Miles Osgood talks to Pia Brancaccio about the Buddhist cave monasteries of Western Deccan, the inter-continental exchange of "Maritime Buddhism" along the "Cotton Road," and the competition between Buddhism and Shaivism at the end of the first millennium C.E.

Pia Brancaccio is currently a Professor of Indian Art and Archaeology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in Italy and at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and cross-cultural exchange in South Asia, with a regional emphasis on the visual cultures of ancient Gandhāra (Pakistan) and the Deccan Plateau (India). She has published extensively on the Buddhist caves in the Western Deccan, including a monograph, The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad (2010), and the edited volume Living Rock (2013). She is currently working on the MAK Project (Mapping Ancient Kṛṣṇagiri) at the Kanheri caves in Maharashtra, India, which aims to produce the first complete archaeological and epigraphic documentation of the site. She has also been a longstanding collaborator with the ISMEO-Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan and has written on architecture, visual narratives, artistic workshops, and the multicultural fabric of Buddhism in Gandhāra. She co-edited the book Gandharan Buddhism: Art, Archaeology (2006).

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

In the West of the Indian subcontinent, during the first millennium of the Common Era, Buddhist monasteries took a peculiar shape. Here, where waterways eroded the edges of the Deccan Plateau and pooled into merchant harbors in the western basin of the Indian Ocean, monks, too, carved out their own communities of refuge into the basaltic cliffs: a network of thousands of caves, combining vihara residences, chaitya worship halls, and internal waterworks, all cut out of rock.

To explain what we find inside these sacred sites—walking over the rich black cotton soil, passing under a giant arch and through rows of columns into an interior apse, following the life of the Buddha in friezes arranged as a series of theatrical stages, and then arriving at a sculpture of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, protector of travelers—we need a unique guide. We need an art historian who is also an archaeologist, a medieval economist, an all-around speleologist: someone who can shine a light into the more remote historical corners of these caves.

PIA BRANCACCIO: “I was also looking at the kind of, sort of economic stimuli that might have led a monastery in the middle of the Deccan Plateau to boom in the 5th century. I mean—it just, you know—we go from like two viharas to twenty. So it’s like an enormous monastic occupation. There must have been some sustenance.”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and flute]

MILES OSGOOD: I’m your host, Miles Osgood.

My guest today is Pia Brancaccio, Professor of Indian Art and Archaeology at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Professor Brancaccio, who has previously held research appointments at the Getty and the Met, is an expert on the Buddhist art of ancient Gandhara and South Asia, and in particular on the rock-cave monasteries of the Deccan Plateau. On that subject, she is the author of The Buddhist Caves of Aurangabad (twenty ten) and the editor of Living Rock: Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain Cave Temples in the Western Deccan (twenty thirteen).

She’s here at Stanford this week to speak to us about the cave complex at Kanheri outside Mumbai, and her digital archaeology initiative “Mapping Ancient Kṛṣṇagiri” (or the “MAK Project”).

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, singing]

On the subject of maps, let me lay out a little of the geography of this episode. Professor Brancaccio’s current research takes her to Western India in Maharashtra, around Mumbai, but as she points out, what’s exciting about this region in the years two hundred BCE to one thousand CE is that it’s a nexus amid the surrounding civilizations. The art and inscriptions we find in the caves reveal a trade network that Brancaccio calls the “Cotton Road,” connecting Western Deccan to Gujarat, Sindh, and Gandhāra to the north, Karnataka to the south, and Egypt and Europe even, across the Western Indian Ocean.

As for making maps on the monastic scale, we can look up close at a single cave complex like Kanheri. Two thousand years ago, Kanheri would have participated in this cross-continental exchange through an estuary of the Ulhas River, such that boats could arrive near the caves by canal. That commerce and infrastructure supported the work of excavating one hundred local rock-cut rooms and their internal waterworks—most likely engineered by mining experts, but serving a community of monks. The monks lived in squared-off cells and gathered in a larger apse around a stupa: a hall where we find giant sculptures of Buddha, inscribed pillars, and flat walls once painted with murals. One cave, number 12, may even have been a library—perhaps one cited by the travelers Faxian and Xuanzang. Overlooking the miniature city, across the river and up a hill to the west, there once stood a temple, now destroyed.

The story of how this all came about, and how it ended, is up next.

Let’s head into the library.

