1Ancient Magadha or the region that corresponds to the south of the river Ganga in the southern part of the state of Bihar in eastern India constituted the heartland of Buddhism (Madhyadeśa/Majjhimadeśa) as the Buddha had spent considerable time propagating his teachings here in the sixth century BCE. Magadha witnessed a long history of Buddhist worship and scholarship until about the middle of the second millennium, attracting pilgrims from near and far to the monastic centres and sites related to the Buddha’s biography that came to define its religious geography, such as Mahābodhi (modern Bodhgaya), Nālandā (modern Nalanda), Vikramaśilā (modern Antichak), Odantapuri (modern Bihar Sharif), Rājagṛha (modern Rajgir), Tailāḍhaka (modern Telhara), Ghośaligrāma (modern Ghosrawan) and modern Kurkihar. Over the centuries, patrons from afar left a deep imprint on Mahābodhi and Nālandā. At the same time, they steadily sought to recreate in their homelands some form of association with these two places through, what they perceived to be, the unparalleled sacrality of hallowed landscapes and authentic Buddhist scholarship of the highest order. In this paper, I explore Magadha’s Himalayan and trans-Himalayan networks over a millennium (fifth to fifteenth century), with special focus on these two sites, using a combination of textual, inscriptional and art historical material. Dividing the paper into two distinct sections dealing respectively with the Buddhist heartland and the trans-Himalayan regions, I foreground Buddhist devotional practices along with the patronage of monks, kings and laymen of political and social privilege in trans-regional contexts. Surviving documentary evidence of these connections dates from the fifth century, the following centuries being marked by cross-cultural traffic until the fifteenth century when Buddhist monastic activity significantly declined in eastern India.
- 1 Scholars who have worked over the last two decades on different facets of these trans-regi (...)
- 2 A notable exception is Singh (2016) who traces the long history of Burmese engagement with (...)
2There is a rich corpus on Mahābodhi’s and Nālandā’s premodern trans-regional Buddhist connections using sources such as textual accounts in Chinese and Tibetan; inscriptions in Sanskrit from Mahābodhi and Nālandā, and in Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and old Mon from Mahābodhi; illustrated Buddhist manuscripts in Sanskrit produced in Nālandā; and Mahābodhi-inspired images and monuments reproduced in the Asian Buddhist world.1 However, scholars have seldom adopted a longue durée approach to critically evaluate the interface between the two pre-eminent Buddhist sites and a particular geo-political or cultural region.2
3Although their respective characters were markedly different, both Mahābodhi and Nālandā were multi-religious sites, distinguished by their sustained links with the premodern Asian Buddhist world. Mahābodhi was the place where the historical Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment (bodhi). It was included in the oldest known Buddhist pilgrimage circuit connecting the four sites where the Buddha’s defining life-events had occurred (birth, enlightenment, first sermon and death), sanctioned by the founder of the faith himself. Over time, it came to be imagined as the locus of enlightenment for all Buddhas of the past, present and future. Nālandā, on the other hand, derived its widespread reputation from its association not with the Buddha’s life but with a mega-monastery (mahāvihāra) whose nucleus was established probably around the fifth century CE, and which evolved into a highly regarded centre of Buddhist learning.
- 3 In the absence of either incontrovertible archæological evidence or an accompanying founda (...)
- 4 Extensive excavations have unearthed a total of six temples and eleven monasteries but in (...)
- 5 See Rajani and Kumar (2019) for the relative sequence in the construction of temples 12, 1 (...)
4Both Mahābodhi’s and Nālandā’s Buddhist landscapes witnessed staggered growth but there isn’t enough evidence to fully trace their built histories. What is certain in Mahābodhi is that, from at least the third century BCE, the focus of worship was an open-air shrine around the sacred fig tree (which came to be identified as the bodhi tree) and the stone seat beneath it (vajrāsana), commemorating the spot where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. Multiple pieces of evidence strongly suggest that this shrine was built by Aśoka, the third-century BCE emperor of the Maurya dynasty. At some point, probably around the middle of the first millennium, primacy shifted from the tree to a towering brick and stucco temple of distinctive architecture, a greatly modified version of which has survived as the Mahabodhi temple (fig 1).3 Enshrined within this temple was an image of the Buddha seated cross-legged in the earth-touching posture (bhūmisparśa mudrā), recounting the moment when he had called on the earth to bear witness to his enlightenment. This image became synonymous with the site and was thus referred to as the Mahābodhi or Vajrāsana Buddha. Nālandā, on the other hand, is the oldest known mahāvihāra in eastern India. Excavations at this brick-built monastic complex have revealed that it had been carefully conceptualised, following a basic plan of a row of massive temples facing a parallel block of spacious monasteries, organised along an east-west axis.4At least three of these temples were built sequentially from the fifth century onwards, and underwent rebuilding at different points in time, like many of the Nālandā monasteries. It has not been possible to ascertain whether, like Mahābodhi, the site had a main ritual focus. If this had ever been the case, it would have undoubtedly been Temple no3, a gigantic stūpa/temple at the south-western end of the site, which was probably the oldest monument, and one that underwent numerous rebuilding phases (fig 2).5
Fig 1: Mahabodhi temple, Bodhgaya.
Photo: Sanjukta Datta. Date: 2013.
Fig 2: Temple No3, Nalanda.
Photo: Sanjukta Datta. Date: 2023.
- 6 A detailed discussion on the nature of Buddhist worship at Mahābodhi and Nālandā is beyond (...)
