Maha Stupa at Amaravati

About

Rising from the banks of the Krishna River in what is now Palnadu district, Andhra Pradesh, the Amarāvati Stūpa, known in ancient texts as the mahācetiya, or great sanctuary, endures today as a sacred ruin of enormous consequence. At the height of its glory it bore the distinction of being among the most richly ornamented monuments the Buddhist world had ever produced, its entire surface alive with carved limestone panels, medallion reliefs, and vedikā railings dense with scenes from the lives of the Buddha and the Jātaka tales.

The architectural form followed the classic domed mound (the tholobate or "drum" encircled by a railing), yet at Amarāvati the sculptural programme reached an extraordinary pitch of elaboration. The outer railing, some three metres tall and running nearly 803 feet in total circumference, carried upright pillars and three-tiered cross-bars carved with round lotus medallions and crowded narrative scenes. Four axial entrances opened at the cardinal directions. Representations of the stūpa itself appear repeatedly within the surviving reliefs, offering scholars a rare view of how the structure once appeared, a domed monument crowned with a parasol, its surfaces gleaming with carved stone.

The atmosphere the site still evokes is one of layered time: centuries of devotion, centuries of neglect, and then painstaking modern archaeology. The Archaeological Survey of India now protects the grounds, which include a site museum. Meanwhile, the finest remaining sculptures inhabit institutions across the globe, the Government Museum in Chennai, the British Museum in London, the Guimet in Paris, and collections in Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington among them, testament to a dispersal that began with nineteenth-century excavations and has never fully been undone.

History

Tradition and scholarship trace the mound's earliest phase to the third century BCE, possibly under Emperor Ashoka, when a simple railing of granite pillars enclosed the site. A second, far grander building phase began around 50 BCE and continued to about 250 CE, when the dome was enlarged and entirely new limestone railings and drum slabs were carved with scenes from the Buddha's life and the Jataka tales. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang recorded thriving monasteries here in 640 CE, and the site remained known to Buddhist scholars in Sri Lanka and Tibet into the fourteenth century before the mound was gradually lost to overgrowth. Colin Mackenzie surveyed the ruins in 1797 and 1816, and nineteenth-century excavations under Walter Elliot and later Robert Sewell sent many of its finest carvings to museums in Chennai and London.

Significance

Art historians count the Amaravati school, with its elongated figures and deeply cut, crowded relief, among the three great traditions of ancient Indian sculpture, its influence carried by maritime trade to Sri Lanka and South East Asia. In 2006 the Dalai Lama conducted a Kalachakra initiation at the mahachaitya, drawing more than a hundred thousand pilgrims and returning living devotion to a site long held in ruin. The Archaeological Survey of India now protects the mound and its adjoining site museum, though most of its carved stones remain scattered among collections in Chennai, London, Paris, and beyond.

Architecture

Andhra (Amaravati school) stupa architecture: a brick-cored hemispherical mound faced in limestone, encircled by a carved vedika railing