Like the wall encircling Nalanda, the layout of Somapura, Vikramasila, and other similar monasteries in the Northeast allowed the sangha to control access to the shrines, temples, and stupas within. Though, just as with Nalanda, it is not possible to determine the degree to which the sangha in the Northeast welcomed or excluded different portions of the laity. There is simply no historical or archaeological information available to definitively address the question. That does not mean, however, that nothing can be known. However achieved, and whoever was allowed in or out, the ability of the sangha to control access to the major monasteries of the late first millennium and early second millennium CE represented a significant change in their power. Whereas the earliest monasteries were built adjacent to pilgrimage sites (e. g., Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Sanchi), or constructed public worship spaces adjacent to their monasteries (e. g., Karla, Bhaja, and Thotlakonda), for the first time, large open-air temples were built within monasteries or, in the case of the Northeast, even within the sangha’s living quarters. For the first time, the gates of the monasteries served as the gates to worship itself.
As discussed in Chapter 2, from the perspective of materiality, the design of a building or site is not simply a reflection of power, but rather part of the creation of power itself. Whether the sangha used the gates to admit or deny admission, the gates instantiated the sangha’s power over outsiders. This power is even more explicable when considering what the sangha was controlling access to—temples and, in the Northeast, the first new large stupas constructed in India in centuries. While the large open-air stupas at Sanchi, Sarnath, and other pilgrimage sites remained in use throughout the first millennium GE, the sangha had long since shifted their devotions to images placed within small cells in their viha-ras. At Nalanda, the viharas continued to have small shrines, but massive image shrines were also constructed outside the viharas, but within the monastery walls. At Vikramasila, and perhaps Somapura, the central temples were stupas rather than images. There are two ways to interpret the reintroduction of stupas to the architectural vocabulary of Northeast India. First, the stupas might have been constructed to win back the laity, and their donations, to the sangha. Second, the sangha themselves may have wanted to worship at stupas. It is also possible, of course, that the construction of the large stupa at Vikramasila was intended to do both. Whatever the case, the stupa constructed at Vikramashila, and perhaps Somapura, followed a radically different form than earlier monastic or pilgrimage stupas in India.
Where earlier stupas in India had been icons of the Buddha’s burial mound indexing his relics and prominent locations in the Buddha’s life, the stupa at Vikramasila was all that plus a mandala, a cosmogram of the Buddhist universe. The anda, thus, was an icon of Mount Mehru. The four stucco Buddha images facing in the four directions were symbols of the all-seeing Buddha, the four lobes of the cruciform terraces were icons of the four continents. In this sense, the stupa at Vikramasila was a materialization of Mahayana, and particularly Tantric Buddhism, meditative practices.2 This, in turn, might suggest that Mahayana and Tantric members of the sangha were at least one of the intended audiences of the stupa at Vikramasila, and perhaps Somapura (assuming that the cruciform platform at Somapura supported a stupa). Whatever the case, the stupa at Vikramasila was a staggeringly multivalent sign, with, in a semiotic sense, significant emotional and intellectual impact.
World History
