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

Abstract

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. 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.