[bell chime]

MILES OSGOOD: Thank you so much Pia Brancaccio for being here with us. I just thought we might start by situating the territory that you look at in your research—ancient Gandhāra, the Deccan Plateau—by talking about your own first travels there, your own first encounters with that territory. Could you tell us how you ended up interested in the region, what it was like to visit the first time, what it's been like to go back?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes, absolutely. These two regions, although distant, they're somehow intertwined in my own personal life as well. I was a student of Professor Maurizio Taddei in Italy at the "Orientale" Università di Napoli, and he was very involved in Gandhāran studies, and there was this quite well-known Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan. So as part of my training, I naturally got involved in this particular area of the Indian subcontinent, and especially in the Buddhist tradition, which is, again, very much studied by various Italian scholars. And then, my own personal sort of track brought me to study, after my graduation, at Deccan College in Pune. And I was at the Archaeology Department, and I was in the heart of the Western Deccan, and the area that was populated by these ancient Buddhist monasteries carved in the living rock. And, naturally, they started to attract my interest. Then, I must say, I met Walter Spink who was an incredible expert on Ajanta, the caves of Ajanta, and so I began this sort of academic work with him, and he sort of adopted me a bit as a grad student, and that opened up this whole world of the Buddhist caves. And so, then, I then moved on, and sort of worked more in that area—however, still keeping an eye on Gandhāra. On and off, I continue to be involved in the study of Buddhists in Gandhāra. I collaborate with the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan. And so it's been wonderful. Two distant areas, but areas where Buddhism thrived in antiquity, and with a lot of material remains as well.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, would you be able to describe for us and our listeners the experience of those areas? What makes them not just distant in geography, but maybe look different on the ground in terms of archaeological sites in Gandhāra versus caves in Deccan?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Absolutely, in Gandhāra, we are looking at built environments. We're looking at schist, stone schist, that's used as building material mostly. In the Western Deccan, we are looking at rock-cut structures. So, in reality, when you look at the Western Deccan monastic environment, everything is there: nothing has changed. There is a different sort of layering that you have to learn to decode,

because everything is present at the same time. The whole lifespan coexists in a cave from the very first intervention to the very last. So it requires a set of different skills to do sort of archaeological analysis in Buddhist caves, while, when it comes to the built environment of Gandhāra, then archaeology, obviously, with its stratigraphy and sort of scientific methods, helps very much. And, of course, in a built environment, you have associated material culture, which you don't in caves that are sitting there empty and pretty much, you know, devoid of these traces of life. So different skills, different sets of information, but both very, you know, valuable sort of sites from where we can learn about monasticism in antiquity, and, of course, Buddhist life in general.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, fascinating. So could you say a little bit more about what new archaeological methods—it sounds like familiar, traditional archaeological methods make sense in Gandhāra, and maybe new ones need to be developed, or new kinds of ways of seeing art historically as well need to be developed in the cave context. Could we hear more about that?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Absolutely, I must say that I owe a great deal of this to field work done when I was young with Walter Spink. He really taught me, I mean, I think he really opened a new path in the kind of investigation we do for rock-cut architecture. Paying attention to close details, to chisel work, to door hinges, to the depth of carvings on a wall, looking at how images relate to each other, if there's been a reuse or not of that surface: just paying attention to all these little details. Everything is there. The only problem is that we need to detect that invisible stratigraphy, and develop an eye. In this way, I think, in this sense, modern tools like photogrammetry, etc., can help a bit, because, you know, we do record depth, and we do record all these fine details, but, really, it's only a careful observation and analysis of all traces of human activity that can help us sort of create a template that we can use.

MILES OSGOOD: What are some examples of things that have become invisible in the stratigraphy where you have to make an inference, or you have to use some kind of technology to imagine what was there before? Are we talking about, sort of, layers that have been hollowed out where we have to imagine what was there previously?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes. That, and also, for instance, we have to imagine also that these caves were painted. That's another thing that we tend to forget. And so, now, we see, for instance, on a cave wall, a sculpted surface and a plain one. And we wonder, "Oh, why that is a plain surface?" Well, it was plain because probably it was painted. So we don't see sculptures...

MILES OSGOOD: I see.

