supervised the labour. They would doubtless have been assisted by lay followers in these professions. The days when the Buddhist monks lived entirely on alms collected in the morning hours became a distant memory for those in the bigger and richer monasteries who ate regular meals in monastic refectories.

  Monasteries were built adjoining a town or on a route frequented by merchants and caravans or pilgrims, or – very occasionally – on some beautiful and secluded location far removed from busy cities. Secluded monasteries were sufficiently well endowed to enable the monks to live in reasonable comfort. In these cases the Sangha was moving away from the common people, which may have diminished its strength as an ideology endorsing social ethics, a development one suspects the Buddha would have resisted.

  Another side to the popularity of Buddhism was its readiness to assimilate local cults. A late Kushana monastery in the Mathura area carried some donations from those propitiating a fertility deity associated with the popular cult of the area, the Naga cult associated with snake worship. This raises the question of whether a site originally of Naga worship had been appropriated by the Buddhist monastery through assimilating the cult. At the same time, places such as Mathura were not only sacred to virtually all the religious sects, but were also cities of political importance and boasted of commercial wealth. All these factors appear to have influenced the choice of a site, although their social functioning could have varied. Whereas the Buddhists tended to bring diverse groups together, the regulations of varna, if observed, would have set them apart.

  The deification of the Buddha and the worship of his image, the concept of the bodhisattva and the notion of transferring merit were not part of the original tenets of Buddhist teaching, although after much debate their importance was conceded among many sects of Buddhism. The Buddha had opposed deification, yet, by the first century AD, his image was carved in stone, engraved on rock or painted, and worshipped. The bodhisattva was another new idea, defined as one who works for the good of humankind in an unselfish manner and is willing to forego nirvana until such time as his work is completed. Alternatively it was interpreted as the bodhisattva being a previous incarnation of the Buddha, working towards nirvana and accumulat
ing merit through successive births. Such merit was intended for humanity and not just for the individual bodhisattva. Furthermore, merit could also be transferred from one person to another by a pious act in the name of the person to whom this transference was made. Thus, the wealthy could acquire merit by donating caves to the Sangha or else a stock of merit could be built up through the donations of others. The analogy with the common mercantile practice of the accumulation and transference of capital is striking.

  These changes altered the interdependence of the Buddhist monk and the upasaka, lay follower. The latter became significant to the establishment and well-being of the Sangha. In order to be socially acceptable as an institution the Sangha needed the support of both the pious and the wealthy. The greater the respectability of the Sangha, the higher the respectability of those who supported it, even if they were from the lower castes. This was a mutual underpinning of strength, and was common to many religious sects.However, Buddhism and Jainism differed in this matter from the Vaishnava and Shaiva sects. This was partly due to the absence of institutionalized renunciation in the form of monasteries and convents among the latter, the closest being ascetic hermitages, and partly because they were often rooted in jati identities and the concerned jatis tended to become a substitute for a laity. Alternatively the religious sect itself became a jati. The Sangha remained dependent on the laity and the laity responded well. Donations and the giving of gifts came to be linked to the acquiring of merit – the pre-eminent reward for any action.

  Gift-giving or dana originated in the practice of a patron making a gift to the priests for a Vedic sacrifice. But the performance of Vedic sacrifices was beginning to decrease and the recipients of gifts preferred a donation of land. Land was becoming the most tangible form of permanent wealth as well as indicating a change in economic value. As landowners brahmans had greater flexibility of power than as performers of rituals, receiving gifts of objects.