- 7 Nālandā’s art production, which began in the first half of the seventh century, stood out (...)
- 8 See Huntington and Huntington (1989) for the transmission of Pāla art in Nepal, Ti (...)
5It is not surprising that, as dynamic loci of Buddhist doctrinal developments, both Mahābodhi and Nālandā initiated major innovations in eastern Indian Buddhist art from around the sixth-seventh centuries.6 Between roughly the eighth and the twelfth centuries, the two centres became prominent representatives of Pāla art, a term used as convenient shorthand for the art style that developed in the Bihar-Bengal region of eastern India during the reign of the influential Pāla dynasty.7 Pāla art widely influenced Buddhist sculptures, paintings and architecture in various parts of Asia, including the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions.8
- 9 Li (1996, 2000, 2002). See Deeg (2021: 130) for why it is incorrect to identify these (...)
- 10 See Deeg (2021) for a discussion on various dimensions of this tradition. See (...)
6A discussion on Magadha’s Himalayan and trans-Himalayan connections has to begin with the three textual accounts composed by the Chinese scholar-monks Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing between the fifth and the seventh centuries.9 Although the nature of these accounts is somewhat different from each other (especially Yijing’s seventh-century account compared with Faxian’s account in the fifth century and Xuanzang’s in the seventh century), all three belong to a distinctive tradition in the early history of Buddhism in Chinese territories. Buddhism had certainly been introduced into China by the first century CE, and it reached its peak during the Sui and Tang periods, between the late sixth and the early tenth centuries. Over these centuries, the transmission of Buddhism was facilitated by the movement of monks from Central and South Asia, visits of native Chinese to the Buddhist heartland, state-sponsored translations of a variety of foundational texts (largely belonging to the Mahāyāna tradition), the construction of cave-shrines and monasteries, as well as the veneration of the relics of the Buddha. From the early fifth century, scholar-monks began writing accounts of their travels to the Buddhist homeland, documenting Buddhist sacred geography and reporting on various Buddhist matters, such as the workings of the monastic order (saṅgha) and modalities of worship. Faxian’s account is the oldest such surviving record.10
- 11 Faxian and Xuanzang did not follow identical overland routes. The former passed through (...)
- 12 Lahiri (1986). Yijing himself used the sea route through Southeast Asia to reach Magadha
7Both Faxian and Xuanzang used the overland route at least one way, which makes it possible to get a sense of the arduous journeys that pilgrims would have had to undertake across the Himalayas to reach the Buddhist heartland. A little more than two centuries apart, both Chinese pilgrim-monks set out from Chang’an, the western capital of the Tang dynasty, close to the modern city of Xian in Shaanxi province of north-western China. They traversed the arid deserts and the snow-capped mountains of China and Central Asia before entering north-western India.11 From there, they travelled south-east along the rivers Ganga and Yamuna to reach Magadha. In the seventh century, Chinese and Korean monks also took the route through Nepal and Tibet, as is evident from Yijing’s compilation of a biography of fifty-six contemporary or near-contemporary monks.12 Moreover, the itineraries of these Sui- and Tang-period monks show that the Mahābodhi monastery and Nālandā were regular sojourns. As for Yijing, he lived in Nālandā for a whole decade, studying and translating Buddhist texts under learned monks, like Xuanzang before him who had spent about two years at this monastery. Consequently, the accounts of these two monks along with Xuanzang’s biography provide an overview of the nature of Buddhist scholarship at this distinguished monastic centre, the names of earlier and contemporary teacher-monks of renown and the types of subjects that were studied (Li 1995: 94–95, Li 1996: 250–251, Li 2000: 43,149–150).
8The accounts of Faxian and Xuanzang – Foguo ji (Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, completed in 414) and Datang xiyu ji (Record of the Western Regions from the Great Tang, completed in 646) – are crucial for grasping a sense of the scale of memorialisation and built histories of Mahābodhi and Nālandā about a thousand to twelve hundred years after the Buddha’s death. By this time, both sites were dotted with temples, monasteries, stūpas and images of the Buddha and bodhisattvas, many of them commemorating spots where noteworthy episodes were believed to have occurred either in the Buddha’s lifetime or during his previous births. In the case of Mahābodhi, Xuanzang’s detailed description of the lofty brick and stucco edifice firmly establishes the seventh century as the terminus ante quem for the construction of the Mahabodhi temple (Li 1996: 217–220). However, it is not good practice to use Chinese Buddhist accounts as authoritative guide maps for visualising Magadha’s sacred geography, as is frequently done with Datang xiyu ji. For instance, Xuanzang’s layout of Nālandā, particularly the relative location of its monasteries, does not correspond to the plan of the excavated site (fig 3). Moreover, the sequence of successive kings of the Gupta dynasty in central India, whom he identified as patrons of these monasteries, is historically inaccurate (Asher 2015: 33–34, Deeg 2020: 252–253).
Fig 3: A comparative representation of the excavated remains of Nālandā (left) and the layout of the site as described by Xuanzang (right). The blue squares numbered 1 to 6 in Xuanzang’s layout represent monasteries.
Photo: M B Rajani.
- 13 See Sen (2003: 15–54) for the role played by Xuanzang in initiating diplomatic (...)
- 14 Just before reaching Mahābodhi, the mission placed an inscribed tablet at the (...)
- 15 See Kieschnick (2000: 27–31) for legends related to the monastic robe as a symbol of the (...)