PIA BRANCACCIO: ... but we see this sort of flat rock, and we think, "Oh, what it is?" You have all this beautiful sculpture, and then we have this ledge of plain rock. So I think we tend to forget quite a lot about this. And other interesting traces, for instance, is you often have holes for garland hooks. Sometimes, they're even broken, the garland hooks in the holes, and you can, you know, imagine that, underneath, there must have been an image. Otherwise, why would you have these garland hooks there? And so you have to think, "Okay, there was perhaps a painted image there." Also, when it comes to caves, for instance, like Kanheri, who have a very long lifespan, well, the architecture is often updated, so, you know, there are some changes in how the porch is designed, or the form of the cave, and so you detect, actually, some cuts and changes in the architectural structure of the facade, for instance. Also, other things we tend to forget is caves were completed with wooden structures, bamboo structures, and we see the sockets of all of that, but they looked completely different in antiquity.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

PIA BRANCACCIO: So many little details, and I think it's its own kind of cave archaeology, if you wish.

MILES OSGOOD: I wonder about, you know, the garlands and the flat wall that you mentioned in terms of the images we were able to assume were there. Is there any hope of imagining what the contents of those images were based on the context of sculptures that might be near them? Or pigments that might remain? Or anything along those lines?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes, I think what makes more sense is to imagine a match of the sculpted decoration would continue also in paintings with similar themes and motifs. Important is also the position of the images. You'll find certain, you know, particular types of images, for instance, positioned next to the entrance, or if you're looking at the central area of the cave in axis with the entrance, you're imagining, you know, a different type of iconography, but I think we can imagine, we can get a sense of what was there in painting by looking at the repertoire of sculpted images around, and whatever remains—say, in caves like Ajanta, where the painting record is still preserved. Of course, it belongs to a particular period, but for that timeframe period, we can perhaps propose tentative reconstructions.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, interesting. And when things are rendered invisible, or when they are visibly revised in some way, where you can see that another generation or another century of architects, sculptors, and painters have imposed some new shape on a structure, is there a political, philosophical, ideological story to tell there? Or is it just the renewal of people living in the same space?

PIA BRANCACCIO: In general, I think it's a renewal of the people living in the same space. I think that... But that is also tied perhaps to a change in kind of financial support...

MILES OSGOOD: Ah, okay.

PIA BRANCACCIO: ... or political scenario. However, I really think that renovation is key to keep a monastery alive. And we know from this Buddhist text—canonical monastic rules—that monasteries with good upkeep were strongly supported by patrons. Beauty in a monastery—as, you know, for instance, Gregory Schopen brought that out—is a key ingredient for the sustainment of monastic life. I mean, patrons are encouraged to give when a monastery is well kept, when it's beautifully painted. So I think that was part of the—that was a necessary part of the sustenance and life of a monastic space in antiquity.

MILES OSGOOD: So a new layer, or a new excavation, or an architectural retrofitting might have more to do with an economic story perhaps rather than a change in belief systems or practices?

PIA BRANCACCIO: I think both, of course, because, at some point, we see clearly that there is a change in practices. So I think both in a way.

MILES OSGOOD: They go together.

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes, they go together.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

PIA BRANCACCIO: And, for instance, we have examples of these main apsidal halls in Buddhist caves in Western Deccan known as "chaitya-grihas" in the inscriptions, and their apsidal halls with a stupa at its center. We have evidence at the site, a beautiful cave site of Pitalkhora, for instance, that, you know, the cave was painted with a kind of first-century layer, and then, in the fifth century, they updated the decoration, and painted over with new iconographic types that were more, you know, in line with the times, and the new sort of movements that had developed within the Buddhist tradition, so...

MILES OSGOOD: ... so you can understand why that's happening in the fifth century by reference to things that are happening elsewhere in Buddhist—

PIA BRANCACCIO: Absolutely.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that makes sense.

PIA BRANCACCIO: Absolutely.

