Buddhist Monuments Near the Lower Krishna River, India (Part 2 of 3)

For photos, see greatmirror.com
For  a transcript, see buzzsprout.com/1970784

Transcript

A day later, I set out for Nagarjunakonda.  That’s Nagarjuna’s Hill.  It’s about a 100 airline miles upstream on the Krishna River from Vijayawada.  Call it four hours. 

Two thousand years ago, Nagarjuna was a monk central to the emergence of Mahayana Buddhism from the older Theravada.  The most tangible distinction between the two is that images of the Buddha appear in Mahayana buildings but not in Theravada ones.  Mahayana Buddhism gives Buddhists someone to pray to; Theravada Buddhism does not.  Take your pick.  

There’s no evidence that Nagarjuna lived on the hill named for him, but Tibetan documents say that he lived in this part of India, and his name appears on the railing of the Amaravati stupa.  It’s also been applied for several centuries to a hill shaped like a grain of rice a bit over a mile long.  The hill is flat-topped, rimmed partly with cliffs and partly with medieval fortifications, and it overlooks the site of the ancient city of Vijayapuri, which flourished on the banks of the Krishna two thousand years ago.  Like Rome, Vijayapuri was in ruins by the 7th century.  Unlike Rome, Vijayapuri was too remote to attract people looking for building materials.  The city was instead destroyed by Muslim iconoclasts on their perpetual mission.  

The government of India in the 1950s decided to dam the Krishna five or six miles downstream from the ruins.  Prime Minister Nehru came to the site to lay the foundation stone for a masonry dam a mile long and with a maximum height of 400 feet.  He said that  laying the foundation stone was, for him, “a sacred ceremony.”  He was laying, he said, “the foundation of the temple of humanity of India.”  He meant that water from the canals leading downstream from the dam would save thousands of farmers from crop failure.   

So the dam was built despite the cries of archaeologists.  They had only discovered Vijayapuri in 1926.  The regional superintendent of the Archaeological Survey of India, Albert Longhurst, then spent five years working at the site.  He unearthed nine stupas, five dormitories, three monasteries, two temples, a riverside wharf, and a palace.  I know.  You’re waiting for the pear tree.

It seems from his official report that his work focussed on the great stupa.   When he found it, he wrote, it had been  “a large mound of earth and broken brick overgrown with grass and jungle…  The whole of the dome… had been demolished….”  Longhurst continues:  “the excavation of this monument was a very laborious task that took a month to complete,” but Longhurst then saw that the foundation of the stupa was a set of concentric brick wheels, the largest 106 feet in diameter.   Brick spokes divided the structure into 40 cells.   “At last” Longhurst wrote, “when we had given up all hopes of finding anything of interest, one of the coolies noticed a small broken pot … crushed when the chamber was filled with earth.  The following objects were found: a fragment of bone placed in a small round gold reliquary three-quarters of an inch in diameter...placed in a little silver casket, shaped like a miniature stupa.”  

Longhurst restored the drum of the stupa, but there was no railing to put back together.  He explained that the railing here had been made of wood.  Some later students have disagreed and argued that the railing was indeed of stone but that iconoclasts couldn’t resist the challenge.  

The most visually spectacular feature of the stupa had been at its cardinal points, where worshippers would have approached the structure through gaps in the railing.  Here, instead of the usual drum wall, there were square platforms about 20 feet wide projecting out from the drum about five feet.  Longhurst calls them ayaka-platforms because each supported five ayaka-pillars, stones ornamented like the torso of a fully tattooed man.  

The pillars commemorated  the five key events of the Buddha’s life: birth, renunciation, enlightenment, first sermon, and death, and Longhurst found all 20 of them–five at each of the four platforms.  In addition, the platforms themselves were profusely ornamented.  By the time he left India to become Ceylon’s commissioner of archaeology, Longhurst had assembled from the ruins of Vijayapuri what he judged to be the largest and finest collection of sculptures and statues in Southern India. 

