Madhya Pradesh, located in the centre of India, has one of the country's richest artistic heritages: Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples and Moslem mosques offer a wide historical overview of the developments in Indian civilisation.
India's best preserved stupa complex stands at Sanchi, 43 miles from the state capital Bhopal. The site is located on an idyllic isolated rise at the confluence of two rivers and near the prosperous city of Vidisha.
The many votive inscriptions show the extent to which the splendour of Sanchi is due to the rich community of local merchants.
Inhabited since the 3rd century BC until the 12th century AD, Sanchi played no part in the life of Buddha but was instead connected with Mahendra, son of the emperor Ashoka, supporter and defender of Buddhism and responsible for taking the teachings of the Enlightened One to Sri Lanka. Queen Devi, mother of Mahendra, was born to a family of rich merchants in Vidisha and it therefore seems very probable that the construction of the Great Stupa, Stupa 1, can be dated to the reign of Ashoka, 273-236 BC.
Third king of the bellicose Mauryan dynasty, Ashoka devoted his youth to territorial expansion until he dominated almost all of India. During the conquest of Kalinga, a kingdom overlapping present day Orissa, Ashoka suffered a profound crisis of conscience. From that moment, he based his policies on the moral concepts derived from the teachings of Buddha and made large donations to the monastic communities. The golden centuries of Buddhism began with Ashoka: stupas were built everywhere, monastic communities spread and universities flourished. Despite the splendour of the Mauryan dynasty ending with the death of Ashoka and the first pan-Indian empire disintegrating into a myriad of local states, the spread of Buddhism continued without pause, particularly in cities and in merchant communities.
Consequently, Sanchi's busy existence continued under the successive dynasties. After a period of stasis building work began again during the pan-Indian imperial dynasty of the Guptas in the 5th century. Influenced by the classical school of Mathura, a holy site 90 miles from Delhi, the local artists engaged upon the image of Buddha and installed four statues of him at the base of the Great Stupa in front of the entrances. The Guptas were also responsible for the construction of Temple 17, one of the oldest Hindu sanctuaries in existence.
During the reign of Harsha, from one of the cadet branches of the Gupta dynasty and the last of the great Indian emperors, other temples and monasteries were built in the 7th century although the quality of the statues was not high.
Sanchi's decline began in the 13th century brought about by the collapse of the great Indian empires that had promoted the expansion of trade and urban settlements and so benefited the merchant class in which Buddhism had found its greatest lay supporters. Indeed, it was along the caravan trade routes that the monasteries were built as another of their functions was to take in and welcome travellers.
When the Moslem hordes burst into India, razed the monastic universities of Taxila, Nalanda and Vikramashila to the ground and destroyed the monasteries in Gandhara, Kashmir and Bihar, the trade routes were made unsafe and Buddhism began to disappear throughout the country.
Sanchi fell into oblivion and it was only in 1818 that General Taylor discovered the site by chance. In 1822, Captain Johnson, the political agent in Bhopal, opened the Great Stupa in search of treasure but caused it to collapse. The stupa did contain treasures but, being a reliquary, the treasures were spiritual, i.e. the remains of the great Buddhist masters. This was reported by Alexander Cunningham, the first superintendent of the Archaeological Survey of India, and by Captain Maisey who found urns in Stupas 2 and 3.
Local farmers had also greatly contributed to the destruction of Sanchi by carting away materials to be used for their own building purposes and even dismantling one of the most beautiful and famous of Ashoka's columns to use its materials for squeezing sugar-cane juice.
Total disaster was averted in 1881 by Major Cole who began to protect the site from intrusion and to clear the monuments of the suffocating vegetation. He strengthened the Great Stupa to prevent its total collapse, rebuilt its western and southern toranas and also the toranas of Stupa 3. Sir John Marshal, superintendent of the Archaeological Department from 1912-19, continued the work of clearing the jungle, restored the south-western part of the Great Stupa, the balustrade and the topmost sections of the construction, restored stupa no.3 and a series of temples and built a small museum where finds were displayed. In 1936, Mohamrnad Hamid opened up the rest of the huge monastery standing at the foot of the hill.