9Mahābodhi remained a frequent stop-over not only for Chinese monks but also envoys deputed by two successive Tang emperors. The Taizong and Gaozong emperors sent two imperial missions from Chang’an to the court of the post-Gupta king of northern India, Harṣavardhana of Kanauj, in the 640s and 650s.13 In 645, for instance, in the course of the second Tang mission, Wang Xuance, a diplomat and second-in-command, visited the Mahābodhi monastery and placed an inscription beneath the bodhi tree.14 Thirteen years later, in 658, when he led the fourth mission, the head of the Mahābodhi monastery organised a grand reception, bestowing precious gifts upon the Chinese emissary while the Chinese entourage presented the Mahābodhi monastery with a monastic robe on behalf of the Gaozong. Given that the monk’s robe was infused with great symbolism linked to the transmission of Buddhist dharma in Chan Buddhism in the early Tang period, the gifting of a robe at Mahābodhi is strongly indicative of Tang China outgrowing what Antonino Forte calls China’s pronounced ‘borderland complex’ or a sense of inadequacy resulting from the spatial and chronological gap between its early exposure to Buddhism and the origins of the religion in eastern India (Forte 1985: 122–128).15
- 16 See Sørensen (2018) for an excellent discussion on journeys undertaken by Korean Sŏn mo (...)
- 17 The Buddhist cave site of Dunhuang comprises almost five hundred cave-shrines excavated (...)
10The Tang dynasty succeeded in establishing independent Buddhist credentials for its empire and in emerging as the source for the dissemination of Buddhism in East Asia. It came to project its dominions as a sacred realm, on a par with the Buddhist homeland, through the invention of pilgrimage centres that drew devotees from near and far. The best example of such a sanctified locale would be Wutaishan (Mount Wutai), the snow-covered mountain in north-western China, which came to be recognised from the seventh century onwards, throughout the Asian Buddhist world, as the abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, personifying supreme wisdom.16 Magadha’s connections with Wutaishan can be traced back to mid-660 when a ninety-four-year-old monk of Sri Lankan origin named Shijiamiduolo (probably Śākyamitra in Sanskrit), who had studied at the Mahābodhi monastery, became one of the first monks from South Asia to visit this sacred site. Interestingly enough, trans-regional networks were instrumental in the popularisation of the worship of Mañjuśrī in both Tang China and Magadha around the seventh–eighth centuries. Amoghavajra, one of the most influential Indian Tantric Buddhist monks in eighth-century China, actively promoted Mañjuśrī as the protector deity of the Chinese emperor and his dominions. Chinese pilgrims, such as Yijing, might have been responsible for bringing the Mañjuśrī cult into vogue in Magadha. According to Jinah Kim, Mañjuśrī of Wutaishan was almost certainly the inspiration behind the emergence of a specific iconographic type in Nālandā from the late tenth to the early eleventh century: Mañjuśrī riding an animated lion. This particular form bears remarkable similarity with what is identified as ‘new-mode Mañjuśrī’ in the early-tenth-century Buddhist caves of Dunhuang, an oasis city in north-western China (Sen 2003: 76-86, Kim 2022: 197–203).17
- 18 Translation activities were now completely controlled by the state-sponsored I (...)
11Yet, despite Tang China’s assertive reinvention of its empire as a Buddhist holy land, Magadha continued to be a sought-after destination for Chinese Buddhists, with a peak registered during the Song period that lasted between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. Song China witnessed another resurgence of Buddhism under the active patronage of its early emperors. Consequently, during the tenth and the eleventh centuries, there were intensive exchanges between the Buddhist homeland and trans-Himalayan regions, characterised by the arrival of monks from South Asia (including those from Magadha) to territories under the Song, visits of Chinese monks to pilgrimage sites in India, the procurement of Buddhist literature and perhaps, most significantly, the revival of the project to translate Indian Buddhist texts.18
- 19 Inscriptions provide evidence of a mere fraction of the overall pilgrimage traffic to Ma (...)
- 20 It was common practice for Chinese pilgrims to offer silk to the image of the Buddha at (...)
- 21 For the translated texts of the two inscriptions, see Cunningham (1892: 69–71), (...)
- 22 See Leoshko (2012) and Kim (2022) for an analysis of the portrayal, in the stele’s top r (...)
12Regarding the many Song-period monks who would have come to Magadha and left records of their acts of piety, details of the merit-making activities of a few of them can be found in five Chinese inscriptions dating between the end of the tenth century and the third decade of the eleventh century.19 The inscriptions attest to the fact that three out of five monks travelled together from Song China, and between them the five erected small sandstone stūpas and gifted gold-embroidered silken monastic robes to be hung over the vajrāsana.20 Among these epigraphs, the two most distinctive ones are those of a monk named Yunshu, dated 1022, and the imperial epigraph dated 1033.21 Yunshu, who came from Xihe in north-western China, set up near the bodhi tree what appears to have been a stone stūpa bearing multiple images of the Buddha. The stone stele on which his long epigraph is recorded is a cross-cultural artefact that ingeniously weaves together text and imagery to highlight the Buddha’s enlightenment. Although the shape of the stele borrows from the vertical back supports of contemporary eastern Indian sculptures, the text inscribed on it completely transforms it. And with regards its iconographic programme, the stele presents an unusual combination of two image-types closely associated with Mahābodhi: Buddha in bhūmisparśa mudrā and Marīcī, the Buddhist goddess of dawn.22
13The royal inscription refers to the building of a stūpa besides the vajrāsana in memory of the deceased Song emperor Taizong, by the monk Huaiwen who had been deputed to Magadha by the reigning emperor Renzong (r 1022–63) and the empress dowager Empress Liu. While memorialisation at the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment would have obviously been a supremely meritorious act by the deceased’s grandson and daughter-in-law, Jinah Kim speculates about the timing of the imperial memorial, that is thirty-six years after the Taizong’s death. Given that Empress Liu had been a politically astute figure in Song dynastic history, acting as the de facto ruler when her husband Zhenzong was fatally ill, and eventually serving as regent to her adopted son Renzong until her death in 1033, Kim is probably right about the possibility of some political mileage being derived from this act. According to her, a political exigency in the form of growing pressure from Tanguts from the kingdom of Xixia to the north-west might have provided the occasion for erecting the royal memorial, helping to convey a message of alliance with Tibetans who had begun to place inscriptions at Mahābodhi from around this time (Kim 2022: 195). However, in the absence of any record of a contemporary Tibetan imperial mission or a royal inscription from Mahābodhi, it becomes difficult to identify this as the exact political motivation.
