Amaravati: Buddhist Sculpture from the Great Stupa

·期刊原文

Amaravati: Buddhist Sculpture from the Great Stupa

Reeviewed by Robert L. Brown

TThe Journal of the American Oriental Society

VVol.118 No.2

AApril-June 1998

Pp.303-305

CCopyright by American Oriental Society

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By ROBERT KNOX. London: BRITISH MUSEUM PRESS, 1992. Pp. 247, 21

figures, 133 catalogue illustrations. [pounds]40.

The two Buddhist sites from Andhra Pradesh, Amaravati and

Nagarjunskonda, have justifiably held the attention of scholars-from

the earliest attempts to quantify, judge, and understand Indian art

in the eighteenth century up until today. The two books are welcome

additions to this research. While neither changes radically our

basic views of the art and architecture of the two early Buddhist

sites, they contribute many nuanced shifts in, and suggest different

approaches to, the extensive stone sculpture from these sites. As

always with Indian sculpture, there is a need to set up a

chronological schema, and both books spend considerable time doing

it. In addition, looking at the two books together helps to clarify

the interrelationship between the art of the two sites.

Amaravati is the earlier of the two. Knox's book is a catalogue of

sculpture from Amaravati in the British Museum, intended, according

to Jessica Rawson's brief preface, as a "general introduction" and

"descriptive catalogue" to the Museum's magnificent collection,

which had been newly installed in the Museum galleries along with

publication of the book in 1992. The catalogue illustrates each of

the 133 sculptures in excellent photographs, many in color and

covering entire pages.

There are four chapters of introduction before the catalogue itself.

These chapters give a history of the site; tell of how the Museum

acquired the collection; describe the great Stupa at the site from

which much of the sculpture comes; and, finally, give a system for

dating and typology of the sculpture. The typology, which consists

of categories of sculpted architectural elements (pillars,

crossbars, copings, and so forth), is used to organize the sculpture

in the catalogue, which is arranged more or less chronologically

within each type. Each object in the catalogue is carefully

described, the most helpful feature, I think, of the book. These

descriptions force the reader to look carefully at the often very

complex sculptures, pointing out details and characteristics that

would otherwise most likely be missed.

Looking at the introductory chapters, Knox ties the form the Great

Stupa finally took to the coming of the Satavahana rulers and the

period of prosperity that they brought. The dating of the Satavahana

kings, however, has long been debated - and for Amaravati they could

have begun ruling either in the first or the second century A.D.,

probably, Knox feels, later - around A.D. 130. The building more or

less ceased with their departure at the end of the third century,

with activities shifting to nearby Nagarjunakonda under the Iksvaku

rulers (the topic of Stone's book). But there was a Buddhist

monument at Amaravati from before the Satavahanas' coming, going

back to Mauryan times in the third century B.C. Knox thus rejects

Douglas Barrett's short chronology for the Amaravati sculpture,

which argued for it beginning only in the first century A.D.(1)

I think most scholars today would agree with Knox, but it is not

clear what was at the site so early. There are massive polished

granite pillars (one is 2.63 m tall) cut to accommodate crossbars

(Knox illustrates one in a photograph of ca. 1880), which appear to

be part of a large vedika that can apparently be dated to the third

century B.C. Some recently excavated fence pieces have, according to

I. K. Sarma, Asokan period inscriptions.(2) Knox does not say it,

but this would make it the earliest stone stupa fence of any size in

all of India, earlier by some 150 years than those of north India,

such as at Bharhut and Sanci, which appear to have replaced wooden

fences. In addition, that the pieces were polished is of great

importance if the polish indicates not only a Mauryan date, but also

Mauryan royal patronage. Add to this the find of Brahmi Prakrit

inscriptions on potsherds from Amaravati which relate to similar

finds from Sri Lanka that date by radiocarbon to 450-350 B.C.,(3)

and thus one or two centuries earlier than any previously known

South Asian inscriptions (and thus writing), and we are forced to

reassess the importance of South India and Sri Lanka to early South

Asian civilization and religion.

The Great Stupa at Amaravati itself was already largely destroyed

when Colonel Mackenzie, an Englishman, visited it in 1797. By then

it had been a source for building materials by local builders, and

the stone was also being burned to produce lime. The site was

cleared completely in 1880; an enormous number of loose sculptures

found their way over the years primarily either to England (and

eventually to the British Museum) or to the Madras Museum. There is

also considerable material today at the site museum. But with the

site's destruction we will never have a clear view of what was there

and how the sculpture was used, and much of what scholars must do,

as Knox attempts, is to reconstruct the monuments from what is left.

