Conclusion

When I first began studying the archaeology of Indian Buddhism in graduate school almost twenty years ago, my peers in Buddhist studies were excited by what I might add to their research. They saw my work as potentially fleshing out some of the details missing in their textual sources. As I began to gain my footing and present what I was learning, their excitement rapidly waned. It wasn’t that my work contradicted theirs; it’s that my work didn’t fit into their framework at all. The questions and debates that oriented their studies were not the same as the questions and debates that oriented mine. Some of the more intractable problems in Buddhist studies seemed simple from my archaeological perspective, and some of the greatest difficulties I faced seemed obvious when examined from a historical perspective. By the time I completed my PhD, it seemed that I had little to offer textual scholars and, I should admit, I felt they had little to offer me. It has taken me almost twenty years to correct my mistake—to learn how to combine the strengths of textual and archaeological sources to study the archaeological history of Indian Buddhism.

What I have learned in the last twenty years is, at some level, deceptively simple. Archaeological evidence provides information on what people did, while historical sources provide information on what people thought (Fogelin 2013). The conceptual hurdle in archaeology is figuring out why people did the things they did. In contrast, the conceptual hurdle in history is figuring out how people’s thoughts translated into action. To be clear, archaeologists have developed numerous methodologies to infer past beliefs, and historians know full well that they must carefully interrogate multiple sources to discern specific historical events. Neither archaeologists nor historians are ignorant of the limitations of their evidence, but they both tend to be more critical of other people’s sources than their own.

I do not deny that the archaeological history presented in this volume is biased toward the archaeological sources that I favor. My bias is shown in the subjects that I choose to emphasize. In a general sense, Indian Buddhism can be studied from the perspective of history, archaeology, or a combination of the two. As an archaeologist, I have focused only on the subjects that can be addressed by archaeology alone, or in combination with history. Subjects that are only revealed in historical sources have generally been ignored. For example, throughout this archaeological history, the order of Buddhist nuns has been almost completely absent from my discussions. While there is extensive textual and epigraphic evidence for Buddhist nuns, at present, no archaeological evidence of Buddhist nuns has been discovered in India.17 While I have no doubt that nunneries existed, and that the order of nuns mattered greatly in the history of Buddhism, I have simply been unable to crack this problem. With luck, another archaeologist soon will.

The inability of archaeology to contribute to all issues that can be covered in textual studies, however, should not be taken to mean that archaeology has nothing to offer textual studies at all. Among the central claims of this archaeological history is that the earliest Buddhist texts—the texts used to create the standard history of Buddhism—were inventions of traditions rather than straightforward historical accounts. The depiction of early Buddhist asceticism in the earliest Buddhist texts had more to do with the concerns of the early to mid-first millennium GE than with the actual practices of the sangha in the mid - to late first millennium bge. Where early Buddhist textual sources project the ascetic tradition onto the distant past, archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sangha was fully domesticated from at least the third century bge. This does not mean, however, that the earliest Buddhist texts were wrong, or that they can be completely disregarded. Rather, by challenging the historical veracity of these textual sources, it allows these texts to illuminate a period of profound change in Buddhism in the early to mid-first millennium GE. This period marked a major transformation in the way the sangha balanced their contradictory communal and ascetic desires through the creation of

Mahayana Buddhism, Buddha images, and the ascetic ideal. This revision to the standard history of Buddhism then demands a reinterpretation of what came before and after.