The Wheel of Life
Friday July 11, 2008
One of the most common subjects of Tibetan Buddhist iconography is the Wheel of Life, or Bhavachakra. You may have seen it. The Wheel is held by a monstrous bull-faced creature, and inside the wheel are several sections with intricate drawings of people and creatures and different worlds. These Wheel symbolizes the cycle of samsara, or birth and rebirth.
This morning I added a new feature to About.com Buddhism, which is an image gallery of the Wheel of Life that explains the several sections of the Wheel and the creature (Yama, Lord of the Underworld!) peering over the top of it. Enjoy.
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My book The Wheel and its Tracks is first in a series on the history of religious structure in Andhra. Our endeavor is to study the development of religious nucleus in specific terms through a nuanced perspective. In the past 150 years of study on religious history focus always has been centred on textuality and narrative traditions that isolate structural analysis. A Stupa or a temple is tobe seen in an evolutionary context that encompasses several centuries of socio-economic and politicalhistory. Minor narratives and living testimonies alsoneed to be covered.
Religion is extremely visual and colourful which prompted me to explore and document its expressive possibilities. The result, as I look at it, would be a balance between acompact prose narrative and whole lot of photographs that are designed to give the reader the emotional experience of the narrative.
The task of putting the book together involved over 18 seasons of examining and analysing material running into several hundreds of books, reports, articles, epigraphs, coins, oral testimonies of people living in vicinities of ruined Buddhist establishments while exploring the different sub-regions in Andhra Pradesh and the neighbouring states of Maharasthra,
Chattisgarh and north Tamilnadu, covering nearly eightcenturies of the proto and early historic period of Andhra with thousands of photographs.
The earliest inspiration for my interest in religion comes from my father Patanjali Sastry who specialized on Mesolithic cultures in south India, under the renowned archeologist H.D.Sankalia at Deccan College, Pune. My early career as a journalist had exposed to me to several scholars in the fields of archeology and history along with all my friends and acquaintances to whom I owe more than I can ever express in words
Buddhism in its institutional form followed a pattern of integration, organisation and influence in concurrence to the early history of societies across the sub-continent. The entire process can be unified into the metaphor of the wheel of Dharma that the Buddha had turned during his first sermon in the Deer Park at Sarnath. The integration of various cultures can be seen as spokes of the wheel held by the organisation of early Sangha, the swivel. The growth of trade and polity that increased patronage could be seen as the motion of the wheel, which slowed down by the growth of local cults, when Buddhism slowly dissipated to isolation and eventual abandonment.
Sashi Sekhar’s magnificent book, The Wheel and its Track, is the first serious attempt to come to grips with the history of Buddhism in Andhra. In terms of the sheer density of Buddhist sites, Andhra is arguably the premier domain of Buddhist archaeology in the world—although most of these sites are completely unknown outside a small circle of experts. Sashi Sekhar has an unparalleled knowledge of Buddhist remains in Andhra, and his book documents the historical and archaeological record with scholarly description and superb, indeed ravishing photographs. This is, then, a pioneering monograph, one that should open up a rich new scholarly field. The introduction traces the history of Andhra Buddhism with insight and imagination. We follow the slow evolution of the Mahayana in the early centuries A.D. as well as the diversified Buddhist culture that preceded it. Many sites document this transition (there are also surviving oral traditions that seem to focus on this moment of historical change, for example at Bavikonda and Bhimli north of Visakhapatnam). One might argue that the highly articulated culture of Andhra Buddhism, especially in its early Mahayana and esoteric forms, remained alive, though somewhat veiled, within Telugu culture through the medieval centuries. A ramified world of esoteric praxis—alchemy, magic, medicine, mantra-sastra, etc.—that is well represented in classical Telugu kavya may ultimately go back to the Buddhist esoteric sources, undoubtedly composed in the sites studied in this book. At Guntupalle, Amaravati, Bojjanakonda, Korukonda, and many dozens of other (mostly hilltop) monastic settings, Buddhist monks, scholars, and specialists in the various esoteric arts just mentioned produced a large corpus of surviving texts, some of them revolutionary in terms of the longue durée of Buddhist civilization. There is reason to think that Mahayana Buddhism, as we now know it from the works of Nagarjuna and his successors, crystallized in the monastic establishments scattered along what is today the Orissa-Andhra coast. It seems that Dignaga lived and worked at Guntupalle. One can easily imagine the intense intellectual energies that must have animated such places in the first half of the first millennium. One thing is clear from the astonishing photographic documentation made available by this book. These Buddhist monks had a flair for choosing the finest possible sites for their stupas and viharas. From many of the hilltops, the breathtaking vistas of the Delta (and, inland, of the dramatic Telangana rock-scapes) provide the backdrop for the daily discipline of meditation and scholastic learning. How did these bhikkus manage to concentrate with such lush landscapes before their eyes? Perhaps early Mahayana Buddhism was a religion of the senses—of sunlight, fragrance, strong tastes, and the creamy sweetness of intellection—more than the somewhat austere standard version of its history would suggest. Sashi Sekhar’s book reveals not only a historical panorama unique in its density and range but also something of the lived experience of these ancient communities, their physical mise en scene and the immediacy of their natural contexts. It is a joy to turn the pages, to take in site after site. The Wheel and its Track is a highly professional, original work of scholarship setting in place a program for further archaeological and historical research. Very few of the many sites have been scientifically excavated (or even well surveyed). A buried world awaits rediscovery. This book is a gift to anyone interested in the early history of Andhra Desa, or of classical Indian religion, and specifically of Buddhism in one of its most creative and formative stages. The author is to be congratulated for a path-breaking achievement. I have only one request. When the book goes into its second printing, it should include a detailed map of all the sites discussed. David Shulman Department of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion Hebrew University, Jerusalem