Study of the Buddhist Viharas during pala dynasty in Bengal

Abstract

The Buddhist monastic establishments in Bengal are the glorious testimony to the prosperous janapada of Pundrabardhan that once dominated the social, political and economic milieu across the entire South and Southeast Asian territory. Throughout c.750-950 AD a significant number of viharas and mahaviharas served as the earliest known religious, intellectual and educational institutions having distinctive architectural merit and systematic functional disposition. These mega-monuments – from Nalanda to the Somapura mahavihara at Paharpur – are considered to be the concluding signature that not only represent Buddhism during the Pala Rajas in their final years, but also accommodate features that are readily identifiable as the architectural traits of the previous religious and monastic terms in the region. However, built entirely of locally available building materials, this volume of unique architectural heritage now stands in utter ruin while little initiatives are there to protect them from the threats of local geo-climatic forces and unwarranted human intervention.

While these viharas and mahaviharas bear distinctively comparable dimensions in their form and spatial arrangements, they represent the process of experimentation and adaptation in each successive development phases; where dissimilarities prevail in many instances. The ground plans in the Bhoja vihara and Ananda vihara at Comilla shared organizational principles typical of their later representatives – the Somapura mahavihara at Paharpur and the ruins of Salban mahavihara at Mainamati. The Vasu vihara, on the other hand, represents architectural characteristics similar to the practices in Nalanda, India and other earlier examples of Buddhist religious edifices across the region. Evidences suggest that before the practice of Buddhism was almost entirely uprooted from the deltaic landmass of Bengal the evolution was complete and the basic spatial and morphological properties in these monuments became archetypal to the cultural bearing of the region as a whole.

This study highlights the distinctive artistic and architectural endeavor that marks a significant development in the concept of the Buddhist viharas and mahaviharas in Bengal. An overall pattern of development in the Buddhist building art has been scrutinized in the light of behavioral attitude, geometrical configuration and spatial articulation (within the boundaries of the Indian subcontinent); and by doing so, some of the features corresponding towards the formulation of conjectural image have been discussed. The study also addresses to the unanswered discrepancies in their arrangement, pattern, and purpose that still shroud these treasured mega-monuments.

Keywords: Built heritage, Buddhist architecture, Bengal, mahavihara, architectural manifestation.