MILES OSGOOD: Well, and okay, so I want to pivot a little bit to the stamp that you've also been able to make on these caves and on this history through your scholarship, because you've had some really fascinating phrases and coinages in the research that you've published, and, I think, also in the talk that you're delivering for us this week that I thought might be a good conduit for us for thinking about how a scholar intervenes in figuring out what's going on between these layers or between these years. One of those—I think the most evocative for me—is the phrase "the Cotton Road," that we're familiar of a sort of more northern Silk Road that explains major trade routes and cultural exchanges in this period in Central Asia and East Asia, but you've made the case that there is maybe a slightly neglected, or an area that needs a different kind of focus, that might have revolved around a particular soil, a particular crop, and a particular trade that has to do with cotton. Could you tell us a little bit about how you came to that realization, and what it illuminated for you?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes, absolutely. And this all started by looking at the vitality of, you know, the monastic spaces at Ajanta first, in the first century of the Common Era, and then, in the fifth century. Paintings at Ajanta really portray a world that's opulent, that's kind of global for the time, and densely filled with beautiful cotton textiles. I mean, the variety of textiles painted in those wall decorations are incredible. And then, I was also looking at the kind of, sort of economic stimuli that may have led a monastery in the middle of the Deccan Plateau to boom in the fifth century. I mean, it just, you know, we go from like two vihāras to 20, so it's like enormous monastic occupation. There must have been some sustenance. And in looking also at evidence of Indian Ocean trade, one of the main products that was exported from the west coast of India was cotton since the Roman time—and, I mean, since the first century C.E., as the "Periplus of the Erythraean Sea" which is a text written in Greek in Alexandria that talks about trade with India. So cotton was always there: textiles. And, again, later on, also in the sixth century, cotton is mentioned as one of the main exports by Cosmas Indicopleustes, another western source, another main export from the west coast. Indian cotton has been found in Egypt, and I do think—and fragments of Indian cotton from Egypt are identical to some of those painted in Ajanta already since the first century. I mean, there is really a smoking gun right there. And so, Ajanta is situated in the very center of this area where there is this fertile black cotton soil called "regar," and cotton there doesn't need—I mean, you can do cotton crops without much irrigation, because the humidity is retained by this volcanic soil. Still today, a lot of cotton is produced there. And so in putting all these little pieces together, I thought that perhaps we are missing this enormous connection that—you know, as much as silk moved the world and became interconnected with sort of Buddhist movements, however we want to frame the Silk Road in the north—I think that this west coast and the Deccan was very much brought alive by cotton trade, trading cotton textiles. And that cotton also for sales, you know: Indian cotton was an incredible product, and still is, if you think about it.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. So I love the detail of being able to see certain forms of cotton cloth in different places, and thereby track the trade. I wonder what do we know then about the cultures and languages and religions that came into contact by way of this crop?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Okay, so, well, recently, actually, there's been some interesting discoveries in Egypt at the port site of Berenice on the Red Sea, where a Buddha image has been uncovered. And that's like—I mean, in an archaeological context, that was like kind of a momentous...

MILES OSGOOD: A shock.

PIA BRANCACCIO: ... yes, discovery. We have, you know, inscriptions in Brahmi both along the Red Sea, I mean in Berenice as well, but also in the island of Socotra across the Indian Ocean. So there is a movement of, clearly, merchants and Indian sailors along this maritime network of the Indian Ocean. And so, inevitably, you know, cultural traditions and religious traditions must have moved. And, in fact, I think that something we haven't focused a lot on is maritime Buddhism in the Indian Ocean. It's "Indian Ocean Buddhism"—but speaking of the western basin of the Indian Ocean. We know a lot about the movements of the, you know, the east coast, and Southeast Asia, and Sri Lanka, but what was going on in the western basin of the Indian Ocean is completely overlooked. So, in fact, I was—I mean, I hope to move in that direction with my research. Kanheri, actually, has opened the eyes for me to this network which must have included Sindh, Gujarat, the coast of Maharashtra, Karnataka—virtually untapped. I mean, and I think there's so much work to be done there. It's difficult, because the remains are always scarce and difficult to contextualize, to put in context, but I think that with careful and patient work, perhaps we can figure out this important exchange that took place in antiquity, in meeting of cultures and religious traditions undoubtedly, of which Buddhism was an important part.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's wonderful. And you can tell from the Egyptian example and just your description of that western ocean that Buddhism must have been spreading and making contact in these outreaching ways, and also getting a sort of economic sustenance, so as to be able to develop these monasteries. Is there also any kind of countercurrent where we see religions from the north or the west having an effect on Buddhist texts or beliefs?

