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The Buddhist "Monastery" and the Indian Garden: Aesthetics, Assimilations, and the Siting of Monastic Establishments.

This article focuses on the vocabulary used to refer to early Buddhist establishments in India. Buddhist monks, in both texts and inscriptions, refer to their monasteries or cloisters as vihāras or ārāmas. The term vihāra in Classical Sanskrit meant walking or touring for pleasure, while ārāma would...

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Published in:Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol. 126; no. 4; pp. 487 - 506
Main Author: Schopen, Gregory
Format: Article
Published: American Society for Premodern Asia (ASPA) Oct-Dec2006
Subjects:
Buddhist monasteries
Vocabulary
Buddhist convents
Cloisters (Architecture)
Ali, Daud
Monasteries
India
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:This article focuses on the vocabulary used to refer to early Buddhist establishments in India. Buddhist monks, in both texts and inscriptions, refer to their monasteries or cloisters as vihāras or ārāmas. The term vihāra in Classical Sanskrit meant walking or touring for pleasure, while ārāma would have referred to as a place of pleasure or garden. According to professor Daud Ali, in the first serious discussion of gardens in early India, the most prominent architectural structures in gardens were the mandapa nikuñja, which could take the form of a clump of trees which formed an enclosure.