14Incidentally, the resurgence of Buddhism during the Song era marks the period when Asian pilgrim traffic to Mahābodhi reached its highest peak (eleventh to thirteenth century), which is borne out by the site’s unique, multilingual inscriptional corpus. During this phase, kings from Myanmar sent two missions to repair/restore the Mahabodhi temple, six lay donors from Tibet undertook a pilgrimage to mitigate the impact of an inauspicious constellation in their lives, a layman from Sri Lanka (probably with his wife and son) installed an image of the Buddha, and a Tibetan monk appears to have set up an image of the Buddha or that of a Buddhist deity.
15Visits by Tibetan pilgrims at this point can be linked to the widespread resurgence of Buddhism in Tibetan territories from the mid-tenth century onwards, which was termed the ‘latter transmission’ or Phyi dar in Tibetan Buddhist historiographical traditions, to distinguish it from the ‘earlier spread’ or Snga dar. Historical evidence shows that during the Tibetan empire (seventh to ninth century), Buddhism had been established throughout the imperial domains that included parts of Central Asia, China and India. In the early post-imperial period, the Purang-Guge kingdom in western Tibet emerged as the main centre of a religious-cultural revival that affected several other Tibetan-speaking regions. During this time, royal patrons, as major architects of Phyi-dar, invited learned Buddhist masters from India and Nepal, sent young students to Kashmir to acquire Indic Buddhist teachings, sponsored monasteries (such as Tholing and Tabo) and ran an eminent translation school, facilitating Tibetan translations of a large number of Sanskrit Buddhist texts (especially Tantric works) by scholars from eastern India, Kashmir, Nepal and Tibet.
16The revitalisation of Tibetan Buddhism was characterised by a strong belief that genuine Buddhism could be established through direct access to Indic Buddhist literature and the strict observance of Indic monastic rules. Magadha strongly influenced the re-shaping of Tibetan Buddhism and, from the thirteenth century onwards, the subcontinent at large and the region around Magadha in particular came to be identified in Tibetan works as the holy land (Phagyül). Within Magadha, Mahābodhi, which Tibetan adherents called Dorjeden (derived from vajrāsana), was imagined to be the geographical and cosmological centre of the world (Huber 2008: 74–84). Furthermore, one of the pioneering figures of the Phyi dar was Atīśa Dīpaṅkara Śrījñāna, an eminent monk from Magadha who was taken to Tibet by a special royal mission in the early eleventh century. According to most of the later Tibetan sources, Atīśa, who was the abbot of the Vikramaśilā monastery, had been initiated at Mahābodhi and had studied at Nālandā (Behrendt 2014: 6).
- 23 For Dharmasvāmin’s account of Mahabodhi and Nālandā, see Roerich (1959: 63–77, 90–97).
- 24 It is not possible here to present the historiography on the decline of South (...)
17Among early Tibetan visitors to Magadha were scholar-translator monks, called lotsawas (lo tsa ba), who came to pursue their Buddhist scholarship in eastern Indian monasteries. When used with caution, surviving hagiographical accounts of lotsawas, called namthars (rnam thar), are helpful in reconstructing a picture of contemporary monastic pursuits and lay devotional activities in prominent centres of eastern Indian Buddhism. One such namthar is about Dharmasvāmin (Chos-rje-dpal) (1197–1264), a revered thirteenth-century lotsawa. Dharmasvāmin travelled through Magadha between 1234 and 1236, studying under Buddhist teachers in Nālandā and Rājagṛha, against the backdrop of Turkish military raids from northern India. In reference to this period of turmoil, he mentions Buddhist centres that had either been abandoned (such as Vikramaśilā and Odantapuri) or those whose activity had been temporarily discontinued (as in Mahābodhi, Nālandā, Vaiśālī and Rājagṛha).23 Consequently, his namthar is widely considered to be an eye-witness account of the demise of Buddhism in eastern India. This is problematic because the end of Buddhism is a very complex issue and has to be understood as a process of gradual decline brought about by a combination of historical factors.24
- 25 There are three dated inscriptions from the Bodhgaya-Gaya area referring to Aśokacalla a (...)
- 26 The complete history of Sri Lankan monks’ institutional control over Mahābodhi remains u (...)
- 27 Buddhasena belonged to the local Pīṭhipati dynasty that had custodianship of (...)