Sanchi is one of the best preserved sites in India and its monuments, over fifty as numbered by Marshall, stand in two groups at the top of the hill and at the bottom on the western slope. The hilltop section is an irregular rectangle measuring 1200 feet north-south by 628 feet east-west and bounded by an 11th-12th century wall. A path near the western tarana of the Great Stupa leads to Monastery 51 and Stupa 2 and joins up with the old road.
The most significant element of Buddhist architecture is the stupa, a reliquary derived from ancient funerary tumuli. Legend has it that, after cremation, the remains of Buddha's body were divided between the largest warrior clans that had been present at the funeral and that the first ten stupa in India were erected over these holy relics. The principal stupa at Sanchi is 119' wide and 53'6" high excluding the pillar with the three parasols. It incorporates a smaller construction attributed to Ashoka and made from fired brick cemented with mud. During the 2nd century, it was rebuilt and enlarged by building a new wall around it from local sandstone covered in a thick coat of plaster. A terrace was added with a double flight of steps, balustrades, a covered walkway for the pradakshina and a harmika in the form of a reliquary.
There is a precise cosmic symbolism to this structure: the high circular plinth, called the medhi, represents the earth; the domed body of the structure, the anda, represents the sky, the square balustrade that rises over the construction, the harmika, refers to the mythical cosmic mountain at the centre of the universe; the dominion of the ultimate Truth, the ethereal world, is symbolised by the central pillar, the chattravali, around which the stupa winds, 'compressing itself like a three dimensional spiral. The chattravali is structured as three parasols, or chattra, typical elements of regal ceremonial which celebrate the three jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha himself, the Sangha and the Dharma- the Enlightened One, the Community and the Doctrine.
As a cosmic mountain, the axis of the universe and the umbilicus of the world, the stupa symbolises the totality of existence and therefore Buddha himself.
A stone enclosure, the vedika, around the stupa delimits the perimeter of the space used for the central rite of Buddhist devotion, pradakshina, in which the devotee circles the object of worship clockwise. The vedika stretches to the four cardinal points where overhanging structures end in huge gateways, the toranas, built in the 1st and 2nd centuries, surmounted by a triple architrave. The original wooden versions of both the vedika and the torana can be seen: the balustrade is made from fixed joint laths that reproduce a stockade and the gateway with slightly curved architraves reproduce the design of structures previously made from canes and curved staves.
It one examines the ground plan of the stupa, the shape of the mandala at the base of all holy Indian architecture, whether Hindu or Buddhist, is evident. The plan is laid over a geometric tracing where the point, the circle and other shapes symbolise determined cosmic events, divine presences and states of awareness that justify the term 'psycho-cosmogram' given to the mandala.
The heart of the stupa is represented by the reliquary which corresponds to the central point in the drawing of the rnandala. The reliquary may or may not be enclosed in a special chamber. The point is the symbol of the origin of time and space, the source from which existence irradiates and to where it returns, the holiest of holies. The process of emanation from the One to the multiple and of cosmic expansion is symbolised by the circle; in the stupa this is represented by the bell-shaped structure made from concentric circles of bricks alternating with loose stones, and topped by a final layer of stones.
The toranas at the four cardinal points are arranged as if on the arms of a cross which has the centre of the mandala as its midpoint. The cross stretches towards the periphery symbolising the concepts of cosmogonic and doctrinal irradiation in the sense that the message of the Buddha, whose 'stone' body is actually the stupa itself, spreads equally towards all regions of the universe. The toranas also evoke the initiatory symbolism of the doorway, a place of communication between the profane and the sacred worlds, a cipher of spiritual transformation that occurs when entering the temple perimeter.
There are no pictures of Siddhartha (Buddha as a young man) on the gateways of Sanchl. The followers of the Hinayana considered himnot as a god but as the master of supreme enlightenment and thus there was no sense in depicting him, either because Buddha's human form had already been extinguished on his attainment of nirvana, or because it was the master's message that was important, not his historical figure.
