Art & Culture · Topic 2 of 16
Stupas, rock-cut caves, regional sculpture schools and bronze casting from Shunga to Gupta times
The Basics
The story of Buddhist monumental architecture begins with the death of the Buddha. His cremated remains were divided and, according to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, eight stupas were built over his bodily relics and two more over the vessel and embers of his funeral pyre.
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Sanchi stands near Raisen in Madhya Pradesh, close to ancient Vidisha, a major Mauryan city. According to tradition, Vidisha was the birthplace of Ashoka's wife Devi. The site has no connection to any event in the Buddha's life. It grew into one of the richest Buddhist monastic complexes through royal and local patronage over many centuries.
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Bharhut stupa is usually dated to about the 2nd century BCE.
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By the time Sanchi's gateways were finished, Buddhist monastic life had taken firm root south of the Vindhyas, in the Krishna-Godavari valleys of Andhra Pradesh, under the patronage of the Satavahana dynasty.
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By the 1st century CE, the north-west was a long-standing meeting point of peoples. This region is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. Greek rule in Bactria ended by the late 2nd century BCE, pushed out by the Parthians. Indo-Greek rule continued further south for a while. It ended around the turn of the era, when the Kshatrapa ruler Rajuvula took the area east of the Jhelum. Greek, Parthian, Shaka and then Kushana rulers followed one another here. Each left behind craftsmen and artistic traditions.
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Before the Kushana period, Buddhist art at sites such as Sanchi and Bharhut never showed the Buddha as a person. His presence was suggested only through symbols. An empty seat or throne stood for his meditation. A horse stood for his renunciation (the Mahabhinishkramana). A tree (the pipal, ficus religiosa) stood for his enlightenment. A wheel stood for his first sermon. A stupa stood for his death and nirvana (the Mahaparinibbana). This symbolic, or aniconic, phase ended in the first centuries CE. Both Gandhara in the north-west and Mathura in northern India then began carving the Buddha in human form.
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By the early centuries of the Common Era, both Gandhara and Mathura were producing many standing and seated Buddha images. A viewer needed a way to recognise which event of the Buddha's life each image showed, since the face and robe alone did not tell the story.
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By the second century BCE, Buddhist monks needed places to live and worship through the monsoon months. Free-standing brick and wood stupas and monasteries already existed on the plains. In the hilly, rocky terrain of the Western Ghats in present-day Maharashtra, builders found a different solution. Instead of building structures, they cut entire halls out of solid rock. They carved downwards and inwards into hillsides along routes used by traders moving between the coast and the Deccan plateau.
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Ajanta is a series of rock-cut Buddhist caves cut into a curving gorge of the Waghora river, in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra. Twenty-nine caves survive here, most of them viharas or monasteries, with a few chaityas or prayer halls built around a stupa. The site did not grow in one sweep; it grew in two widely separated bursts of activity separated by several centuries.
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Ellora has thirty-four caves with Buddhist, Hindu and Jain shrines side by side.
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Elephanta Caves, near Mumbai, are dominated by Shaivism.
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By the 1st century BCE, Kalinga, once battered by Ashoka's conquest, had re-emerged as an independent kingdom. It was ruled by the Mahameghavahana or Chedi dynasty, and its most notable king was Kharavela. Kalinga under him is seen as an example of secondary state formation, because it had earlier been a core Mauryan province and had absorbed the structure of a state through Mauryan administration before breaking free.
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Buddhist caves also exist in eastern India, mainly in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.
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The lost-wax or cire-perdue process of casting metal images, first seen in the Harappan Dancing Girl, did not disappear with the Indus cities. It was taken up over later centuries by Buddhist, Jain and Hindu communities across India to cast ritual images, continuing right up to the sixteenth century.
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By the late fourth century CE, Gupta rulers controlled much of north India. Their wealth in gold let princes and the rich patronise art and literature. Samudragupta is shown on his coins playing the lute. Chandragupta the Second is said to have kept nine luminaries at his court. This patronage gave sculptors the resources to refine the older Mathura and Gandhara idioms into a more unified style, often called the Gupta style, though some historians caution against naming art styles after dynasties.
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The Gupta empire broke up in the sixth century CE. The eastern region of Bihar and Bengal, called Magadha, stayed relatively unified. Many small Rajput states rose in the west. In the eighth century the Palas came to power in Magadha. Their second ruler, Dharmapala, built a strong empire by defeating the Pratiharas. His wealth came from fertile Ganges agriculture and international trade. The Palas were devoted patrons of Buddhism. Under them, the brick monastic university tradition at Nalanda reached its peak.
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