Ashoka's Brick Stupa at Sanchi Grew Into a Stone Dome 36.6 Metres Across, Four Carved Gateways Were Added Around It, and the Archaeological Survey Rebuilt Its Failing Side From 1912

The Great Stupa at Sanchi is a solid stone dome 36.6 metres across and 16.46 metres high, the figures the ICOMOS evaluation gave UNESCO in January 1989. Inside it sits an older brick stupa that John Marshall, the Archaeological Survey’s director-general, judged “most probably built by Asoka.” UNESCO, which listed the Buddhist monuments at Sanchi that year, places the hill in Madhya Pradesh about 10 kilometres from Vidisha. It says the perfection of the dome’s proportions and the carving on its four gateways make this monument, Stupa 1, “an incomparable artistic achievement.”

A stupa is a solid domed monument built to hold a relic or mark a sacred spot, and Marshall noted that nothing in its outward form tells you which. UNESCO’s account gives the Great Stupa four layers: Mauryan brick, Shunga stone, Satavahana carving and a Gupta addition. After centuries of desertion the site was found by General Taylor in 1818, and from 1912 Marshall oversaw the repairs that rebuilt its failing south-western side.

tuput has a life of Ashoka and a piece on how his edicts were read. This one stays with the monument. Sanchi is one of the three World Heritage sites in the Madhya Pradesh state profile.

A brick mound beside a polished pillar

Marshall’s 1918 guide corrects an old belief that the Great Stupa was built whole in Ashoka’s reign. He wrote that the first stupa was a brick structure about half the diameter of the present one, most probably raised when the pillar beside the south gateway went up. Its bricks measure 16 by 10 by 3 inches, close to the size used in other Mauryan buildings, and pieces of a stone umbrella that probably crowned it turned up in the debris on the plateau. At about 20 metres across, according to ICOMOS, it was smaller than the dome that now covers it.

The two UNESCO documents differ on the order of events. The World Heritage Centre’s page calls the brick stupa contemporary with the pillar, while the ICOMOS evaluation says it came first. Both agree that the sanctuary began in Ashoka’s time, in the 3rd century BCE. Ashoka, whose queen came from nearby Vidisha, founded the sanctuary or at least embellished it, ICOMOS says.

When whole, the pillar was a round, slightly tapering shaft of a single stone, about 42 feet (12.8 metres) tall, with a bell-shaped capital and four lions set back to back. According to Marshall, the sandstone came from the Chunar quarries several hundred miles away. The oldest preserved monument on the site, UNESCO calls it, with lions inspired by Achaemenid, or ancient Persian, art. A local story, which Marshall records, says a landowner broke the pillar into pieces to turn the shaft into a sugar-cane press. The stump stands where it was.

The shaft carries a damaged edict. In E. Hultzsch’s 1925 translation it covers the same ground as Ashoka’s edicts at Sarnath and Kosambi: a monk or nun who splits the Sangha, the Buddhist order, “should be caused to put on white robes and to reside in a non-residence.” Hultzsch adds that a monk’s proper robe is yellow and that a non-residence means a dwelling unfit for members of the Sangha.

Why Ashoka would build at Sanchi

The Mahavamsa, the Sri Lankan chronicle, offers one explanation. In Wilhelm Geiger’s translation, Ashoka, ruling Avanti for his father, halted at Vedisa, married a merchant’s daughter named Devi, and had by her a son, Mahinda, and a daughter, Sanghamitta. When Mahinda was about to carry Buddhism to Lanka, he visited his mother at Vedisagiri, and she led him up to the vihara, or monastery, there. Geiger’s note identifies Vedisa with Bhilsa, which Marshall places five miles from the hill.

Sanchi is also considered to be the Cetiyagiri of those chronicles, UNESCO says, where Mahinda stopped before setting out as a missionary to Sri Lanka. Marshall found the identification reasonable but cautioned against building on it. Another version of the legend makes Mahendra Ashoka’s brother and never mentions Vidisha, so in his view the story cannot date the monuments. What the ground itself shows, he wrote, is that Buddhists settled at Sanchi in Ashoka’s lifetime, and that the only Mauryan remains in the neighbourhood are here.