Buddha's presence in the bas-reliefs is evidenced by symbols connected with particular events: the horse refers to Siddhartha's departure from his family home, the tree symbolises the moment of enlightenment, the throne and the parasol emphasise his prominence among the members of the monastic communities, the wheel signifies diffusion of his doctrine, the stupa is the celebration of his attainment of nirvana (the state of extinction of the incessant and agonizing earthly existence), and the feet indicate the presence of the Enlightened One.
The creative urge of the artists however found ample material for expression in the "Jataka", the writings of the previous lives of the Buddha, the most famous of which is the "Vessantarajataka" in which he appears as a generous prince. Many others record his adventures in the guise of animals and so the bas-reliefs on the torana at Sanchi show gazelles, elephants and monkeys in the wild with extraordinary realism and skill. After the formal and hieratic representations influenced by Persian art, Indian artists learnt to represent the natural world with skill and fluidity.
The first images of the Buddha date from the 2nd-3rd century AD. They were created by the Indian school of Mathura and by the Candhara school influenced by Greek art. It is probable that images of jain saints and yakshas (tree spirits) carved as supports for the western gateway at Sanchi, were the Indian models for the anthropomorphisation of the Buddha while the Hellenist Gandhara school, in the northwest, found ideological justification in using the figure of the Creek philosopher as their basis. Supporting evidence for this theory is that the former was the incarnation of the dharma (the Buddhist doctrine) and the other the incarnation of Logos (the controlling principle of the universe in Greek philosophy).
The doors consist of two pillars topped by four lions, elephants and yakshas supporting three curved architraves. The architraves end in spirals and are separated by square blocks and processions of cavalry mounted on elephants and horses. Extending from the uppermost part of the capital to the spiral scroll of the first architrave, charming shalabajikas (yakshis or tree nymphs) decorate the whole. The final architrave is raised above the others by the 'wheel of law' flanked by two fan-carriers and two triratnas (symbols of the triple jewel). An oft-repeated image is the katpavalli, the 'plant that grants all desires': a vine that winds from the moulding to the balustrade offering jewels, flowers and other delights.
The painted decorations of the architraves were worked on by ivory and wood carvers, metal engravers and jewellers. They are based on the "Jataka" and salient episodes from the life of Siddhartha - the most powerful of which is the temptation by the demon Mara - as well as various Buddhist themes. The northern torana is the best preserved.
The nearby Stupa 3 is much smaller and simpler. It was built at the same time as the larger stupa but is preceded by a single portal like the others of the 1st century AD. Although of a lesser artistic value, this stupa has great religious importance as it contains two sarcophagi in the reliquary chamber with the remains of Shariputra and Maugdalyayana, famous disciples of the Buddha.
Stupa 2 stands on an artificial terrace 1040 feet below the summit of the hill. It is similar to Stupa 3 but without toranas although its balustrade is decorated with simple, archaic scenes and by splendid images of flowers and animals. The reliquary chamber is strangely off-centre and houses the remains of at least three generations of illustrious Buddhist masters.
There are many other stupa all around in different states of conservation: they are built in brick or stone depending on their size, on square or round ground plans and were erected by the votive gifts of pilgrims.
Among the most important finds, like other similar relics elsewhere in India, Ashoka's sandstone column reveals the influence of Persepolis. It is made from a single block, with a bell-shaped capital conserved in the museum) decorated with lotus petals and a circular plinth with four lions at its base. The lion refers to the warrior class into which both Buddha and Ashoka were born.
The many temples in different states of conservation help to reconstruct the genesis of holy Indian architecture. Temple 17 is extremely important from this viewpoint. It is a typical example of 5th century Gupta architecture with a hall preceded by a colonnaded porch and topped by a flat roof. Temple 18 from the 7th century has an apse and an intact and impressive colonnaded porch. Temple 45, with a tower, has been rebuilt several times.
Of the viharas, the largest and most legible is Monastery 51; this structure is almost square, measuring 108' by 106'3", and is divided into twenty two cells around a wide porticoed courtyard. The central cell is larger than the others and preceded by an antechamber; it probably housed an image of the Buddha and was used as a chapel.