Evidence of survival of Buddhism in Western India until the fifteenth century: revisiting excavated numismatic evidence from mid-nineteenth century Kanheri (original) (raw)
Related papers
Archaeology of Buddhism in India
Rehren, T., Nikita, E. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2nd Edition, vol. 4, pp. 344–349, London: Academic Press., 2024
Archaeological material can be located not only in space and time fairly reasonably, it also offers an unfiltered access to Indian Buddhism. However, an overwhelming majority of modern Buddhist scholarship still sees textual material as the most important source of information on Buddhism and that the archaeological data, though useful, can only be understood fully if used as supportive of the textual data. In other words, the usefulness of archaeological sources as independent witnesses is effectively ignored, when, compared to the textual material, the archaeological and epigraphical material offers the most direct access to Buddhism and the way it was followed by its adherents across all social and economic strata of the Indian society. Thus, for the proper study of Indian Buddhism, the value of archaeological material needs to be taken into consideration. Here, an effort has been made to show that a study of Buddhism can gain significantly through archaeology.
An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism
2015
An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism is a comprehensive survey of Indian Buddhism from its origins in the 6th century BCE, through its ascendance in the 1st millennium CE, and its eventual decline in mainland South Asia by the mid-2nd millennium CE. Weaving together studies of archaeological remains, architecture, iconography, inscriptions, and Buddhist historical sources, this book uncovers the quotidian concerns and practices of Buddhist monks and nuns (the sangha), and their lay adherents—concerns and practices often obscured in studies of Buddhism premised largely, if not exclusively, on Buddhist texts. At the heart of Indian Buddhism lies a persistent social contradiction between the desire for individual asceticism versus the need to maintain a coherent community of Buddhists. Before the early 1st millennium CE, the sangha relied heavily on the patronage of kings, guilds, and ordinary Buddhists to support themselves. During this period, the sangha emphasized the communal elements of Buddhism as they sought to establish themselves as the leaders of a coherent religious order. By the mid-1st millennium CE, Buddhist monasteries had become powerful political and economic institutions with extensive landholdings and wealth. This new economic self-sufficiency allowed the sangha to limit their day-to-day interaction with the laity and begin to more fully satisfy their ascetic desires for the first time. This withdrawal from regular interaction with the laity led to the collapse of Buddhism in India in the early-to-mid 2nd millennium CE. In contrast to the ever-changing religious practices of the Buddhist sangha, the Buddhist laity were more conservative—maintaining their religious practices for almost two millennia, even as they nominally shifted their allegiances to rival religious orders. This book also serves as an exemplar for the archaeological study of long-term religious change through the perspectives of practice theory, materiality, and semiotics.
Archaeology of Buddhism: India
Elsevier Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2nd edition, Amsterdam, 2023
Archaeological material, which is more objective than many textual sources, can be better located in space and time and has high value as a source material. • Even for the first two centuries of Buddhism in India, for which archaeology cannot substantially add to the understanding of Indian Buddhism, it can offer an analysis of the larger material milieu in which it originated. • From the 3rd century BCE onwards, archaeology offers so much valuable information on Buddhism that there is now need to rewrite the history of Indian Buddhism, which has been largely based on textual material. • Three types of monuments, st upa (mound), caityagṛha (sanctuary), and vih ara (monastery), are commonly used to identify an archaeological site as Buddhist. However, while doing so, it needs to be remembered that specific material remains may have been the creation of more than one religious community.
Archaeology of Buddhism in Asia - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.pdf
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.
A Buddhist Interpretation of Small Finds in the Early Historic Period
Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology II, (special issue on New research on Central Asian, Buddhist and Far Eastern art and archaeology) Judith Lerner and Annette Juliano (eds.) Brepols, Belgium in Association with Inst. for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) NYU. ISBN: 978-2-503-58450-8, 2019
This paper considers many images of deities that we have not previously accounted for from a Buddhist perspective. Moving beyond conjectural reconstructions of the shared worldviews of image consumption, it reveals images which are definitely Buddhist in their purport, indicating the regional variations of the Buddha biography, and expanding what we know of the type of narratives and myths that existed within a Buddhist context. There appear to be repeated references to a bodhisattva-like figure who may reference a variation in the imaging of Siddhārtha. However, there are other figures who appear to represent Maitreya. It examines the internment of a female figure usually called the ‘pañcacuda’-type from Buddhist relic deposits. It also presents previously unknown ivory relic-caskets from Bengal. The significance of this selection is to open a door into examining how small finds substantially enhance our understanding of the lived experience of what might have been practised by Buddhists in their homes, what sorts of medical needs they may have visited monasteries for, what they may have decorated private shrines with and what sorts of votive offerings they may have made—information we have had scant references to. Only the first page is uploaded here. The full paper can be found at: http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod\_id=IS-9782503584508-1
Pratna Samiksha A Journal of Archaeology New Series Volume 9 2018 CENTRE FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES & TRAINING EASTERN INDIA •KOLKATA, 2018
The present paper reads and analyses some of the inscribed Buddhist images discovered in different parts of Odisha during exploration. The analysis of the inscribed images as well as the copperplate donation to Buddhism largely reveals rapaka, samanta (feudatory chiefs) and acaryas as major donors. The increasing evidence of the names of acaryas in early mediaeval Buddhism signifies their increasing roles in the Vajrayana tradition. On the other hand, the evidence on the inscribed images reveals that the rapaka and samanta (feudatory subordinate chiefs) emerged as a major support group of Buddhism in early mediaeval period. These subordinate chiefs were largely from the interior hilly area with substantive tribal populations, and Buddhism while travelling to interior Odisha during the time of the mapdala polity (eighth-eleventh century ce) found support from these subordinate chiefs of tribal origin. In the conflict between Brahamnical religions and Buddhism in early mediaeval Odisha between ninth and twelfth century ce, the Brahmanical religions targeted the tribal origin feudatory chiefs by showing them being trampled by Bhairavas.