The Shungas wrap it in stone

UNESCO gives the Shunga dynasty (184 to 72 BCE) the next stage: the brick stupa was enlarged, covered with a facing of dressed stone, and given walkways around it, staircases, balustrades and the crowning square railing, pole and umbrellas. In Marshall’s dating the stone casing came about a century after Ashoka. Builders put up a thick wall at a distance from the brick dome and packed the gap with rubble. That made a dome over 120 feet across and about 54 feet high.

At the foot of the dome runs a plain railing with no carvings. Marshall observed that each post, crossbar and coping stone seems to have been the gift of a different donor, whose name is cut in early Brahmi characters, the script of Ashoka’s own edicts. The railing, he thought, took less than the century or more that James Fergusson had estimated, since crowds of Buddhists were then flocking to Vidisha and making the pilgrimage to the hill.

In June 1837 James Prinsep noticed that facsimiles of the Sanchi inscriptions all ended in the same two letters and guessed that each recorded a gift. That guess opened the script, and the story is in the tuput piece linked above.

Four gateways and a foreman’s inscription

Marshall called the gateways, or toranas, the last and finest addition. Each has two square pillars carrying three architraves, the horizontal beams with curled ends, and they were “the work of carpenters rather than of stone masons,” copied in stone from wooden gates. The southern gateway came first, then the northern, the eastern and the western, and in his view no more than three or four decades separated the first from the last. Balamitra, a pupil of the preacher Aya-chuda, paid for the middle architrave of the southern gateway, and the right pillar of the western one seems to be his gift too.

An inscription on the back of the southern gateway’s top architrave names another donor: Ananda, son of Vasithi, foreman of the artisans of King Sri Satakarni. Many kings of that dynasty bore the title Satakarni, Marshall noted, so the inscription alone does not say which. Marshall placed the gateway in the middle or later first century BCE. UNESCO says the toranas were ornamented under the Satavahanas in the 1st century CE, and the ICOMOS evaluation says the stupa was enlarged under the Shungas and the Andhras, the name Marshall used for the dynasty, in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Across these sources the dating of the gateways varies by about a century.

Another inscription, on a panel of the southern gateway, says it was made by the ivory carvers of Vidisha. The delicacy of the carving, Marshall wrote, makes that easy to believe.

Gupta-period additions came last. A Gupta-era inscription of the year 93, which Marshall converts to 412 to 413 CE, is cut on the railing of the Great Stupa. It records a gift by Amrakardava, an officer of Chandragupta II, of a village and a sum of money to the community at the great monastery of Kakanadabota, to feed monks and keep lamps lit. Another, of the year 131 (450 to 451 CE in Marshall’s conversion), mentions the place where four Buddhas sit, which Marshall identifies with the four seated Buddha images set against the terrace wall at the four entrances. In UNESCO’s description the Gupta addition, in the 5th century, was four shrines at the cardinal points. For the dynasty itself, see tuput’s reassessment of the Gupta age.

What the carvings show

The Buddha never appears as a person on the gateways. As Marshall explained, the early school of Indian art indicated his presence with symbols: his footprints, the throne he sat on, the tree where he gained enlightenment. Symbols mark the four great events of his life too. Birth appears as a lotus, or his mother Maya on one. Enlightenment is an empty throne under a pipal tree. The first sermon is a wheel with deer around it, for the Deer Park at Sarnath, and death is a stupa.