Nobody knew how much more might be found.  Ramachandra Rao, an art historian who at the time was making a cottage industry out of lecturing coast to coast at American universities, wrote that the dam would “completely inundate the valley of Nagarjunikonda, transforming it into one hopeless reservoir of water.”  I have no idea what a hopeless reservoir is, but I guess I know how he felt.  Think of that terrible photograph from 1948 of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Julius Krug.  He’s signing a contract authorizing the compulsory purchase from three Indian tribes of 155,000 acres of Missouri River bottomland that the federal government wants for a reservoir in North Dakota.  The Washington Post put the picture on its front page.  We see the tribal representative, George Gillette, with his hand over his face.  He weeps as a half-dozen observers stand politely behind the Secretary and wonder what they’ll have for lunch.

In the 1960s, Egypt would with international help save some pharaonic monuments from immersion in Lake Nasser, but India had already gone through a similar exercise at Nagarjunakonda, funded domestically and without much international publicity. 

I do not know who suggested that the monuments should be moved from the floor of the valley to the top of Nagarjuna’s Hill.  I suspect that the suggestion came from someone so august that nobody dared to speak against the idea, but visitors would now have to spend almost an hour on a ferry sailing from a dock near the dam to a dock on the island that Nagarjuna’s Hill had become.

I arrived at the mainland dock midday on a Sunday, in time for the afternoon sailing.   Good, I thought until, stepping onto the island, I was told that I, along with a hundred other passengers, had to be back at the dock in one hour, when the last ferry of the day would leave. This was an impossibly short time, because it’s a steep climb up to the flat top of the island and then a 10-minute walk just to get to the museum, which is another ten minutes shy of the major rebuilt monuments, including the great stupa. I  decided right then that I’d run through the island’s museum and return the next day on the morning ferry, spend the day on the island, and return on the afternoon sailing.  

The next morning I came to the dock well before the ferry was scheduled to leave.  There was nobody around.  I waited a bit.  Nobody.  I asked what was going on and was told that the ferry only went if 30 people bought tickets.  There were no customers except me, and the six or eight people who worked on or with the ferry looked ready to pack it in.  This is ridiculous, I thought.  I’ve come a long way; am I supposed to wait for the next weekend or holiday?  Who was the idiot who suggested putting everything on an island?  

Rhetorically, I asked if the ferry would sail if I bought 30 tickets.  To my surprise, the answer was “why not.”  I didn’t have enough cash on me, and the office wasn’t set up to take credit cards, but one man spoke two magic words: “Apple Pay?”  I had never used it and didn’t have it on my phone, but with several people looking over my shoulder, we got it done.  In half an hour a boat with a hundred seats was plowing through the reservoir with me and a crew of four.  

This was a very good deal, because the trip takes about 45 minutes each way and the roundtrip for 30 tickets came to a total of about 60 dollars, but when we got to the island the crew said I should be back in an hour.  We settled on two hours, which, combined with the hour the day before, was barely adequate.  I would see most of the reassembled monuments, though not the most distant ones.  And I had the island to myself, except for several dozen guards and gardeners and construction workers who apparently live on it.  Yes, I said gardeners.  This is an Archaeological Survey of India, which means that this rocky butte has lots of sprinkler-irrigated lawns and shrubs.  My wife tells me they’re nice.  Maybe.  Anyway, I must thank a tractor driver whose tractor was hitched to a small trailer carrying rocks.  He told me to jump in.  Without his help I would have seen less than I did and would have had almost no time to look at what I saw. 

The tractor driver drove me past the museum and dropped me off at the site of a reconstructed monastery, with brick cells arrayed in a square around a pillared hall that had its pillars–plain stone posts–but not its roof.  In front of the monastery there were two almost identical prayer halls, apsidal in shape, by which I mean they were shoebox-shaped rectangles with an entrance at one narrow end and a semicircular wall bulging outwards at the other narrow end.  The rebuilt walls were only thigh high, but that was enough to show the floor plan.  The two halls faced each other, entrance opposite entrance.  One hall held a replica of a statue of the Buddha.  The other hall had a plain stupa.  It was like a Catholic church next door to a Lutheran church, but in this case one was Mahayana and the other was Theravada.  It suggested that the two schools could coexist without fighting, a pleasant surprise.  

The most interesting detail for me was that both halls had moonstones at the entrance.  These are about the size of semicircular doormats. In Sri Lanka, in particular at Anuradhapura, moonstones brilliantly demarcate the transition from secular to sacred space.  Here not so much.  There were no concentric bands of animals on these moonstones, there was no transition between worlds.  These were just doormats with a curved edge.  They could have come from a building-supply store back on the mainland.  For all I know, they did.

