Introduction

The Archaeology and History of Indian Buddhism

The study of Buddhism, like the study of most major world religions, has long focused on written accounts of transcendent beliefs concerning the spiritual world at the expense of material expressions of faith in the mundane, earthly world. Temples, however beautiful, are understood as a reflection of faith, not faith itself. At some level, this perspective makes sense. Buddhists, like the adherents of most other modern world religions, explicitly champion the transcendent over the illusion of the earthly and mundane. Being part of the mundane world, Buddhist temples are merely way stations on the path toward enlightenment. To study Buddhism from a material perspective, then, necessarily imposes an alien understanding that is antithetical to what Buddhists themselves believe. Yet, this is exactly what I aim to do.

At its heart, archaeology is the study of the material remains of past cultures—the empty buildings, the discarded tools, and the garbage that people leave behind. While ruins inspire a peculiar sense of melancholy in those who visit them by forcefully demonstrating the impermanence of even the greatest of human accomplishments, archaeological remains also provide a window into the worldly actions of the long dead. Though different from the transcendental ideas preserved in ancient texts, these worldly actions are no less important for understanding the history of any people or any religion. This is not say that the study of ruins should supplant the study of texts. Rather, history needs to examine the interaction between the spiritual and the material, between the transcendent and the mundane, and between faith and the practicalities of daily life. Accordingly, an archaeological history of Indian Buddhism must combine both textual scholarship and archaeological scholarship to produce a more complete understanding of the origin, development, and eventual collapse of Buddhism in the place of its birth.

The standard, textually derived history of Indian Buddhism begins in fifth or sixth century bce with Siddhartha Gautama, a prince who renounced his life of privilege for the life of an ascetic (e. g., Basham 1967; Davids 1910; Lamotte 1988; Lopez 2001). After many trials, Siddhartha achieved enlightenment, seeing the path to ending the cycle of rebirth and the end of suffering. For the rest of his life, he taught this path to an increasing number of disciples. After his death, his disciples continued to promote the Buddha’s teachings and established a community of monks and nuns, known collectively as the sangha. Initially members of the sangha were wandering ascetics, living on the margins of society, begging for their food, and practicing meditation and other ascetic rites. In contrast to the ascetic practices of the sangha, the Buddhist laity began practicing pilgrimage to key sites of the Buddha’s life, and to burial tumuli—stupas—that held portions of his cremated remains.

Over the centuries, and out of their desire to assist the laity on their path to enlightenment, the sangha gradually settled into monasteries and nunneries that drew the favor and financial support of the elite and non-elite Buddhist laity. According to the standard history, by the end of the first millennium bce, the sangha was becoming domesticated within monasteries, with ever escalating obligations to their lay followers. With the contact that these obligations demanded, the sangha began adopting the practices of lay Buddhism—worshiping at stupas and, by the early to mid-first millennium ce, Buddha images. Thus began a gradual degradation of the pure, ascetic tradition of forest monks in favor of scholastic Buddhism centered in monasteries. Scholastic Buddhism focused on the study of texts and the formal education of novitiates in ever-larger monasteries in the north of India.

In the mid - to late first millennium ce, increasing numbers of lay followers abandoned Buddhism in favor of Hinduism, Jainism, and, eventually, Islam. Without lay support, Buddhist monasteries and pilgrimage centers were particularly vulnerable to Turks from central Asia, who invaded North India beginning in the second millennium ce. With their monasteries in ruins and their pilgrimage centers abandoned, the sangha either abandoned India for the Himalayas, China, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, or abandoned Buddhism for Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam. By the fifteenth century ce in India, Buddhism survived in a few small isolated pockets and as traces in the ritual practices of other religious sects.

Adding archaeology to the standard history of Indian Buddhism does not wholly change the narrative. Particularly in the latter half of the standard history, from the mid-first millennium onward, textual and archaeological evidence are in broad agreement. This shouldn’t be surprising. Beginning in the mid-first millennium CE, the quantity, quality, and diversity of historical source materials increase dramatically. With better textual sources on which to base the standard history, it is not surprising that archaeological evidence is largely in accordance with it. The same cannot be said of the first half of the standard history. When compared to what is known of the archaeological record of Indian Buddhism, much of the standard history appears to be wrong. Most important, archaeological evidence of early Buddhism indicates that from at least the third century BCE—the earliest period in which substantial archaeological evidence is available—the sangha was fully domesticated. Where the standard history posits an ascetic sangha that slowly coalesced into monasteries, archaeological evidence suggests something like the opposite. From the earliest period in which archaeological evidence is available, the sangha was monastically based. Rather than developing early, it appears that the ascetic ideal only emerged in India in the mid - to late first millennium CE, and even then only a small minority of the sangha abandoned monasteries for the ascetic life of the forest.

