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.

Keywords:

• Buddhism; Ancient India; Practical models of religious change; Pan Indian v. ‘local’ religion; stupas; relic cult; intervisibility; monasticism; water-management; ritual landscapes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Archaeological Survey of India and the Madhya Pradesh Directorate of Archaeology, Archives and Museums for permission and support during fieldwork seasons. Keyfieldwork seasons have been funded by the British Academy, the Society for South Asian Studies, Merton College, INTACH UK, and the Nehru Trust. Grateful thanks to Alan Outram for stepping in as editor for this paper and for the comments of anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Useful analogies here include the link between urbanization, rising population levels and the spread of Islam and new crops from Asia into the Middle East and the Mediterranean between the eighth and tenth centuries AD (Sherratt 1999: 30–1; Watson 1983: 15–16, 99–100). The link between rising population levels and wet-rice agriculture is a familiar one and forms the central focus of Geertz's (1963) seminal work on ‘agricultural involution’ in Southeast Asia. For a similar link between population growth, political change and the introduction of new rice species into southern China from Champa in central Vietnam during the eleventh century AD, see Glover and Higham (1996: 414). For the introduction of new irrigation technology and the spread of Buddhism in eighth-century Tibet, see Dalton (2004).