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The problem with using religious documents to approach an understanding of the past—well, really any historical document—is not that they’re inaccurate or too fantastic to be true, but rather that they are incomplete.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.
The problem with using religious documents to approach an understanding of the past—well, really any historical document—is not that they’re inaccurate or too fantastic to be true, but rather that they are incomplete.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.