PIA BRANCACCIO: So that's a complicated question right there. You know, and it's hard to... One cannot easily say, "Oh, that." I mean, sometimes, we fall in easy connections. So we have to be careful about that too, you know. "That looks like that, so they influenced each other." No. But there are interesting things that happen. For instance, at the site I'm working on currently, Kanheri, we have Pahlavi inscriptions in the caves, and we were wondering whether those Pahlavi inscriptions were done at a time where the monastery was already dead as a Buddhist monastery—so added later—or not. And the more we worked at Kanheri, the more we realized that the site had a long life, and, perhaps, when those Zoroastrians visited the caves, the caves were still active—or some part of the site—as a Buddhist monastery. So there are interesting connections right there, or interesting relationships. And also sacred sites are sacred sites, and, sometimes, you know, they are relevant for many traditions, even though, of course, it's a Buddhist monastery, but other communities may see that as a site with power. Also we know of the environment in antiquity of "Yavanas." The word "Yavana" is a label, a term that we find in epigraphic—in inscriptions—at the Buddhist caves that refers to people coming from the West: "Yonas," the Greeks. But the word is actually mediated through the Persian, okay, so it doesn't come directly from Greek. And it doesn't mean that those people there—those "Yavanas," who donated things at Buddhist caves—were actually Greek. But it does speak for this cross-cultural interaction, and for this involvement of different communities in the support of Buddhism.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. And to be able to trace some kind of provenance of people, but also of donations, of support that might not only be local, is that right?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Absolutely, and speaking about Kanheri, we have inscriptions—say, an inscription dated to the fifth century, which, unfortunately, it's lost now, it was a copper plate inscription, but it's been documented in the 19th century—it refers of donors from Sindh, which is—again, speaking of this Indian Ocean, kind of Buddhism along the shores of the Indian Ocean—it's clearly connecting our west coast, the Maharashtra part of the west—the Konkan, as we call it—to the northern coastal regions, and, of course, the scene was also connected with Gandhāra. I mean, it's the northwest of the Indian subcontinent looking at the coastal part, and if you kind of backtrack along the Indus, you get to the northwest, to Gandhāra. So I think Buddhism was very much interconnected with so much movement in antiquity, much more than we imagine. And especially during particular periods, there was movement, and it was a kind of a global force in a way, or at least, you know, a force that moved people across long distances in wide areas.

MILES OSGOOD: Great: that's such a wonderful illustration of just the geography that we can zoom out on and understand having an impact on this particular region. Now, I want to zoom in again a little bit, and talk about the smaller movements of people.

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: Because another phrase that you've used for the title of this collection, "Living Rock," I also wanted to ask you about, just in terms of what do we think we can infer about daily practices or yearly practices within these monasteries? You had this lovely line in your essay for that compilation that Buddhist caves seem to be sites that "intrinsically foster monastic meditative practices." And I just wanted to maybe refocalize us on that scale.

PIA BRANCACCIO: So I think the beauty of a religious tradition like Buddhism is that it's, you know, strongly trans-local, but also very much rooted in the region it develops. I mean, it's really this incredible combination of the two. So we can talk about one Buddhism and many Buddhisms, if you wish, I mean. And so it's both trans-regional and local, strongly so. And I think for the Buddhist caves—Buddhist caves are an incredible way to understand the life of the local communities, religious communities at the time. And going back to the site I'm investigating right now, Kanheri—not that I want to—but it's an enormous site with a lot of evidence. For instance, we do have still the path cut in the rock by the monks who lived at the site, and they remained intact. So we can, actually—what we're doing also is documenting those pathways in order to understand how the monks moved across the sites, which parts of the sites were connected, how the monastery grew, what areas became relevant when. And so those little things like the stairs cut in the living rock may be important traces of this life that we are completely missing otherwise in, say, the built environment. And there, it's all recorded, and the stairs are not all identical. So it's clear that they changed ways of cutting path through time. And as they add new caves, or develop new area, they cut new paths, and I think that has been really fascinating in the case of our monastery. And, of course, we have cells with rock-cut beds, and that tells us something about the life of the monastics—how many people may have lived in a cave—and we don't find that Kanheri does big, large, square monasteries with a lot of cells for monks to reside. At Kanheri, we rather have small sort of studio apartment caves with small units. So clearly monks did not live in a joint space, but each had their own space. And I think that's something to do with the nature of the monastic practices, again, that were undergoing there at Kanheri. So I think, yeah, lots of evidence.

MILES OSGOOD: This leads me to ask about the "Mapping Ancient Kṛṣṇagiri" project, because it sounds like, you know, we started this conversation with, you know, sort of rolling out the entire map of Asia, and the Middle East, and the subcontinent, and thinking about, "Okay, in what way is the ocean allowing for connections between all these regions?" But it sounds like there's an opportunity here to do maps more on the scale of blueprints, more on the scale of figuring out where the footsteps were going from one path to another. Is that the nature of the mapping project? Or is it both?