18Tibetan pilgrims were not the only ones to maintain links between Mahābodhi and the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions in the thirteenth century. In the second half of the thirteenth century, some associates of King Aśokacalla (r 1251–1278) of the Khasa-Malla dynasty of western Nepal recorded their patronage in Mahābodhi by inscribing a few epigraphs in Sanskrit.25 In 1253–55, Aśokacalla’s royal preceptor and a couple of functionaries built a monastery (vihāra) wherein they placed an image of the Buddha. They assigned the daily task of offering food to the deity to the Sri Lankan saṅgha, which by this time seems to have emerged as the custodian of worship at Mahābodhi.26 Aśokacalla’s royal preceptor appears to have been based at Mahābodhi for some time, evidently involved in the upkeep of the sacred site. This can be inferred from the epigraphs dating from 1278 and 1274–79, found in Bodhgaya and neighbouring Gaya respectively. The first of these records local king Buddhasena’s gift of land to Dharmarakṣita, who is identified as chief preceptor of Aśokacalla and royal preceptor of Kamā (modern Kumaon).27 Through this endowment, Dharmarakṣita was made responsible for handing over a section of the landed property at Mahābodhi to Sri Lankan monks, some of whom had stayed there while others had returned home. The second epigraph documents the way Dharmarakṣita sought Aśokacalla’s consent before overseeing the construction of a shrine for the Buddha by Puruṣottamasiṃha, a king of the Kamā region, in memory of his dead grandson. Like Aśokacalla’s own officials, his younger brother Daśaratha’s treasurer was a benefactor at Mahābodhi. In 1278, he performed some merit-making activity (deyadharma), details of which are unspecified in his inscription but which could have involved building a shrine, dedicating a Buddhist image or gifting land.
- 28 In the inscription of Daśaratha’s treasurer, Aśokacalla is identified as the p (...)
19At Mahābodhi, the endowments of these functionaries, manifestly representatives of Aśokacalla, have to be situated within the history of the origins of the Khasa-Malla dynasty, the geopolitics of the Khasa kingdom and the nature of Aśokacalla’s kingship.28 Kings of the Khasa-Malla lineage, whose exact linguistic and ethnic identity remain uncertain, ruled over a large, culturally diverse kingdom that existed between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. At its peak, the Khasa kingdom stretched across south-eastern Tibet and north-western Nepal, extending into the Kumaon and Garhwal regions of Uttarakhand in the central western Himalayas. The political integration of these territories in the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions coincided with growing economic and religious-cultural networks because some of the most important trans-Himalayan trade and pilgrimage routes passed through the Khasa-Malla territories (Pande no date, Michaels 2024: 99–102).
20Aśokacalla actively contributed to the expansion of the Khasa domain in multiple directions, in keeping with the expansionist policy of his father, Krācalla. Samuel Grimes attributes to Aśokacalla a pivotal role in the Khasa-Malla dynasty’s successful transition from what he calls the Tibetosphere to the Indosphere, following its likely origin as the house of Yatse in Guge, western Tibet. According to Grimes, the fact that Aśokacalla authorised inscriptions at Bodhgaya stemmed from his Indic inclinations (Grimes 2023). This might be a plausible hypothesis given the consistent claim made in Tibetan sources that Yatse rulers in the southeast of Purang originated from the royal lineages of Guge and Purang, coupled with Grimes’ careful reading of Khasa-Malla inscriptions.
- 29 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such manuscripts often contained complex (...)
- 30 Prajñāparamitā, who personified the wisdom necessary for the attainment of Buddhahood, e (...)
- 31 Since manuscripts more often than not identify Nālandā as their place of production, Joh (...)
21Around the same time that Mahābodhi witnessed a peak in its trans-Himalayan networks, Nālandā saw an influx of patrons from Nepal and Tibet, actively involved in nurturing a Buddhist book cult. Between the late tenth and the thirteenth centuries, there was an efflorescence of a cult around the ritualised worship of Mahāyāna texts in Buddhist monasteries in the Bihar-Bengal region.29 Although written texts had always been held sacred for being embodiments of the Buddha’s dharma, their potency now came to approximate that of consecrated objects such as stūpas and images. In eastern India, three texts were singled out for their unparalleled ritual efficacy – Prajñāpāramitā, Kāraṇḍavyūha and Pañcarakṣā sūtras – and laypersons, seeking to acquire spiritual merit (puṇya), began to commission richly illustrated copies of these texts in large monasteries, especially Nālandā.30 These manuscripts would most likely have served as dedicated visual aids for monks during meditation.31
22The early medieval period in Nepal, spanning the centuries between the end of the Licchavi dynasty in the late ninth century and the beginning of the reign of several Malla clans from the early thirteenth century, was characterised by the emergence of city-states such as Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan in the Kathmandu Valley in central Nepal. The Kathmandu Valley had already developed into a major regional hub of Indic Buddhist traditions by the fifth–sixth centuries CE, and Vajrayāna traditions were consolidated in the early medieval period. This was a time when many new monasteries were built in these places and emerged as prominent centres of Mahāyāna-Vajrayāna scholarship, frequently attracting distinguished scholar-monks on their way to and from the Buddhist heartland and the Tibetan regions (Michaels 2023: 95–98, Lewis and Bajracharya 2016: 88–93).
- 32 See Kim (2013: 226) for examples of two such manuscripts of the Aṣtasāhasrikā Prajñāpāra (...)