While archaeological and textual evidence about early Buddhism seemingly contradict each other, it is not my aim to simply debunk the standard, textual history of Buddhism and replace it with an archaeological history of Buddhism. The generations of textual scholars who developed the standard history were often brilliant, and the historical narrative they developed was based on real evidence. That said, the Buddhist textual sources that historians relied upon were written by a small, literate minority for specific reasons in the early to mid-first millennium CE, some five to ten centuries after the events they describe. I argue that the Buddhist textual sources used to make the standard history of early Buddhism are colored by the concerns of the sangha during the periods in which they were composed.

In the mid-first millennium CE, the sangha was divided between those who desired a more contemplative life as ascetics and those who desired a scholastic life as monastics. Much of the standard history of early Buddhism is based on readings of early to mid-first millennium CE Buddhist texts written by the pro-asceticism faction of the sangha. The authors of these texts sought to delegitimize established, monastic

Buddhism by portraying the Buddha as the prototypical ascetic. By relying on these accounts, those scholars who created the standard history of early Buddhism confused later polemic for actual history. This does not mean that Buddhist texts that describe early Buddhism have no historical value. Obviously, they have immense value in illuminating the sanghds concerns and interests at the time of their composition in the first millennium ce. But the texts also have value for understanding the early history of Buddhism. In some instances, descriptions in Buddhist texts strongly concord with what has been found archaeologically. By combining archaeological and textual sources, it is sometimes possible to separate those textual accounts that have a high degree of historical accuracy from those that are later interpolations. More so, Buddhist textual sources also illuminate a central, long-standing tension in Buddhism—the tension between the individual and the group. Relying on textual sources, many scholars have argued that this persistent tension was central to Buddhism from the very start (e. g., Carrithers 1979, 1983; Tambiah 1976, 1982). Following this insight, I argue that the strategies that different groups of Buddhists used to address and ameliorate this tension were central to the history of Buddhism in India.

I do not expect anyone to be convinced of my argument based upon this short introduction. I also admit that my version of the standard history just presented ignores many significant debates among older generations of Buddhist scholars and the study of more quotidian Buddhist texts by a new generation of Buddhist scholars (e. g., Lopez 1995; Schopen 1997, 2004, 2005; Strong 1983, 2004; Trainor 1997; White 2000). That is what the rest of this book is for. Here I am laying out only the most basic contours of an archaeological history of Indian Buddhism—a history that spans almost two millennia and includes the sangha, the laity, and the ruling dynasties that both were subject to. It must also be remembered that Buddhism was always one of several religions in simultaneous practice in India. The history of Buddhism in India, then, is not simply the history of Buddhist thought, but rather the history of the Buddhist thought, Buddhists themselves, and the non-Buddhists they interacted with.

While this book is primarily intended as a study of the history of Indian Buddhism, it is also intended as an exemplar for the archaeological study of religion. It might surprise a non-archaeologist to know that, until recently, archaeologists have avoided studies of religion. For the most part, religion was the explanation of last resort, with “religious” often meaning little more than “I have absolutely no idea what this thing is or what it was used for.” Its not that archaeologists have not found ancient temples and religious artifacts—they are almost unavoidable. Rather, archaeologists have not known what exactly to do with them. Following the tradition of seeing religion as belief, archaeologists often did little more than identify sacred sites as sacred and religious artifacts as religious. Where possible, archaeologists have also taken the bold step of correlating known archaeological sites with sites named in historical or ethnohistorical sources. In American archaeology this is known as being the “handmaiden to history” (Hume 1964), and as most would likely guess, archaeologists don’t want to be anybody’s handmaiden.

Beginning with the pioneering work of Colin Renfrew (1985) at Phylakopi sanctuary on the Island of Milos in the Aegean and John Fritz (1986; Fritz and Michell 1989) at Vijayanagara in India, archaeologist have begun to take up the challenge of studying religion (e. g., Bradley 2005; Fogelin 2007a, 2008a; Insoll 2001, 2004; Kyriakidis 2007; Shaw 2013a; Walker 1998; Whitley and Hays-Gilpin 2008). For the most part, this challenge has been addressed by borrowing recent anthropological theories that see religion as something that people do, not simply something that people think about. Religion is created and revealed in the performance of a ritual, the construction of a temple, and the attendance at a ceremony. If people practice religion, then they are likely to leave at least some material traces of their actions. Those material traces are what archaeologists can use to identify and reconstruct ancient religions. For the most part, however, most archaeological studies of religion have been synchronic—identifying religious practices in specific archaeological contexts or identifying the function of religion at a particular time. With a few exceptions (e. g., Bradley 2005; Shaw 2013a), archaeologists have not studied long-term religious change. They have not studied the ways that the material aspects of religious experience can shape and alter future iterations of that religion. In Chapter 2, I will develop the methods necessary to animate the archaeology of religion and incorporate its insights into the study of long-term religious change.