monastic life. Although each structure was probably
made of perishable materials, such as bamboo, thatch,
and wood, the buildings included dwellings, private
cells, porches, storehouses, privies, promenades, wells,
bathing chambers, and halls of unspecified purposes.
The same multiplicity of building functions, usually in
a secluded location but close enough to the greater
population to allow for alms collection, would remain
standard for monastery architecture in East Asia. The
conversion of residential space into Buddhist space,
including the donation of residences for transforma-
tion into monasteries, would also become common in
East Asia.
Three structures named in Sanskrit texts or inscrip-
tions of the last centuries B.C.E. are associated with early
Indian Buddhist monastic architecture: the vihaara,the
caitya,and the STUPA. All were constructed of endur-
ing materials and were derived from vernacular archi-
tecture in which rooms of a covered arcade enclose an
open courtyard. In a Buddhist context, vihararefers to
the residential cells of monks and the courtyard they
define. Because a resident monastic population is fun-
damental to religious life, the Sanskrit term viharacan,
in certain instances, be translated as “monastery.” The
first meaning of caityais mound or pedestal, but the
concept of a locus for elevation quickly gave way to a
more general meaning of “sacred place.” In the vocab-
ulary of Buddhist architecture, caityais most often an
adjective for hall (caityagrha), and the most common
form of caitya is a rock-carved worship cave with a
stupa inside. Some of the best examples of this kind of
caitya hall are at Lmas Rsi in the Barabar Hills and
Bhajaand the nearly adjacent site, Karl, both about
one hundred kilometers southeast of Mumtaz (Bom-
bay). Dated to around the third century B.C.E., the first
century B.C.E., and the first century C.E., respectively,
the exterior entry to each is marked by a pointed, horse-
shoe-shaped arch known as a caitya arch. The same
archway appears in relief sculpture from contemporary
stupas at Bharhut and SAN
CI.
Although each is best known for its monumental
stupa and in some cases torana(gateways) with relief
sculptures recounting the life and legends of the Bud-
dha, the monasteries Sañcin Madhya Pradesh, Ama-
ravatand Nagarjunikonda in Andhra Pradesh, and
Taxila in present-day Pakistan included all three types
of monuments in the late centuries B.C.E. and early cen-
turies C.E. Moreover, all remained sacred sites of Bud-
dhism to which architecture would be added through
their history. Temple 17 at Sañc, for instance, built
four centuries after the monastery’s famous stupa, is
an excellent example of a Gupta temple.Rock-carved monastic architecture
Full-scale monastic complexes were also carved into
natural rock in India. Most famous are the caitya and
vihara of AJANTAin Aurangabad, Maharashtra. Con-
sisting of twenty-eight caves excavated over ten cen-
turies, Ajantaincludes some of the best examples of
architecture of the Gupta period (ca. fourth to seventh
centuries), the stylistic pinnacle in Buddhist art pro-
duction in India. Two distinctive cave types and all
three architectural forms are preserved there. The ma-
jority of caves are vihara-style, consisting of monastic
cells enclosing a central, open, squarish space or an in-
terior with pillars arranged in grid pattern. Caitya-style
caves at Ajanta(numbers 9, 10, 19, and 26) are ellipti-
cal in shape with pillar-defined arcades and a stupa at
the interior end of the ellipse. Like the majority of caves
at Ajanta, all the caitya-caves are MAHAYANA. That is,
the Buddha image is represented, often seated on in a
stupa, in the caitya chapels. In plan, it is hard to dif-
ferentiate between a Mahayana and pre-Mahayana
caitya- or vihara-style cave. Inside they are immediately
distinguishable, the early ones having an unorna-
mented stupa for circumambulation at the deepest
point in the cave and the later ones with the Buddha
image represented not only on the stupa but in other
sculpture and murals.Rock-cut monasteries and temple complexes were
constructed in India through the course of Buddhist
history. The details of architectural style were often of
the period, so that a Gupta monastery might house a
building whose structure, minus the iconographic dec-
oration, would be hard to distinguish from a contem-
porary Hindu temple. In general, it can be said that
Hindu architecture surged and Buddhist monastery
construction began to wane after the Gupta period. By
that time, however, monks and travelers from the east
had come to India to study, and Indian Buddhists had
traveled eastward. The midway points where meetings
between Chinese and Indian monks occurred resulted
in some of the most extraordinary Buddhist monas-
teries known. Monasteries in these points of encounter
in former Chinese and Russian Turkestan, the present-
day Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, and
the republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, survive as ruins in
oases of the death-defying mountain ranges, deserts,
and barren wasteland that characterize CENTRALASIA.MONASTICARCHITECTURE