The great stupa was a short walk away.  It had attracted visiting Buddhists the day before.  I know this because back at the hotel Sunday night I had chatted with some Nepalese visitors who said they had rushed to see it that afternoon.  I saw it on my own the next day and thought that it was much ado about a circle of bricks, with plain brick ayaka-platforms protruding at the cardinal points and supporting the stumps of ayaka-pillars.  You had to work really hard to find something attractive here, and a guard was keeping a constant eye on me. There was one interesting detail.  It was that the bricks here were very large, about 10 inches by 20 inches and three inches thick.  That’s the same size as old bricks found in North India.  There are lots of ways to measure the footprint of a civilization, but one of them is to see the distribution of standard measures.  

The most intriguing reconstructed monument was not on the island at all but on the mainland and a few hundred yards back from the edge of the reservoir.  Why hadn’t everything been put here?   I have no idea.  The place was called Anupu, and the next morning I visited without 30 tickets or a time limit.  There was another reassembled monastery here with cells and a prayer hall with a moonstone with an arc of animals, a full selection of elephants and lions, cattle, horses, and a hog.  

A few hundred meters away there was an amphitheater, not semicircular as we’re used to but square, several tiers high, and made of those same oversized bricks, capped with flat limestone slabs  There are no other ancient amphitheaters in India. Nobody knows why there’s one here, nobody knows what it was for, and nobody knows why it’s square.  It could seat a thousand people watching something.  

Down at the lakeshore a dozen fishing boats were tied up next to trucks that I suppose were about to haul the catch to market, but from the theater I could see or hear none of that.  When you think how frenetic India is in its cities and how noisy people and animals are even in villages, the silence at the theater was a gift.  I heard only my footsteps and chirping birds.  I wonder now what Archeologist Longhurst would have made of the scene.  He died the same year that Nehru came to inaugurate the work that would flood the ancient city.

Ancient Buddhist sites keep turning up.  Vijayapuri, as I said, was discovered in 1926; Phanigiri or Snake Hill came along in 1942.  There was some early excavation work, but then the site was abandoned for almost 40 years until 2001, when excavations revealed things that I hope, for the sake of the archaeologists, made them tingle.

Phanigiri is the name of a village about a three-hour drive north of Nagarjunakonda. (If you’re looking for it, it’s about 15 miles north of the busy town of Suryapet.)   The villagers of Phanigiri must always have known that there were ruins atop the bare granite dome immediately north of the village, so when I say that the ruins were discovered in 1942 I mean that 1942 was when experts first climbed the rock.

The rock rises like a whale from a green ocean of rice paddies and is roughly oval, about a mile north to south, half a mile east to west and 150 feet high.  The rock is as clean as Yosemite and a lot less crowded.  It’s always been less crowded.  I mean that Amaravati and Vijayapuri were cities, but Phanigiri was always just a monastery.   Although the site is called Phanigiri in the literature, the ruins are properly called Karimahavihara or Kari great monastery.  I do not know if Kari means anything.

There is a more or less developed path up the east side of the dome, but Google, bless her heart, directed me instead to a bit of dry land on the west side.  “You have reached your destination,” she said.  

There was no path up the rock, and there were no signs.  I tried to find a point where the rock wasn’t too steep and where I could climb without losing my footing, sliding downhill, and tearing my precious polyester pants.  I did make it to the top but met a concrete wall topped with an electric fence.  That’s a first, I thought, even if the wires were broken.  You’ll get some sense of how thoroughly I detest guides if I say that even at this point, stuck at the top, I did not regret having come alone. 

I started circumambulating in search of a gate, found nothing in one direction and was about to give up in the other when–you have to love India--I found an open gate at the top of the path that visitors are supposed to use.  A few minutes later I found a half-dozen women already up here. They said they were studying to be teachers.  They had children with them and the kids stared at this sweating and red-faced, old white guy. The women earnestly offered me water, and they wanted a group photo, which I failed to evade. 

I have to say there wasn’t a lot to see up here.  There were foundations for cells for monks and there were foundations for at least four prayer halls, all empty.  There were several small and plain stupas, and there was a drum for a large stupa, about 50 feet in diameter and now completely clad in protective concrete, including on the ayaka platforms.  It was disappointing.  So was a storage room filled with chunks of sculpted rock, mostly bits of lotus flowers and all simply tossed here.  