PIA BRANCACCIO: I think both.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

PIA BRANCACCIO: I think on a local level—again, this is, just as we were saying, where Buddhism offers us the opportunity to look globally and locally at the same time. So on one end, we get a sense for the development, religious developments, that were undergoing across the board within the Buddhist tradition. Because of the position of Kanheri on the estuary of a river, not far away, the landscape has changed, and so we forget that, in antiquity, Kanheri was easily accessible by water. So that changes completely—at the mouth of a river, and the Indian Ocean is there, and there are important ports nearby. So I think, you know, Kanheri is the ideal site, because we do get a sense for, you know, again, the broad space, the connections with other sites, the Indian Ocean trade, and the prosperity of the site linked very much to maritime, I think, activities, and also to, obviously, trade, and also agricultural activities linked to the trade. Cotton, for instance, was what we discussed. But then, at the same time, mapping Kṛṣṇagiri helps us understanding really on the—sort of, it's a bit of a micro-history of the site, both micro- and macro- at the same time—it's really a site that helps us, kind of moving on both fronts,. And I think that's why that particular site is special.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, so you mentioned history, and this makes me want to turn from thinking about space to thinking about time. In the abstract that you've written for the talk that you're going to deliver at Stanford at the Ho Center this week, you talk about using the framework of the "longue durée," and I wanted to ask you about that next. Has there been a particular more event-based, political-power-based account of what happened in the first millennium in this territory that you feel needs a kind of revision? What are the stakes of—well, I guess, maybe, you could explain a little bit your historiographical orientation towards this period, and what might bear revision or reconsideration.

PIA BRANCACCIO: Absolutely, so one thing I should mention that my work at Kanheri, I mean, I couldn't do that work by myself alone. I have wonderful partners that are working with me. We're working together as part of a team, and we are looking at different parts of the site, and different... So, for instance, I'm working with Akira Shimada from State University of New York who's doing most of the mapping along with a colleague from Nara, Dr. Yamaguchi. Then, I'm working with Vincent Tournier from the University of Munich, who is an epigraphist, and so he's looking at all the written material from Kanheri, which is very useful for precisely what you were suggesting. I mean, those are the historical hooks of our site, okay? So we can through—we are redocumenting, rereading, we discovered new inscriptions that had never been looked at. And Vincent Tournier is working with one of his students, Kelsey Martini, to reread the whole corpus...

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, wow.

PIA BRANCACCIO: ... and a lot of interesting things are coming up. So those are, you know, important elements that help us rethink, in some cases, the history of the site and the region as well. And then, I have a colleague—of course, I'm working with the Archaeological Survey of India—so my colleague Rajendra Yadav, along with him, during the last campaign, I was mapping one particular area of the site, and we were looking, again, at interesting evidences that speak of, you know, Buddhist foundations there in the 11th century, 12th century, a time when we think Buddhism is kind of, it's sort of slowing down. Well, then, you know, we have this incredible structure that I think is one of these beautiful Buddhist temples built at a site where we have rock-cut structures. And from some of the architectural details that survive, it seems that we can connect it to the Shilahara temples of the area. So, I mean, it's like opening up another chapter of the history of Buddhism in the region. And so, yeah, it's a lot of interesting bits and pieces to put together, but I think that, yes, we are rethinking in a way.

MILES OSGOOD: And it sounds like maybe there's two ways of rethinking: there's the sort of typical move that we might associate with "longue durée" historicism which is that, "We are not going to focus specifically "on who's in control, or who's invaded, or whatnot, but rather think about kind of long-term living practices," but it also sounds like what you were just saying is that the boundaries of a given period might not be as crisp as we might have assumed before, in terms of when, you know, Buddhism arrives, and departs, or fades, as it were. Is that right?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes, I think, you know, as human beings, it seems we've been obsessive with beginning and endings. It's like we are very much into, "How did it start? "When did it start? And when did it end?" But, sometimes, neglecting this important evidence, because we are looking for precise points in history rather than sort of looking at the gray areas that remain where a lot still happens—and I think, today, in the field of Buddhist studies, we are really looking more at those sort of areas of transition, you know, rather than a precise points—so beginning and end—but sort of how it all worked out within a particular historical context, and how did it fade away if it did. And I think we're thinking about the end of Buddhism as a light switch, you know. And I think that's a problem. There are pockets where Buddhism lingered for very long. I mean, with support, of course, and eventually fading away, but it's not just a wave that erases the footprints of this tradition. And I think certain sites had a very long life, they had support. They shrunk—monasteries undoubtedly shrunk—but I see sort of the end of Buddhism as a much more kind of complex issue.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, if it's not a wave, what accounts for the fading? Or how does the fading take place?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yeah, well, I can speak for—for instance, I'm looking now, carefully, into the Deccan, the Western Deccan. And so I can see that, there, there is this sort of underlying sort of Shaivism. As Buddhism fades away, Shaivism is sort of taking over. It seems that they're kind of eroding the patronage base of Buddhism. And there's lots of exchange. I mean, if you look at sort of sixth-century Shaivism in Western Deccan, it's clear that there are lots of connections—for one thing, I mean, clearly the carvers. I mean, Shaivism took to itself the mode of cutting rock and creating caves. There are important cave sites precisely in the areas where the Buddhist caves are. For one thing, Elephanta, which is today, you know, hailed as one of the major sites for this beautiful Shaiva rock-cut architecture where the first occupation was Buddhism. There is a stupa on top, which is actually, now—I was talking, a colleague from the Archaeological Survey of India was telling me this winter that they were going to undertake excavations of the stupa to understand also the relationship and the area between these two folds. Clearly, we see Shaivism sort of insinuating in Buddhist—kind of eroding the patronage base and having support.

