The first monumental architecture of historic India: the stupa, a solid mound of relics ringed by railings and gateways; the chaitya hall and vihara, cut from the living rock; and the pillars of Ashoka.
Indian architecture before the third century BC was built in timber, thatch and brick and has almost entirely vanished. The emperor Ashoka (r. c. 268–232 BC), converted to Buddhism after the bloody conquest of Kalinga, set up polished sandstone pillars inscribed with his edicts and crowned with animal capitals (the lions of Sarnath are the emblem of the modern Indian state), and is said to have divided the Buddha’s relics among thousands of stupas. The Mauryan stoneworkers show knowledge of Achaemenid Persia, whose palaces had fallen to Alexander a few generations before.
The stupa is a burial mound made monumental: a solid hemisphere (anda) of brick faced with stone, on a low drum, crowned by a square railed enclosure (harmika) and a mast of parasols (chattra). The Great Stupa at Sanchi, founded by Ashoka and enlarged in the second century BC, is the classic example: 36.6 metres across, ringed by a massive stone railing whose posts, rails and coping imitate carpentry, with four gateways (toranas) at the cardinal points, carved in the first century BC and the first century AD with the stories of the Buddha. There is no interior; the architecture is a path, walked clockwise round the relics.
Where the stupa is sculpture, the rock-cut hall is architecture carved in negative. In the Western Ghats monks cut into the cliffs chaitya halls (apsidal naves with a stupa at the end, a barrel-vaulted ceiling with ribs of stone, or sometimes of real timber, and a great horseshoe-shaped window over the entrance) and viharas, square halls surrounded by monks’ cells. The chaitya at Karle (c. 1st century AD) is the grandest; the caves at Ajanta, cut between the second century BC and the late fifth century AD, preserve painted interiors of extraordinary refinement.
The horseshoe window of the chaitya, the gavaksha, became one of the basic motifs of all later Indian architecture, and the stupa travelled with Buddhism: into the stepped terraces of Borobudur in Java, the bell-shaped chedis of Thailand and Burma, the dagobas of Sri Lanka, and, through Central Asia, into the pagodas of China and Japan. In India itself Buddhism declined after the twelfth century, and its great monastic universities, such as Nalanda, were abandoned.