Ritual and Presentation in Early Buddhist Religious Architecture

Abstract

Asian Buddhists focused much of their ritual and worship upon stone or brick mounds, stupas, containing the relics of the Buddha. Some stupas were found in large, open-air complexes that were the focus of pilgrimage by the Buddhist laity. Other smaller stupas were located within the worship halls, chaityas, of Buddhist monasteries carved into the sides of cliffs. In each case, the people who created these temples had to decide how to present the stupa for worship. In both cases, the designers had to accommodate the highly individualistic nature of Buddhist worship while attempting to provide mechanisms to foster group cohesion within the developing Buddhist community. Monks designed their own ritual spaces with the goal of allowing for the mediation of worship by ritual specialists. In contrast, stupa complexes frequented by the laity were designed in a way that effectively limited the potential for ritual leaders and promoted a more egalitarian, spontaneous form of group worship. Further, the architectural layout of the different stupa complexes suggests that the laity, not the monks, were most interested in individual, meditative ritual. These conclusions stand in marked contrast to traditional discussions of early Buddhism derived from textual sources, which date from later periods.In this paper, the architectural plans of 13 Buddhist stupa complexes of the first century B.C. through the second century A.D. are examined in order to assess the nature of ritual presentation in two forms of ritual architecture, one focusing on the Buddhist laity and the other dominated by the clergy. This analysis presents a new theoretical and methodological tool for archaeological studies of ritual architecture, while exploring an issue central to contemporary Buddhist studies-ritual practice and the relations between monks and laity. Before turning to the specifics of this analysis, I first provide some background on early Buddhist history and thought, focusing on specific rituals and on the role of the stupa in Buddhist worship. This is followed by a brief summary of previous anthropological approaches to ritual and ritual architecture before discussing the architectural methodology used in this paper. The locations of the 13 complexes are indicated on Figure 1. This paper introduces a method, derived from theater and set design, forLars Fogelin is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. investigating religious ideology through architectural forms of presentation. Specifically, analyzing how someone or something is shown to an audience illuminates the goals of that presentation. This is accomplished by studying what is seen, how it is seen, and perhaps most importantly, what is hidden. In the case of early Buddhism, the architectural forms of presentation illustrate underlying tensions between the individual and group and between the clergy and the laity. While this paper presents an archaeological methodology for the examination of ritual architecture, it is strongly situated within the specific context...

Material Practice and the Metamorphosis of a Sign: Early Buddhist Stupas and the Origin of Mahayana Buddhism

“…and a.d. 500 Buddhist monks and nuns progressively adopted the "vulgar" practices of the laity (i.e., initial worship of relics within stupas and subsequent worship of Buddha images) in order to gain their material support. recently, many researchers, myself included, have argued that monks and nuns participated in stupa ritual with the laity from at least the third century b.c., the earliest period for which there is any direct archaeological or inscriptional evidence (Fogelin 2003(Fogelin , 2006Schopen 1997;Strong 2004;Trainor 1997). Similarly, Schopen (1997) has argued that monks in the second through fifth centuries a.d. initially promoted Buddha images, with the laity only adopting the practice later.…”

“…Circling the drums and andas were railings that defined a circumambulatory path used by devotees to ritually walk around the stupa as a form of worship (Fogelin 2003(Fogelin , 2006. The paths were typically a few meters wide.…”

“…Practice theorists emphasize the ways that specific people, in specific historical contexts, act in culturally meaningful ways. My previous work on Buddhist stupas was heavily informed by practice theory (Fogelin 2003(Fogelin , 2006. rather than reject practice theory in favor of semiotics, my goal here is to combine the dynamism of practice theory with the sophisticated understanding of signs found in Peirce's semiotics to examine the architecture of power in Buddhist monasteries.…”

Ignoring the problem: Spatial strategies for ameliorating social contradictions in early South Asian Buddhism

“…In this light, the earliest chaityas can be understood as prototypes that failed to suppress the contradictions inherent in the early Buddhist sangha. The problem with the earliest chaityas centered on the ways that worshippers interacted with the primary focus of early Buddhist ritualstupas (Fogelin, 2003(Fogelin, , 2006Schopen, 1997;Trainor, 1997).…”

Identifying residences of ritual practitioners in the archaeological record as a proxy for social complexity

“…In contrast, there has been little archaeological discussion of ritual specialists and what particular roles they might have played in religion, despite ethnohistoric accounts suggesting the importance of full-time ritual specialists world-wide. While past studies have focused on the ways in which the material record can inform on past experiences of ritual participants (Fogelin, 2007), be they elite leaders or commoners, many have ignored the primary role that ritual specialists played in leading individualistic and communal rituals (Fogelin, 2003;Kahn, in press;Rakita, 2009) and their linkage to larger socio-economic and political processes.…”