Archaeologies of Buddhist propagation in ancient India: ‘ritual’ and ‘practical’ models of religious change

Abstract

This paper assesses the degree to which current 'ritual' and 'practical' models of religious change fit with the available archaeological evidence for the spread of Buddhism in India during between the third and first centuries BC. The key question is how Buddhist monastic communities integrated themselves within the social, religious and economic fabric of the areas in which they arrived, and how they generated sufficient patronage networks for monastic Buddhism to grow into the powerful pan-Indian and subsequently pan-Asian institution that it became. While it is widely recognized that in time Indian monasteries came to provide a range of missionary functions including agrarian, medical, trading and banking facilities, the received understanding based on canonical scholarship and inadequate dialogue between textual and archaeological scholarship is that these were 'late' developments that reflected the deterioration of 'true' Buddhist values. By contrast, the results of the author's own landscape-based project in central India suggest that a 'domesticated' and socially integrated form of Buddhist monasticism was already in place in central India by the late centuries BC, thus fitting closely with practical models of religious change more commonly associated with the later spread of Islam and Christianity.

A ‘Reflexive’ Multi-Stage Survey Methodology for Historical Landscape Research in Central India:Field-Walking, Local Knowledge, and Satellite Imagery as Archaeological Site Prospection and Mapping Tools in the Sanchi Survey Project

“…While decisions regarding where one site begins and another ends commonly draw on architectural and topographical divisions such as walls or cliffs, history and epistemology are also key influencing factors. Thus, the decision to include the dam and the Buddhist monuments at Sanchi within a single archaeological complex drew on wider evidence for the role of water management in Buddhist 'Monastic Governmentality' 2,3,40,41,66 , the repetition of related inter-site patterns across the study area, and general recognition of the 'entangled' nature of human : non-human : environment relationships 3,62 . Chronological divisions, together with the changing site usage and custodianship, however, are less easy to determine.…”

“…Resulting in the documentation of 134 'sites', the study aimed to assess the spatial and temporal links between a single Buddhist site and its immediate archaeological setting. Although the wider manifestation of these patterns beyond the spatially restricted study area thus remains unknown, the resulting dataset is important for assessing text-driven theories regarding modes of interaction between monastic and lay populations, and offers useful parallels to similar, although more broadly dispersed patterns documented during the SSP [1][2][3]40,41 . In recent years, other similar projects focusing on historical socio-economic, agrarian and religious landscape dynamics have proliferated, from those dealing with Buddhist contexts 6,[42][43][44][45][46] , to those more aligned with later Hindu traditions [47][48][49] .…”

“…This approach avoids focusing on a single type or period of site, but rather views the landscape as a fluid entity in which categories such as 'ritual' and 'secular' or 'past' and 'present' play an implicitly interlinked role. Thus, while the SSP yielded a wide range of site types, it was only when viewed within the context of an 'entangled' human : non-human : environment framework that they provided the empirical basis for addressing the principal research questions of the project regarding the economic and religious modes of interaction between monastic and non-monastic sections of society [1][2][3] .…”

“…The project is aimed at relating diachronic socio-ecological and ritual landscape patterns to the histories of urbanism, land use, and broader forms of human : non-human : environment engagement from the late centuries BCE to mid' first millennium CE [1][2][3] . Although the project was initiated in 1998, remote sensing was only introduced in 2003 as a means to aid mapping and to test a subset of imagery as a potential tool for archaeological prospection.…”

Beyond Prestige: A Ritual Production Model for Stone Tool Specialization in Naqada Period Egypt

“…Discussions of what constitutes 'religion' can get quite complicated, historically particular, linguistic, and are beyond the scope of this work. Suffice it to say that many archaeologists studying religion recognize that the idea of religion is a culturally situated, historically bounded term with specific limits that can be separated from other areas of life and opposed to secular thought and activities (Graham et al 2013;Insoll 2004:6;Shaw 2013a).…”