This is essentially what he does in the two chapters (III and IV) on

architecture and sculpture. His reconstruction of the form of the

Great Stupa basically follows Barrett's of 1954, and he illustrates

the reconstruction in drawings that follow those in the earlier

study. The stupa was axial, with a massive circular fence whose four

entrances brought the worshiper directly to the four projections of

the stupa's base on which five pillars were erected. These pillars

and projections, called ayaka-pillars and - platforms, are found

almost exclusively (something similar has been found in relief on

two votive stupas at Ratnagiri in Orissa) in Andhran stupa

architecture. The sculpture is on the fence and gates, and on stone

relief slabs that were stacked in rows against the body of the stupa

itself.

This is not the place to go into the details of the complicated

arrangement of the sculpture, but Knox's reconfiguration, as those

in the past, is largely speculative. Indeed, the organization he

suggests does not fit in many ways with the organization of

sculpture depicted on the extensive and highly detailed stupas

carved in relief on slabs meant to decorate the actual mahastupa

itself (many examples of which are included in the catalogue). The

often-repeated notion that these reliefs show the mahastupa raised

above the fence, pushed up like a stick of deodorant out of the tube

in an artistic convention, so that the relief carving against the

stupa that would actually be hidden by the fence can be seen, does

not, in fact, explain the organization that scholars, including

Knox, have attempted to propose for the loose architectural pieces.

Further, which figures are intended as people and which as images on

these stupa reliefs is also frequently not clear. None of these

issues is mentioned by Knox.

But what I feel is the most serious concern with the book is that

Buddhism is not introduced in the discussion. Not only is there no

attempt to inform the reader about even the most basic facts about

Buddhism, how it works, and why people might be Buddhist, but the

descriptions of the reliefs name the stories and their characters,

all of them Buddhist, but fail to tell the stories and what they

mean and why they are important. Knox freely uses Sanskrit terms in

his descriptions, but there is no glossary. I cannot imagine how a

reader, unless he is already very familiar with Buddhism and

Amaravati, will be able to make heads or tails out of these

otherwise helpful descriptions.

The second book reviewed here deals with a nearby Andhran site (some

100 km away as a bird flies and connected by rivers) that is closely

related to Amaravati in time and in style. Elizabeth Stone's book,

however, is a very different undertaking from that of Knox. Stone

has been working on Nagajunakonda since her graduate student days,

and it was the topic of both her Master's thesis and her Ph.D.

dissertation (written under her maiden name, Rosen). She has

published a number of interesting and important articles on the site

over the years. We in Indian art history have long been anticipating

her book-length study.

It turns out that its focus is on the stylistic development of the

site's sculpture, and it has some surprises. But before discussing

this "evolution," the topic of her second and much the longest

chapter, I will say something of the other four. The first chapter

introduces the site, its ruling dynasty, and its architecture.

Unlike Amaravati, Nagarjunakonda was recognized by scholars only

very late, in the 1920s; by the 1960s it was under water, at the

bottom of a dammed-up lake. In preparation for the inundation, the

site was excavated by the Archaeological Survey of India from 1954

to 1960. Unfortunately, only the briefest excavation reports have

thus far been published. Stone does not tell us where the official

excavation data are and why no report has been published after some

forty years. In an odd twist, and apparently according to a wish of

Jawaharlal Nehru, some of the monuments, and much of the sculpture,

were transported to a hilltop which, with the flooding of the

reservoir, became an island, and can today be reached only by boat.

Stone feels, as did Knox anent Amaravati, that the building activity

at Nagarjundakonda is directly related to dynastic patronage, in

this case of the Iksvakus, of which four kings are mentioned in

inscriptions, reigning some seventy-five to one hundred years, from

about A.D. 225 to the middle of the fourth century. The Iksvakus

were perhaps Satavahana feudatories who rose to power with the

Satavahanas' downfall. But unlike the Satavahana kings, the Iksvaku

kings were Hindus, worshippers of Siva; it was their queens who were

the Buddhist patrons. Thus, there are Hindu shrines and images from

Nagarjunakonda. Interestingly, these temples are built in an unusual

technique, of a stone veneer over a core of brick or rubble, that

Stone suggests is Roman in source. While she says that such a

building technique is restricted in India to Nadarjunakonda, this is

not exactly true, as temple 17 at Sanci is built with this

technique, and it brings up the intriguing possibility that this

enigmatic little temple, dating to about 400, or only perhaps some

one hundred years later than those at Nagarjunakonda, might also

have been a Hindu temple.