23The practice of making illustrated Buddhist manuscripts on rectangular palm leaf folios began almost simultaneously in monasteries in the Kathmandu Valley and in Magadha around the late tenth century, and cross-cultural interactions were evident in both of these traditions. For instance, while the use of palm leaves in a similar format might have been introduced in Nepal from eastern India, it is highly plausible that it was the initial demand for manuscripts by lay and ordained Buddhists from Nepal and Tibet that boosted their production in eastern India (Pal 1978: 36, Kim 2013: 226). There was evidently a great demand for manuscripts of the Prajñāpāramitā and the Pañcarakṣā in the Kathmandu Valley because the largest number of copies of these two texts were made there from about the eleventh century onwards (Lewis and Bajracharya 2016: 90–91). The role of distant patrons in Magadha can be clearly identified from details about donors in precisely dated manuscript colophons but also sometimes via additional information attesting to the manuscripts’ presence in Nepal or Tibet not long after their production.32 For example, one of the oldest surviving copies of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā from Nālandā, dating from the fourteenth regnal year of the Pāla king, Nayapāla (mid-eleventh century), records that it was commissioned by Rāmajīva, a Nepalese (nepāli) lay donor, and that Svameśvara, a resident of Nālandā, was the scribe who wrote it (Kim 2013: 213–215).
24Manuscripts from Nepal have also on occasion brought to the fore specificities of eastern Indian sacred geography. This is because, from the early eleventh century, illustrated manuscripts in Nepal began to portray sacred sites and their associated powerful cultic images not only from within Nepal but from across the Asian Buddhist world, such as India (many of which were from Bihar and Bengal), Sri Lanka, Java, Sumatra, Central Asia and China. One such Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā manuscript, dated 1015 and prepared in a monastery called Shri Hlam in Nepal, identifies an Avalokiteśvara image in Nālandā as being associated with Candragomin, a well-known mid-fifth-century lay Buddhist master from eastern India (Kim 2013: 56–57, 88, 95, 214–5).
- 33 Dharmabhāṇakas, who were members of the monastic community, might have functioned as ma (...)
25Once the practice of commissioning illuminated Buddhist manuscripts had been initiated, patronage was extended by lay men and women of high social status from eastern India, and ultimately by indigenous monks and nuns in the mid-twelfth century. But even when domestic donors dominated the scene, it was not uncommon for Tibetan monks to commission manuscripts in Magadha. For instance, in the early twelfth century, in the thirty-seventh regnal year of Rāmapāla, Vijayakīrti, a monk (bhikṣu) of Tibetan origin (Cīṇadeśa) residing in Nālandā (Nālandānagara), commissioned a richly embellished manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā which was prepared by a dharma-preacher (dharmabhāṇaka) named Kanakamuni-jāgeśvara.33 The manuscript is unusual in that it bears individualised portraits of Nālandā’s Buddhist monks engaged in various activities, including meditating over a book, thus providing visual evidence of contemporary monastic usage of illustrated manuscripts. In the same century, another Tibetan bhikṣu named Puṇyakīrti donated a manuscript of the Maitreyavyākaraṇa, which was prepared in Ghośaligrāma (Kim 2013: 264, 116–17 footnotes 5 and 6, 118).
26In the history of the spread of Buddhism across Asia, the circulation of material objects, such as relics of the Buddha and copies of images of the Buddha and of other Buddhist deities associated with specific locations, played a crucial role in spatially and culturally integrating diverse regions and in drawing adherents to the Buddhist imaginary. In the context of Magadha’s interface with the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions in the first and the second millennium of the Common Era, replicas of famous image-types and monuments associated with the Buddhist heartland facilitated the transposition of Magadha’s sacred landscape onto locales far removed from the birthplace of Buddhism. For instance, an image of Maitreya under the bodhi tree was copied in the course of the second Tang mission by an artist named Song Fazhi and was later used as a blueprint for a sculpture at the Jing’ai monastery in Luoyang and a golden image in Chang’an. Similarly, images from Nālandā had apparently inspired the eighth-century Buddha images that were set up by Amoghavajra in the Jin’ge monastery on Mount Wutaishan. Monks also played a pivotal role in the dissemination and re-creation of Magadha’s monastic architecture in distant lands. For example, in the seventh century, Yijing and his compatriot Huilun sent back home models and sketches of the monasteries in Nālandā and Mahābodhi (Sen 2003: 38, 206–7, Lahiri 1986: 1–2). In the 760s and 770s, monks of Indian origin, Śāntarakṣita (who had been associated with Nālandā) and Padmasambhava, were closely involved in the building of Samye, Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery. The monastic complex was allegedly modelled on Odantapuri, with a three-dimensional maṇḍala-like arrangement of smaller buildings around the central temple (Apple 2014: 106).
- 34 See Sen (2019) for a discussion about the impact of images and paintings from South Asia o (...)
27Mahābodhi was probably the only site in the Asian Buddhist world whose unparalleled sacrality generated a pan-Asian culture of replication in art and architecture from about the ninth–tenth century at least, if not earlier (fig 4 and 5). Consequently, miniature Mahābodhi images in stone, wood and cloth, terracotta plaques depicting the enshrined image within the sacred precincts of the Mahabodhi temple-complex, small-scale temple models in stone and wood, and even full-scale copies of the Mahabodhi temple found a home in different parts of Buddhist Asia (Asher 2012: 63–75). Among the wealth of re-creations of various types, it was reproductions of the Mahābodhi image that were adopted in both Tang China and in post-imperial Tibetan regions.34
Fig 4: Terracotta plaque depicting the Buddha in bhūmisparśa mudrā inside the Mahabodhi temple.
Photo: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (Public Domain). Gift from Michael De Havenon. Source: JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/community.24618070 (accessed 14 May 2024)
Fig 5: Stone model of the Mahabodhi temple.
