Stone, Elizabeth Rosen. The Buddhist Art of Na ̄ga ̄rjunakonda.
Delhi, 1994. Definitive study of archaeological evidence
from the most important region for early Buddhism in
southern India.
MICHAEL W. MEISTER (2005)
TEMPLE: BUDDHIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS
IN EAST ASIA
Symbols of the Buddha and precursors of Buddhist monu-
ments appeared in China in the Western Han dynasty (206
BCE–9 CE). During the Eastern Han (23–220 CE), Buddhist
images and places to worship them had made their way to
the Chinese capital and many provincial regions. By the
fourth century CE multicultural monastic communities prac-
ticed Buddhism in China’s westernmost regions, including
oasis towns in what are today Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous
Region and Gansu province. By the next century, temple
compounds had sprung up in cities, towns, and secluded,
mountainous areas in every part of China, and Buddhism
and its architecture had reached the Korean peninsula. By
the end of the sixth century, the religion flourished in all
three East Asian countries—China, Korea, and Japan.
In general, the movement of Buddhism and the temple
compound was eastward, initially from India to Central Asia,
to China, to Korea, to Japan, but occasionally transmission
of architecture and ideas occurred via alternate routes that
bypassed Central Asia or Korea, for instance. Wherever Bud-
dhism went, the temple compound was the core of both mo-
nastic and religious communal life. Its size and complexity
increased with time, such that new sects gave rise to new ar-
chitectural forms and building arrangements. Patronage
often was a direct reflection of imperial interest in the faith.
Constructed almost exclusively with local materials, the ar-
chitecture of temple compounds was adapted to every cli-
mate and region of East Asia. Yet through two millennia of
history, the core structure and the primary purposes of the
Buddhist temple compound as a setting for Buddhist wor-
ship and education have remained constant.
TEMPLE COMPOUNDS IN CHINA. Buddhist temple com-
pounds presented the first serious challenge to the highly de-
veloped, coherent, codified, and even rigid Chinese architec-
tural system. For more than two thousand years prior to the
appearance of Buddhism, individual Chinese structures had
been supported by timber frames made of primarily straight
pieces of wood. By the time Buddhism entered China, canti-
levers in the form of bracket sets had been introduced to help
support the weight of large, prominent roof eaves, and ce-
ramic tile had become the primary material for roof cover-
ings. The system was employed for emperors and common-
ers alike, in palaces and ritual halls of the sovereign, humble
dwellings, and altars that were built by both groups. Ground
plans of all these structures were almost invariably four-
sided, the one exception being ritual halls that excavations
suggest had circular and octagonal rooms. Principles of axial-
ity and four-sided enclosure dominated Chinese construc-
tion; the latter was so important that it was almost impossible
to find a structure without an arcade-enclosed courtyard ad-
joining or in front of it. Buildings and space multiplied along
orthogonal lines, sometimes joined by arcades, in either di-
rection. Except for watchtowers or gate-towers, before the
entry of Buddhism, Chinese buildings were one-story high.
These principles of Chinese construction and space would
influence and usually govern imperial and religious building
across East Asia until the twentieth century.
Construction in China’s first Buddhist centuries.
Three fundamental architectural forms of early Indian Bud-
dhist construction—stupa, caitya, and viha ̄ra—had to be ac-
commodated by the Chinese system in order for Buddhist
temple compounds to exist. All three were achieved during
the centuries of disunion between the fall of the Han dynasty
in 220 and reunification under the Sui in 581. During this
period, many of the non-Chinese rulers of small and short-
lived dynasties and kingdoms were eager patrons of a religion
whose origins were as foreign on Chinese soil as were they.
By the end of the sixth century, Buddhism had become the
dominant religion in every region of China and its borders.
The most striking symbol of Buddhism on the Chinese
landscape was the tower-like structure known as a pagoda,
the Western name of the East Asian version of the stupa. The
stupa had already undergone transformation along the route
eastward across Central Asia from its initial Indian form of
a circular plan with an egg-shaped dome capped by a balus-
trade-enclosed harmika ̄ to a taller, occasionally four-sided
monument. Its primary purposes as a relic mound, either for
the remains of a Buddhist or other sacred relics or to mark
a sacred place or event in the history of the faith, remained
the same. At least five versions of the pagoda stood as parts
of Chinese temple compounds before the beginning of the
Tang dynasty (618–907). Three examples of pagodas with
four-sided plans are represented by the single-story, nearly
square Four-Entry Pagoda at Shentong Monastery in Lic-
heng, Shandong, restored in 611; the multistory pillar-
pagoda whose perimeter decreases story by story from base
to top; and the multistory pillar-pagoda of uniform perime-
ter dimensions from first story to last. The latter two are
found near centers of Buddhism in China that included
major clusters of Buddhist worship caves. Both forms of pil-
lar-pagoda had roof eaves marking each story. The fourth
and fifth pagoda types taper in size from base to roof. One
has an octagonal and the other a dodecagonal ground plan.
Numerous octagonal pagodas survive from every period of
Chinese history, but the only surviving, and only known,
twelve-sided pagoda was built at Songyue Monastery on
Mount Song, Henan, in 523. All pagodas of the early period
have replicas on their exterior facades of the doors, windows,
and corbel bracketing found on contemporary Chinese
wooden architecture. Those that survive are brick or stone
masonry.
Joining the pagoda as a focal point of worship in an early
Chinese temple compound was the Buddha hall, in whichTEMPLE: BUDDHIST TEMPLE COMPOUNDS IN EAST ASIA 9045