MILES OSGOOD: Does that mean, at specific caves and specific monastic sites, we have artifacts from different traditions occupying the same space, or...?

PIA BRANCACCIO: You can. Not in the case of the site I'm working on. I mean, we looked hard for Shaiva traces, but until now, couldn't really find any. It seems that there—but if you think about cave sites like Ellora, the site was occupied by Shaivas, by Buddhists, and by Jains, and so it's clear that there is a certain, you know—I mean, different communities occupy the same sites, and, in the case of Ellora, the sites seem to have started as a Shaiva site...

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, okay.

PIA BRANCACCIO: ... and then, taken over by the Buddhist…

MILES OSGOOD: Interesting.

PIA BRANCACCIO: ... and then—taken over, not really. It's possible. I think both were active, Shaiva and Buddhist.

MILES OSGOOD: Joined.

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes. On the same cliff, there's a certain distance... But this is all to be seen. This is my personal impression. I think that we work in categories, and, sometimes, those categories are not so rigid.

MILES OSGOOD: And it's so intriguing to think about what conversations or witnessing must have taken place by these neighbors, right?

PIA BRANCACCIO: And I think we haven't looked enough—for instance, for Maharashtra, into, say, 12th century, 13th century, Marathi literature, local narratives that actually talk about that issue. And I think that could be really interesting to look into the vernacular, and see if there are traces of these dialogues, fights, encounters. Undoubtedly, there was a certain degree of competition. So, yeah. I think, yes, I agree with you on that dynamic environment.

MILES OSGOOD: So there are discoveries remaining to be made there. This leads me to maybe a final set of questions just about your eye as an art historian. When I look through your scholarship, you do this wonderful work of seizing on motifs that you see maybe within a particular complex, but also kind of as a pattern that shows up maybe in different geographies, and allows us to tell a story of influence or exchange, whether that's the chaitya arches that you mentioned before, maybe monumental sculptures for the Buddhas parinirvāṇa, and I think, recently, you were talking about how certain narrative phrases seem to be suggestive of sort of theatrical poses, or arrangements...

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yes, yes.

MILES OSGOOD: ... in telling the life of the Buddha by way of maybe, you know, sort of like foreign staging practices—all really fascinating. In Kanheri, in particular, is there a visual detail you're starting to seize on? Or are there ones that are reminiscent of other things you've seen elsewhere?

PIA BRANCACCIO: So for Kanheri, we have this very interesting iconography that seems to be, well, for one thing, there are very few paintings: nothing survives. So a lot of those, you know, traces, you see, for instance—paintings offer kind of a wealth in documentation. When it comes to Kanheri, there is one iconography that seems to be really connected with the—very popular in the Western Deccan and beyond, as I will tell you in a second—is the iconography of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, who's saving travelers from these dangers, great dangers. And it's sort of a pattern: it's a codified iconography that seemed to be recurrent on many sites in Western Deccan. And it's not found very much elsewhere in India. And then, it pops up a lot on the Silk Road. We have it in Dunhuang—it's interesting, it's all this... two incredible distant areas that were so involved—speaking of Cotton Road and Silk Road, actually, and going back to the beginning—where these kind of mercantile activities seem to have provided the sort of a lifeline for the sites. And then, you have this particular iconography that develops, that's absent elsewhere, and clearly speaks of some kind of connections. They're not immediate as we would think, it's not that—but in both areas, clearly, this type of motif became common, and that certainly says something.