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Public Domain). Source: JSTOR. https://jstor.org/stable/community.18623084 (accessed 14 May 2024)
- 35 The discussion on reproductions of the Mahābodhi image in Tang China is based on Wong (2 (...)
- 36 By this time, the verse on dependent origination, which summarises the core Buddhist phi (...)
- 37 The purpose of dedication can be inferred from Chinese inscriptions stamped on the (...)
28The Mahābodhi image was introduced into Tang China in the mid-seventh century and assumed its full-fledged form by the beginning of the eighth century.35 It was eventually widely disseminated in the rest of East Asia and to some extent in Central Asia with the diffusion of the Tang Buddhist art style (Wong 2018: 52–53). Between the 660s and 680s, it came to be depicted on a large number of mass-produced, moulded clay tablets of an average height of 10 to 20cm, which have been discovered in a few monasteries in Chang’an. Since many of these tablets were found in the Large Wild Goose Pagoda of the Daci’en monastery, the primary centre of Xuanzang’s translation activities, the pilgrim-monk had evidently been directly involved in the propagation of these portable icons. Scholars have identified two main types of these clay tablets in the Chinese context: the ‘merit-clay’ type, featuring the Buddha seated in bhūmisparśa, flanked by two standing bodhisattvas; and the ‘Indian Buddha image’ type, portraying the Buddha in bhūmisparśa, according to his contemporary Indian figural form, and stamped with the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit verse ye dharma hetu, the Buddhist formula of dependent origination.36 As in all other parts of the contemporary Buddhist world, the dedication of these sealings would have been considered a highly efficacious, merit-accruing activity.37 By the end of the seventh century, large reliefs and statues of this image-type began to be made in Chang’an and Luoyang and on cave-temple sites in Sichuan. That this iconographic form was derived from Mahābodhi was clearly established by label inscriptions that identified the images as being copies of the auspicious image of the Buddha’s attainment of enlightenment (ruixiang).
29From at least the eighth century, the Mahābodhi image in Tang China also came to be combined with another iconographic type from South Asia – the bejewelled Buddha – to form the hybrid image-type of the bejewelled Buddha in bhūmisparśa mudrā. However, unlike the Mahābodhi image-type, the bejewelled Buddha in bhūmisparśa had a more limited trans-regional impact. Found in places like Chang’an, Luoyang, Sichuan and Dunhuang, such unusual hybrid icons depict the Buddha with crowns, armlets and elaborate necklaces, often seated on a throne and accompanied by regal paraphernalia. And like the inscribed examples of the Mahābodhi image-type, bejewelled Buddha images modelled on eastern Indian prototypes are identified as such. For example, a few eighth-century silk paintings from Dunhuang categorise the type as the ‘light-emitting miraculous image from the country of Magadha’.
- 38 See McKeown (2019: 213–252) for a detailed discussion of the re-creations of t (...)
30The association with Mahābodhi prevailed in Ming China, albeit in a very different form. In the early fifteenth century, the Yongle emperor (r 1402–1424) began a copy of the Mahabodhi temple in Beijing, his newly established imperial capital. This temple, built on the grounds of the Zhenjue temple-complex, was completed in 1473, about fifty years after his reign. Before the Yongle, ambitious rulers of the Pagan, Pegu and Chiang Mai kingdoms in Southeast Asia had also built replicas of the Mahabodhi temple in their emergent capitals, between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries.38 This was the period when the Mahabodhi temple came to be closely interlinked with kingship in the Asian Buddhist world through the figure of Aśoka, who had institutionalised worship at Mahābodhi. By recreating the monument associated with the patronage of this paradigmatic ruler in Buddhist history (cakravartin), later monarchs sought to project themselves as righteous Buddhist rulers and their capitals as the centre of the Buddhist world.
- 39 See McKeown (2019: 253–75) for how the Yongle-Śāriputra’s patron-preceptor rel (...)
31However, while aspiring to the common cakravartin ideal, each of these rulers was also reacting to their particular historical circumstances and imperial legacies. As Arthur McKeown’s analysis shows, the Yongle emperor’s patronage of the Vajrāsana stūpa (jingang baozuo ta)/Mahabodhi temple) stood out by the way it drew on imperial traditions in the Chinese realm and by a powerful connection with Mahābodhi through Śāriputra, the last known abbot of the Mahābodhi monastery (McKeown 2019). A Tantric Buddhist practitioner of eastern Indian origin, Śāriputra had been active in Nepal and Tibet before he was invited by the Ming court. There, he was appointed preceptor of the state and supervised the building of the replica on the basis of the plans that he had brought along.39
- 40 See Huber (2008: 100–121) for a discussion on Tibetan engagements with pīṭha sites, whic (...)
32In the Tibetan cultural regions, from the early eleventh century onwards, understandings of Indic Buddhist sacred geography encompassed both sacred sites of early Buddhism concentrated in Magadha as well as a relatively newer network of Tantric cult-centres (pīṭhas) located outside Magadha. Moreover, the transfer of toponyms and the transposition of holy places came to be a distinctive Buddhist practice on the Tibetan plateau.40 From around this time, associations with Mahābodhi were sought to be replicated through the Vajrāsana Buddha image, miniature copies of the Mahabodhi temple and scroll paintings (thangkas). In Tibetan areas, the Mahābodhi image came to be represented through relatively small metal sculptures (usually less than 15cm high) created in a modified Tibetan style following the late Pāla tradition. The Tibetan re-creation stood out because of the portrayal of the Buddha with a short neck in bhūmisparśa mudrā, a particular style of the robe and the use of two separate metals for the Buddha’s body and robe. Among these features, the Buddha’s short neck and the use of two metals for his figure are unusual in the art of the Himalayan region and are clearly indicative of the image-type’s association with Mahābodhi. Jane Casey Singer identifies the use of a brassy copper alloy for the Buddha’s body along with red copper for his robe as clear inspiration from the eleventh–twelfth-century Tantric Buddhist text Sādhanamālā. An invocation in the text describes the Vajrāsana Buddha of the Mahabodhi temple as the one with a yellow-gold body, wearing a brown-red robe (Singer 2001: 44–45, 47–48).
