Archaeology of Early Buddhism

[Guest guest]

Lars Fogelin. 2006. Archaeology of Early Buddhism. ISBN 0-7591-0750-

5. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, California. 203 pages, glossary,

index, bibliography.

When the Buddha died, says tradition, his fellow monks burned his

body and divided up his ashes, sending parts of the great

philosopher's remains to eight monasteries in the Ganges plain of

India. Buddhist monasteries were, according to historic documents of

the period, places where monks could live the contemplative life,

eschewing the material world and following in the steps of

Siddhartha.

 

The problem with using religious documents to approach an

understanding of the past—well, really any historical document—is

not that they're inaccurate or too fantastic to be true, but rather

that they are incomplete. Tradition tells us that Buddhist monks

lived simply, and in fact the religious principles outlined in the

documents are very detailed. But the documents still don't tell us

the practical aspects of the simple life. While on paper the

monasteries were isolated from the material world, they were still

subject to local political and economic forces, not to mention the

physicality of living in a particular environment, and the flavor of

the interchanges with nearby villages for food and religious

ceremonies.

Thotlakonda Monastery

Lars Fogelin's new book, the Archaeology of Early Buddhism, is

focused on the archaeological investigations of the Thotlakonda

monastery, an Early Buddhist monastery located on the eastern coast

of India in Andhra Pradesh overlooking the Bay of Bengal.

Thotlakonda was occupied by about 65 monks, more or less, between

about 300 BC and 200 AD. The monastery ruins were excavated between

1987 and 1991 by the Andhra Pradesh Department of Archaeology and

Museums. Fogelin conducted archaeological survey of the region

around Thotlakonda over several months between November 2000 and

March 2002. What an examination of the combined research does is

place the monastery firmly within the greater society of coastal

India, how it functioned within the natural and social context of

the time and place it was located; and, most interestingly, how the

monks adapted their surroundings to practice Buddhism, and adapted

Buddhism to suit their surroundings.

An Introduction to Practice Theory

Fogelin's book is a reworking of his 2003 PhD dissertation from the

University of Michigan, and under normal circumstances I would skip

over all the chapters giving background research. From immediate

personal experience, I know that sometimes these chapters are

exercises for the dissertation committee, to prove that the writer

knows the background and little to do with the text of the

dissertation itself. (Nobody, please, look at my MA thesis as a

prime example of this). But in this case, the chapters are an

excellent introduction to the notion of practice theory: how

religion is practiced. In these chapters, Fogelin introduces the

subject by walking the reader through the intricacies of the

theoretical underpinnings, and, trust me, the writing is far more

interesting than mine as I attempt to summarize it. Ultimately, what

using practice theory does is widen the sphere of information used

to understand cultural history. It is an exciting form of

archaeology, allowing bits of information to come from many

different disciplines to create a mosaic of what, in this case, the

monastery life was like for the Early Buddhist monks on India's

eastern coast.

Reading the Sticky Bits

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Fogelin's writing is very clear,

even when approaching the sticky bits of archaeological theory like

(shudder) Marxism and phenomenology. The book includes a brief

glossary of Buddhist terminology, for which I'm very grateful. A few

more photographs of the monastery ruins or other modern monasteries

would have been very nice, but all in all, the Archaeology of Early

Buddhism is an excellent introduction both to the archaeology of

Buddhism and practice theory as it is exercised in archaeology.