MILES OSGOOD: And it completely makes sense, right? Because you...

PIA BRANCACCIO: Absolutely.

MILES OSGOOD: ... you're having, essentially, a patron saint of travelers overseeing, and protecting, and saving exactly the people who are meeting here, who are supporting the monastery. Is that right?

PIA BRANCACCIO: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: And I guess is your intuition that, it's because of the thematics of how appropriate it is to have that particular bodhisattva watching over the people who are there, that it's a coincidence then that the Silk Road and the Cotton Road develop the same iconography, or not?

PIA BRANCACCIO: No, I don't think it's a coincidence. I think it's much more complex than that. I mean, there is kind of texts that are translated, and some chapters of text that may linger in separate, you know, isolated forms in certain areas. So I think it's more complex than that, but I think it really tells us something about it. We also have—if you're looking at motifs and not iconographies—for instance, we find some of the motifs decorating the few stupas that were documented in Sindh—and were back to Sindh—brick stupas by a great scholar of the past: Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, who passed away when I, actually, just started studying—I remember my professor talking about her in class... And some of those motifs are present in the Western Deccan. We have them at Ellora ... And so I think there seem to be—and, of course, monumental Buddhas: those are not motifs, but, when it comes to monumental Buddhas, those are images that instill a sense of awe. Monks would talk about them. We have evidence, I mean, Chinese sources, that, you know, monks would have sketches. These kind of images leave traces in the Buddhist imagination, and I think it's not by chance that you find them in certain locations. And I think, again, those all speak for these connections, networks, Buddhist networks, that were alive in antiquity.

MILES OSGOOD: That's great. Just one closing question that strikes me now as I try to imagine for myself both what this living rock territory looked like in the first millennium, and what it must be like now. Do you have any words of wisdom for travelers, whether they be laypeople or young scholars, who might go to these places for the first time in terms of what to look for, how to experience it, how to send oneself back in the past imaginatively?

PIA BRANCACCIO: So some of the sites have become very popular. For instance, Kanheri is popular on weekends. It's a picnic spot. And in the rain, there is an incredible work of water management that has been done by the ancient monks. And so there are all these pools that are cut along the course of the stream that cuts the cave area in two. So it's like beautiful in the rain, and during the summer, kind of it's cooler and offers respite to visitors. So in a city like Mumbai that lacks any kind of green lungs, Kanheri and the area around it, that's protected still in the forest—and so that's why we're studying those caves, because they haven't been built around—it's really crowded. Ajanta has become the flagship of Buddhist caves in India, but there's some sites that are really still incredible, and I think can give you the sense for what a Buddhist cave site may have been in antiquity. One of them is actually Pitalkhora, absolutely empty still, and it is evocative. And the spaces are, the mountain is, and I think landscape and nature was an important part of the crafting of a Buddhist environment in those areas. We always think about rocks, but—you know, caves in the rock—but we never talk about views. And the views were key also for the ancient occupants of those caves. And I think the natural setting, what you could see from the caves, was of great relevance. We have found among the, I mean, there's an inscription from Kanheri that actually names a cave like "the cave with the ocean view." So it is clear that, as much as we enjoy these caves and the view, the monks who inhabited them also did in antiquity. So, yeah, landscape is an important part, and some caves still preserve that. Not many, and it's becoming, yeah...

MILES OSGOOD: Well, that makes sense. Well, thank you for the view that you've provided us of the Indian Ocean, of Western Deccan, of an entire map of cultures meeting and the view close up of inscriptions and sculptures and empty walls that once had paintings on them. It's all very illustrative and evocative, and we appreciate you coming here, and having a conversation with us about it.

PIA BRANCACCIO: Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share some of my research and thoughts with you. Thank you.

MILES OSGOOD: It was wonderful.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

To see some of Professor Brancaccio’s photographs of Kanheri, check out the video recording of this interview on our YouTube Channel, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies. You can start with a good cluster of images right around the 25-minute mark.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Pia Brancaccio’s full Stanford lecture on the Kanheri caves is also available on the YouTube Channel. And if you want to learn more about upcoming events and speakers, head to our website: buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

As always, the music for this episode is a recording from Ani Choying Drolma’s “Buddhist Chants and Songs,” performed at Stanford’s Memorial Church in twenty seventeen.

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]