- 41 See Datta (2021: 83–85) for issues relating to the provenance and workmanship of these m (...)
- 42 See McKeown (2019: 287–288) on the strong possibility of Śāriputra having been involved (...)
33Tibetan Buddhists had a special relationship with miniature models of the Mahabodhi temple, which might have functioned like the Tibetan portable shrine (gawu), housing their tutelary deity (yi dam) or as three-dimensional maṇḍalas.41 Stylistically dated between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, such fine-grained stone models (usually less than 20cm high) are unmistakable for the way they reference the Mahabodhi temple, notably through its signature pyramidal tower flanked by four smaller replicas at the corners. Their ritual import can be deduced from the fact that several models are painted in gold and each of them portrays at least one element of Buddhist significance, such as the Buddha’s footprint, double thunderbolt (vajra) or scenes from the Buddha’s life. Among these, two models made up of multiple components – one in stone and the other made of sandalwood – are unique in their depiction of the entire temple-complex.42
- 43 See Heller (2020) for some examples of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sculptures of (...)
34Apart from the continuous history of inspired re-creations of its signature icon and temple architecture in China and Tibet, in the thirteenth century Mahābodhi also served as a channel for the transmission of eastern Indian sculptural art to the extensive Khasa kingdom. An interesting outcome of Aśokacalla’s involvement in Mahābodhi was the influence of eastern Indian Buddhist art on the well-established tradition of casting metal images nurtured by the Khasa-Mallas from that period onwards. Khasa Malla sculptures, lavishly cast in gilt bronze or silver, are usually of a modest size (between 5 and 25cm), but are characterised by fine workmanship largely derived from the Newar style of the Kathmandu Valley. Apart from the Buddha, they frequently depict Buddhist deities of the Vajrayāna pantheon popular in Nepal and Tibet, such as Nairātma, Saṃvara, Hevajra and Bodhisattvas Avalokiteśvara Padmapāṇi and Ṣadakṣarī.43 But the incorporation of prominent eastern Indian iconographic forms into the Khasa Malla corpus, such as the two-armed Prajñāpāramitā and the Vajrāsana Buddha, along with distinctive stylistic elements from Pāla sculptures, bears testimony to the trends in artistic influences (Alsop 2005: 1–5). In the Khasa kingdom, stylistic idioms were borrowed from various sources, as is evident from the influence of Tibetan regions, the Kathmandu Valley and different parts of northern India on the art of western Nepal (Andolfatto 2021: 73–74).
35My analysis of Mahābodhi’s and Nālandā’s interactions with the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions in the course of a millennium reiterates the significance of adopting a long-term perspective in understanding cross-cultural encounters within Asian Buddhism. As places of trans-regional renown located within the Buddhist heartland, Mahābodhi and Nālandā steadily drew lay and ordained practitioners from mountain regions lying to the far north. A careful survey of extant literary and archæological sources has established that this circuit extended from the Himalayan regions of northern India and central Nepal to the trans-Himalayan areas of Tibet and central-northern China. In the period between the middle of the first and the second millennia, Magadha had sustained links with the kingdoms under the Tang and Song dynasties of China. Comparatively speaking, its relationship with post-imperial Tibetan territories, extending into the Kathmandu valley and the surrounding areas of Nepal, covered a shorter period beginning around the eleventh century. Magadha’s most short-lived association was with the Khasa-Malla kingdom that straddled the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions, which was limited to the second half of the thirteenth century.
36While some devotees travelling from distant places added to Magadha’s sacred landscape by building stūpas, setting up shrines and gifting illustrated texts, others contributed to knowledge production around the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment and eastern India’s oldest mahāvihāra in the Asian Buddhist world by composing literary accounts and by bringing material objects. Monks from Magadha also periodically travelled to trans-Himalayan kingdoms, either on a pilgrimage or on more permanent assignments. Consequently, trans-regional influences remained multidirectional, which was perhaps most clearly manifest through the popular worship of Mañjuśrī in Tang China and in Magadha. This is materially reflected in the production of remarkable hybrid artefacts, such as visually enriched Chinese inscriptions from Mahābodhi as well as Vajrāsana Buddha images from Tibetan regions and the Tang territories in China.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the organisers for inviting me to the conference, Himalayas from its Edges: Mobilities, networks, and geographies, of which this special issue is an outcome, and the participants for their helpful questions and comments. Thanks are also due to Vasudha Pande for generously sharing relevant literature, Eloise Wright for help in tracking down references, Sarath Pillai, as always, for promptly providing access to material, M B Rajani for readily granting permission to use an image, Andy Rotman, Kim Gutschow and Maria Heim for insightful suggestions about expanding the scope of the paper, the anonymous reviewer for valuable advice on strengthening some of the arguments, and Sayantani Mukherjee and Bernadette Sellers for critical editorial inputs.