Around those symbols the reliefs tell stories. On the southern gateway, the middle architrave shows what Marshall identified as Ashoka arriving by chariot with elephants, horsemen and footmen at the stupa at Ramagrama, where the Nagas, or serpent spirits, guarded the Buddha’s relics. The lowest architrave on its back shows the siege of Kushinagar, where seven clans fought the Mallas for the Buddha’s relics, and the victors leaving with them on the heads of elephants. The northern gateway has panels telling the Vessantara Jataka, the tale of a prince who gave away his chariot and then his children. Over on the eastern gateway the Buddha leaves his home city of Kapilavastu, his horse Kanthaka’s hooves held up by gods, and after the groom turns back his onward walk is shown as footprints under an umbrella.

Inscriptions on the gateways record donors and say nothing about the scenes. Marshall credited the Bharhut sculptures, which carry labels, and the work of the French scholar A. Foucher for settling what most of the reliefs mean.

Lost in 1818, opened up in 1822

Marshall wrote that from the 13th century Sanchi seems to have been left desolate, and that the hill’s monuments escaped the damage that fell on nearby Bhilsa. The site had lain abandoned, ICOMOS says, for 600 years, overrun with vegetation, when General Taylor discovered it in 1818. Marshall’s guide records Taylor’s visit that year and the state of the monument: three gateways stood upright, the southern one lay where it had fallen, and the dome was intact with part of the railing on its summit still in place. Captain Fell visited in 1819, according to Cunningham, and notes and drawings followed.

Attention brought treasure seekers, and in 1822 Captain Johnson, the assistant political agent in Bhopal, cut a breach from top to bottom through one side of the dome, and Marshall blamed that breach for later damage and the fall of the western gateway. Cunningham, who dug at the other stupas in 1851, called it a “destructive excavation” by amateur antiquaries. Casts of the east gateway were made in 1869 for European museums after Napoleon III asked for one of the gates. The government cleared the hill and filled the breach in 1881, and by 1883 it had put the fallen southern and western gateways back up.

Marshall rebuilds the south-western side, 1912 onward

Marshall began work in 1912 on behalf of the ruler of Bhopal, Sultan Jehan Begam. Marshall’s guide is dedicated to her and credits her “interest and generosity” for what has been done at Sanchi in recent years. When he started, he wrote, most of the hilltop’s monuments were buried under debris and jungle, so that their very existence was unsuspected. The clearing eventually uncovered the ruins of about 50 monuments, ICOMOS says.

The Great Stupa itself needed more than clearing. Marshall reported in the Survey’s 1913-14 volume that the 1881 repair had filled the breach with rubble and earth, and that the fill had settled. The upper dome was caving in and the lower part and terrace of the south-western quadrant were bulging out, putting the south and west gateways at risk. No course remained but to take down and rebuild that section, he decided, laying the facing stones in lime concrete to keep rain out of the core. The 1918 guide lists that rebuilding as the most important and most difficult of the measures taken, alongside re-setting the leaning columns of Temple 18 and rebuilding the dome, railing and umbrella of Stupa 3. The stone pavement around the Great Stupa was also relaid so that water drains away from it.

UNESCO listing and the site today

The World Heritage Committee inscribed the Buddhist monuments at Sanchi at its 13th session in 1989 (decision 13 COM XV.A) under criteria (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and (vi). The Archaeological Survey’s own report gives the date as 15 December 1989. For criterion (iv), UNESCO says Stupas 1 and 3 “represent the most accomplished form of this type of monument.” The property belongs to the Government of India and is conserved by the Survey under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958.

The Survey’s 2002 periodic report to UNESCO lists a protected area of 47.449 hectares and an annexe of 6.029 hectares, and says major conservation work was carried out from 1989 to 2001-02. The Survey’s separate report for UNESCO’s periodic review records that the villages of Sanchi, Manchi, Kanakheda and Nagori had spread into the buffer zone and that the Survey had proposed buying more land. Under a Government of India notification of 16 June 1992, the land within 100 metres of the protected limits is a Protected Area and the next 100 metres a Regulated Area, for mining and construction.

UNESCO adds that although Sanchi was abandoned for about 600 years, pilgrims have returned from across the Buddhist world, in particular from Sri Lanka.