The next morning I decided to give Phanigiri another shot.  This time I ignored Larry and Sergei and just drove into the village.  Signs directed me to where I should have gone the day before.  Brilliant!  I started walking but a man called out.  I pretended not to hear but his voice was persistent.  He asked if I wanted to see the museum.  What museum, I wondered, but I said sure.  He took me to an old, two-story house, gated and locked.  It was rented by the government, he said, but he had the keys.

It was a fine old house, with a staircase whose banister, a solid wall  from tread to handrail, seemed made from a single log. The upper floor was missing its floorboards, but the flagstones of the ground floor weren’t going anywhere, and they were covered with treasures.  Here was all or most of the stuff that archaeologists had found on the dome, and I was, as Brits sometimes say with real sparkle, gobsmacked.  The most surprising finds, discovered in 2002 or 2003, were the profusely carved posts and crossbars of a ceremonial gateway seven or eight meters tall.  Paral Pandya Dhar of Delhi University has written that until Phanigiri no such gateway had ever been found in South India.  Perhaps this one adjoined the large stupa, but that’s unclear.  Dhar writes that the pieces of the gate had been deliberately buried near the prayer halls to protect them from vandals when the monastery, at an unknown date, was abandoned.  

The largest crosspiece fragment was about eight feet long and was lying right in front of me on the ground, where it rested on thin logs.  It was gently arched and had two main scenes, one a procession with an elephant and the other a group of monks greeting each other. One end of the piece was broken, but the other terminated in an intact lion combined with the head of a makara, a mythical creature.  Between these animals and the arch, there was a cube showing monks worshipping at an ayaka pillar.  Dhar describes the sculptures on the other side of the stone, but it was far too heavy for me to turn over.  

The man with the keys said that a proper museum was under construction close to the eastern base of the dome, but I’m glad I saw the stones before they were dressed for visitors.

Now the scholarly literature on Buddhist sculptures spends a great deal of time identifying the stories illustrated by the sculptors.  “Here’s the birth of the Buddha.  You can see his mother holding the branch for support.”  Or, “Here’s the Great Renunciation.  See the prince on horseback leaving his palace.” Or, “Look, it’s the moment of his Enlightenment.  You can tell, because he’s touching the ground with the fingertips of his right hand.” 

I’m sorry, but this is like seeing Michelangelo’s David and saying, “Oh, look. He’s just killed Goliath.”  Yes, it’s true that the scholarly literature does go further, showing for example that the icons associated with the Buddha, especially trees and snakes, derive from pre-Buddhist sources.  The implication is that Buddhism, diffusing across India, incorporated the nature spirits that were already worshiped there.  It’s no accident that the classic 19th century study of the Amaravati stones, by the same James Fegusson who rescued the stones in London, is called simply Tree and Serpent Worship.  

Still, even this fails to tell me what I want to know.  I want to know what these sculptures and reliefs teach about how to live.  Scholars mock that question, at least while they’re wearing their professional hats, and other people may say that if at 81 I don’t know the answer, I should quit looking.  

I may be a slow learned, but I’m persistent, and I headed to one more site, Jaggayyapet, midway between Phanigiri and Vijayawada.  Before I get there I’m going to violate my simple chronology and tell you what I learned from the stones at these places.  To do that, I am going to leave the Krishna Valley for a couple of minutes and visit the Amaravati Room in the government museum in Chennai. 

The Chennai museum has about 300 Amaravati stones.  That’s more than anyone else, including the British Museum.  In 1880 the stones had been cemented into an outdoor wall at the museum.  Brilliant!  One hundred and twenty-two years later, somebody woke up, and the stones were extricated from the wall with power tools.  A hundred stones were then and are now crowded into a very warm room measuring about 30 feet by 60.  The other 200 are in storage.  When I came by, in the so-called cool season, the air-conditioning was turned off and the A/C ducting was up against the ceiling and smiling at me.  The haloid lights were painfully bright.  The museum authorities were proud of the room’s marble floor.

I focussed on two stones.  One was cataloged by the museum as No. 221.  It’s a square measuring about two meters on a side.  The other, No. 17, is a disc about one meter in diameter.