Besides Hindu architecture, there are also secular structures at

Nagarjunakonda, and these are unique in India, including a theater

or, according to Stone, a boxing stadium. But it is the Buddhist

monuments that dominate. And Stone introduces in this first chapter

several of her ideas, mostly already presented in her articles,

regarding the development of architecture, and more generally of

Buddhism, at the site. These include that the site shows, in its

monastic architecture, the development from Hinayana to Mahayana;

that Mahayana developed largely from lay patronage, which focused on

the worship of the stupa and Buddha images (following Akira

Hirakawa); and that the different sects at the site can be placed on

a scale of innovation (or movement toward Mahayana doctrine)

depending on the monks' acceptance or rejection of stupa and image

worship.

Jumping to chapter III, Stone deals briefly with sculpture from two

other Andhran sites, Gummididurru and Goli. She uses sculpture from

Western museums, basically unprovenanced material, to show that it

can be placed at one or other of the two sites because it is

stylistically distinct, different from sculpture from

Nagarjunakonda. The sculpture from Gummididurru relates, however, to

the early sculpture at Nagarjunakonda, while that from Goli is

later, perhaps post-Iksvaku (first half of the fourth century). The

Goli sculpture, Stone feels, particularly relates to, in fact

influenced (is "evidence of the transmission of the Andhra Style"),

the later art of north India of the GuptaVakataka era.

Chapter IV is very short, but takes the transmission of Andhra style

even further geographically, to Afghanistan, in a discussion of the

Begram ivories. Stone dates the ivories, also a topic of a

previously published article, to the third or fourth centuries. She

suggests that, while made in the northwest, they have close

stylistic and iconographic parallels in the stone sculpture of

Nagarjunakonda. Similar ivories must, she feels, have once actually

existed in Andhra, and they reveal, as do the stones, an intense yet

subtle awareness of classical Western art. The point here is that

these styles and influences are pan-Indian, reflecting a surprising

interchange of peoples and goods, all feeding into, Stone thinks,

the style that develops in the Gupta period. The final chapter (V)

is a brief, two-page conclusion.

Now I want to return to the heart of the study, chapter II, "The

Evolution of the Nagarjunakonda Style." Stone "will demonstrate in

this chapter (that) the stylistic changes in the art of

Nagarjunakonda are allied to the development of the architectural

ground-plans of the site." While this may not sound unusual, it has

never, as far as I am aware, been argued for any other site in

India. What Stone means, and goes on to demonstrate, is that each

monastic or stupa site at Nagarjunakonda had its own style. This

means, for example, that the two contemporaneous and contiguous

sites 2 and 3 had two different styles. That is, the artists of one

monument, working at the same time but a few meters from artists at

another monument, were working in two different styles. This differs

from the rest of India, where artistic styles are broadly

geographical and chronological, but monuments and art from the same

site share the same style, and do not even show sectarian stylistic

differences.

Another surprise is the relationship of the Nagarjunakonda art to

that at Amaravati. Stone's dating for Amaravati is roughly the same

as that of Knox; it was around A.D. 225 that, with the downfall of

the Satavahanas, the Iksvakus' first king Camtamula I came into

power at Nagarjunakonda. But the art she assigns to his reign is

not, as might be expected, a continuation of the late styles at

Amaravati. While some of the art does reveal an Amaravati

connection, much of it shows influence from a north Indian site,

Mathura. It is not, according to Stone, until the reign of the third

Iksvaku king, Ehuvala Camtamula (ca. 265-75 to ca. 290-300 A.D.),

that Amaravati influence becomes more powerful. The Nagarjunakonda

artists then changed the Amaravati art, moving it toward lower

relief, more decorative style, and more formalized compositions.

Stone makes it clear that she feels this is a decline in artistic

quality from that of Amaravati - a somewhat distressing tendency

toward personal judgment shared, to an even greater extent, by Knox.

Both books deserve to be widely read, and contain many important

points that I have not been able to bring up here. Nevertheless, the

sculpture and architecture from Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda is so

rich, varied, and significant, and continues to present so many

important questions, that scholars should be encouraged to continue

research on this wonderful material.

1 Douglas Barrett, Sculptures from Amaravati in the British Museum

(London: British Museum, 1954).

2 I. K. Sarma, "Early Sculptures and Epigraphs from South-East

India: New Evidence from Amaravati," in Indian Epigraphy: Its

Bearing on the History of Art, ed. Frederick M. Asher and G. S. Gai

(New Delhi: Oxford, 1985): 15-23.

3 See F. R. Allchin, The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia:

The Emergence of Cities and States (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1995), 176-79.

ROBERT L. BROWN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES