In 1983, Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger published an edited volume titled The Invention of Tradition. In the volume, Hobsbawm, Ranger, and the other contributors argued that much of what is presented as authentic history consists of “responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition” (Hobsbawm 1983:2). For example, where the coronation ceremonies of the British royalty are presented as the timeless repetition of ceremonies of old, in reality these ceremonies date to only the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—by which time the British royalty served as little more, perhaps even less, than figureheads in the British political system. In earlier times, when British mon-archs actually had power, coronation ceremonies were more informal and ad hoc. In this sense, the more recent “invented” coronation ceremonies had almost no precedent in history. Critically, however, the invention of tradition does not require that a tradition be wholly novel, but can also include the appropriation of a genuine tradition in novel ways. For example, the neoclassical design of the US Capitol building borrowed design elements of Greek and Roman architecture to invoke a tradition of classical architecture and governance. In reality, of course, both Europeans and the Euro-Americans who cherished neoclassical architecture were not the descendants of the Romans, but rather the descendants of the people who sacked Rome, bringing the Western Roman Empire to an end. The key here is that the US Capitol Building could have referenced many other historical precedents—it could have been designed to resemble Stonehenge, for example. The choice of classical traditions over other traditions signifies an invention of tradition as much as creating a new tradition out of whole cloth.
By the mid-1990s, archaeologists had taken up the invention of tradition, though often in terms of the broader concept of “memory” (e. g., Mills and Walker 2008; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003):
People remember or forget the past according to the needs of the present, and social memory is an active and ongoing process. The construction of social memory can involve direct connections to ancestors in a remembered past, or it can involve more general links to a vague mythological antiquity. (Van Dyke and Alcock 2003:3)
The value of the invention of tradition or memory for archaeologists lies in its clear material manifestations. Whether the regalia and crown of British coronation ceremonies or the stone columns of the US Capitol building, memory is inscribed in material objects, monuments, and landscapes. This is not to say that all elements of memory are material. They aren’t. Rather, it is only possible to say that memory and the invention of tradition often have material manifestations, and this materiality does not simply reflect inventions of tradition, but actively facilitates them.
Among the central arguments I make in this book is that from the third century BCE—the earliest period for which archaeological, epigraphic, and textual evidence is available—the Buddhist sangha was fully domesticated, living year-round in well-established monasteries. Buddhist asceticism was invented only in the early to mid-first millennium CE through the writing of new Buddhist texts, the building of new Buddhist monasteries, and the carving of new Buddha images. The earliest Buddhist texts were written in the beginning of the first millennium CE to help invent the ascetic ideal and project that ideal onto the Buddhist past. At the same time, Buddhist monasteries were redesigned and Buddha images were created to construct new forms of social memory that justified a new emphasis on monastic isolation. This does not mean that Buddhist monks all became solitary ascetics. Rather, the invention of the ascetic ideal was part of a collective withdrawal by the sangha from day-to-day interaction with the Buddhist laity—a withdrawal facilitated by monasteries’ substantial wealth and the ownership of large tracts of arable land. By celebrating an invented history of solitary asceticism, the sangha legitimized a newfound collective asceticism practiced within the walls of monasteries that were becoming isolated from the laity for the first time. In the end, however, the collective asceticism of the sangha planted the seeds that led to the collapse of monastic Buddhism in the second millennium CE. When the sangha withdrew from day-to-day interaction with the laity, the laity returned the favor by converting to Hinduism and other faiths. With the loss of monastic lands and royal support at the hands of Central Asian Turks in the second millennium CE, monasteries no longer had a laity to fall back on. Without monasteries, Buddhist monasticism failed in India, with the last vestiges of lay Buddhism and Buddhist pilgrimage centers following soon thereafter.
In the rest of this book I attempt to provide the necessary evidence and detail to support the revisionist history just described. It is a complicated argument, relying on widely divergent lines of evidence from textual, epi-graphic, archaeological, and art historical sources. It also relies on archaeological methodologies, both well established and newly created for this project. Given the importance of these methods, all of Chapter 2 is taken up by introducing and explaining them. I return to India in Chapter 3, using the tools developed in Chapter 2 to begin the process of building an archaeological history of Indian Buddhism.
World History