The museum calls 221 the best piece in the collection.  It’s certainly large and well preserved.  The center of the stone shows a stupa complete with drum slabs, railing, gateways, lions, and ayaka pillars.  Deities and nature spirits hover off to both sides of the dome, which is flanked farther to the right and left by dharmacakra pillars, or pillars supporting the wheel of the law.  At the top of the stone there’s a frieze with three scenes from the life of the Buddha, including his renunciation of princely comforts and his temptation by the demon Mara.  All this I could see for myself, but I needed help with an inscription crediting this “gift of coping stone to the great stupa of the Lord by the wife of the merchant Samudra…”.  We can see similar signs today on the donor walls of hospitals and concert halls.  Some things never change.

No. 17, the museum says, tells the story of King Bandhuma.  The king sits on a throne and is surrounded by 20 people, along with an elephant and a horse. He receives two valuable presents and gives them to his daughters, who in turn give them to the 22nd Buddha, Vipassi.  For their generosity, the younger daughter becomes a saint and the elder is reborn as Mayadevi, the mother of Gautama Buddha, the 28th and last Buddha, or, in short, the Buddha.

So far, my description is like our coming upon Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and telling you, “Oh, that’s Venus because she’s scooting across the waves.”  But what I drew from the square stone was its sense of composure.  That’s not unknown in western art, but No. 17 offers something else you will not find in the paintings of the Brueghels or Hieronymus Bosch.  I pick on them because their paintings, like No 17, have lots of people.  The difference is that the European paintings show everyone as an individual.  Everyone has their own personal space.  No surprise, but the crowd in No. 17 is composed of people who aren’t isolated.  They are part of a community.

I’m the last person to praise teams, but No. 17 doesn’t ask me to join a team, do something in a group, or think like everyone in a group.  No. 17 teaches that people can be part not only of the physical world but of the community of people in that world.  It’s an almost impossible lesson for Americans taught from childhood to strive to be successful, which is to say to be separate and if possible better than everyone else.

End detour.

On the way back from Phanagiri to Vijayawada, I stopped at Jaggayyapet.  It had been mined for building materials long before James Burgess came by in 1882.  We met him in the last episode as the first archaeologist to dig at Amaravati; he was the guy with a string of initials after his name.  Alexander Rea, who had dug up Ghantasala, would also study Jaggayyapet. Here’s a bit of what he wrote: “the stupa… has an outer brick casing with an interior packing formed of layers of earth about 2 feet thick, over each of which was laid a close flooring of very large bricks closely fitted together.  The diameter of the building is 31 ½ feet.”  

Can you imagine going through life seeing the world this way?  We’re back to Bill Gates talking to Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.

As I neared Jaggayyapet, I was sure that Lady Google was lost. She took me off on a side road, then a smaller side road, then onto a dirt track through a few acres waiting for a land developer to do something.  I forgave her when I saw a fenced area and a blue and white sign of the Archaeological Survey of India.  

Inside the fence there was very little to see except the base or drum of a stupa.  Carved slabs had once wrapped it, but now the stupa was clad with blank replacements. I walked around the drum the wrong way, which is to say counter-clockwise, but noticed that at one point there was a surviving fragment of one elegantly carved stone.  

This surviving piece might have been six inches wide by 18 inches tall.  It showed a young woman, a dancer, minus her arms and head.  Still there was half her torso and most of her legs and she was in the graceful posture called tribhanga, or three positions.  

Perhaps you remember the final scene in the first Planet of the Apes, a movie released in 1968.  An astronaut played by Charlton Heston thinks he’s landed on a distant planet but sees the ruined Statue of Liberty and realizes that he’s somehow returned to an Earth destroyed in a nuclear war.  The last line is him cursing humanity: “God damn you all to hell.”  Today, we no longer worry about nuclear annihilation–no point in getting worked up about something you can’t do anything about–but the movie was timely in its day, because 1968 was the year of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

Anyway, I got back to Vijayawada a few hours later and mentioned to someone that I had been out at Jaggayyapet looking at a beautiful dancer but for some reason recalling that final scene from “Planet of the Apes.”  Wasn’t that an odd thing to come to mind, I said.  The person I was talking to didn’t miss a beat.  Not at all, she said.  I know exactly what you mean.