Chapter 10

The Buddhist Landscape

Temples were strewn like stars, and pagodas like flying wild geese.

—Samgukyusa, Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, Book 3

Although the Dharma and Buddhists played a pivotal role in the urbanization of Asia, they were not the sole causal factor in such a complicated historical development. In every case, from Mathura in India to Jiankang in China and Kyoto in Japan, many other people contributed to these urban realities. Nevertheless, Buddhists and the Dharma were the sole driving force in one sphere of activity: the politics of landscape.

By “politics of landscape” I refer to the dynamic whereby Buddhists—be they kings, businessmen, goldsmiths, or monks—transformed the landscape with Buddhist monasteries, temples, and stupas, and these structures in turn transformed social realities. As James Duncan has observed, “landscape … is one of the central elements in a cultural system, for as an assemblage of objects, a text, it acts as a signifying system through which a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored.”¹ Wherever the Dharma became established, this landscape dynamic unfolded.² In some cases, landscape transformation was a state enterprise and in others it was not. In Sri Lanka, for example, Duncan has shown how the Kandy Kingdom performed its “good deeds” by building an explicitly Buddhist landscape: “The environmental evidence of these good deeds was a distinctively Asokan landscape which embodied and exemplified [Buddhist] values. In order to become a Buddha, kings devoted themselves to building religious structures, such as monasteries, dagobas and vihara, which would enrich the religion, as well as to public works such as irrigation tanks which would benefit the people.”³ Such transformation exerted political and religious control but it also produced a specifically Buddhist culture through landscape.⁴

Figure 19. Potala Palace (Lhasa, Tibet, 1993).

Photo by author.

In Japan, Buddhist rulers built roads, canals, and irrigation systems to forge the state, but they also transformed the landscape with state monasteries, called kokubunji.

The kokubunji helped define the cultic and political identities of Japanese rulers in several ways. As Piggott has noted, the Buddhist tradition offered rulers a new vocabulary with which to construct a cultic and political identity vis-à-vis their subjects. Thus the establishment of the kokubunji system and the construction of the Great Buddha at Todaiji created a ritual space in which Shomu tenno could enact the role of leader of a Buddhist nation populated by devout—and loyal—believers. Piggott has also noted the role of Buddhist institutions in providing a suitable stage for a “theater of state,” in which the performance of rituals elicited provincial participation in the political structures controlled by the court.⁵

In other cases, nonstate actors such as traders and monastics initiated and maintained such projects. In the western Deccan, for example, merchants excavated more than a thousand Buddhist caves in the Western Ghats.⁶ In China nonstate actors built thousands of temples. Yet, regardless of the agent, the results were the same: a Buddhist culture was created through the alteration and exploitation of the natural world.

The previous chapter looked at the cities that developed in tandem with the spread of Buddhism. Here I consider the natural resources that this other aspect of the Buddhist landscape demanded. Research has shown, for example, that the building of state monasteries across early Japan between 600 and 850 CE required some three million cubic meters of wood.⁷ Paul Gleason has studied the Todaiji Temple, which was built in the eighth century and remains the world’s largest wooden structure. He calculates that its two nine-story pagodas and meeting hall measuring more than an acre would have required 2,198 acres of timber.⁸ After Todaiji burned down in 1180, however, the effort to rebuild it required 118 new dams to be built because, by then, urbanization and agricultural expansion had consumed all local sources of lumber and suitable timber had to be ferried from all over Japan.⁹ Wood was also needed for many aspects of the Buddhist landscape other than building structures. In early Japan, Buddhist temples required ten different types of tile, and wood fires fed the kilns. A few decades after the boom in Buddhist construction, the kilns were moved more than fifty miles away from the capital because all the nearby forests had been cut.¹⁰ Wood was also needed to make the bricks used in temple construction. Geographer Michael Williams has determined how much wood was required for brick making: “Every cubic meter (1.0 m³) of burnt brick required nearly 150 m³ of wood to make. Bricks also had to be fixed to one another, and intense heat was required (900–1100 C depending on the type of stone used) to calcinate or reduce calcium carbonate (limestone or chalk) to lime, the basis of cement, plaster, and ultimately concrete. Each ton of lime required between 5 and 10 tonnes of wood to produce, depending on the quality of the wood.”¹¹

Buddhists also built stone monuments, which required quarrying. In ancient India, Buddhists were the first to build with stone.¹² Archaeologists have begun to study ancient quarries, such as these from the Mauryan Empire:

As many as 452 ancient quarries containing marks of extraction of stone blocks, chiseling debris, undressed, half-dressed, and completely dressed cylindrical blocks, and records of blocks in the form of count marks and the like were recorded. A total of 1,128 cylindrical blocks were noted…. The abandoned quarries of the Chunar Hills were of various dimensions. In most of the cases, one thick sandstone layer was extracted. As a result of this mode of operation, the quarries in general had an average depth of 2–4 m and they were abandoned after removing the upper formation. Each quarry was utilized only once … because the upper Vindhyan formation is characterized by an extensive stretch of sandstone bed right at the top of the plateau-like formation.¹³

Such early evidence attests to extensive building with stone and may help us to understand the environmental impact of the Buddhist landscape in India.

The size of building indicates how intense its environmental demands would have been. The Mainamati Buddhist complex, in what is now Bangladesh, covered thirty-five square miles.¹⁴ In northeast China, the Liao dynasty built remarkable wooden temples in a “program of monumental construction the likes of which had never been seen.”¹⁵ Monumental architectural projects also made Wutai Shan into a Buddhist sacred space.¹⁶ In China, Empress Wu built a wooden tower almost 1,000 feet tall, which housed a statue of Maitreya over 900 feet tall.¹⁷ A much more recent example is the Potala Palace that looms over Lhasa. Built in the mid-seventeenth century, it measures 1,312 by 1,148 feet, has thirteen floors and more than a thousand rooms. Its walls are 16.5 feet thick at the base and they are reinforced with copper. In Sri Lanka, the Kandy Kingdom built a nine-story monastery and a 400-foot dagoba out of wood.¹⁸ In Cambodia, an inscription informs us that the royal court annually used sixty tons of gold to gild the Bayon Temple.¹⁹

The sheer number of monasteries built also indicates how massive an undertaking the Buddhist landscape was.²⁰ In Thailand, the Lan Na Kingdom built 500 monasteries in the town of Chiang Mai.²¹ In Burma, the Pagan Kingdom built 4,000. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian reported in the early fifth century that Buddhists in the Swat valley, today’s Pakistan, had built 500 monasteries in the course of a few centuries.²² Similarly, in Japan, the first temple was built in 588 CE, and by 624 CE more than 20 such temples had been built; sixty-eight years later the number of monasteries in Japan was 548.²³ But such explosive growth was not exclusive to densely populated East Asia. In sparsely populated Amdo, Tibet, for example, the number of large-scale teaching institutions went from 20 to 150 in the course of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).²⁴ During the Northern Wei dynasty in China (386 to 534 CE), the state built 47 “great state monasteries”; the nobility and other elite built another 839 monasteries; and commoners financed the building of more than 30,000 temples.²⁵

The Northern Wei dynasty, however, was not unique,²⁶ as the dynasties ruling in the south of China show the same pattern. Even though the Six Dynasties period was one of much upheaval and chaos in Chinese history, the number of Buddhist institutions steadily increased during each successive, short-lived dynasty.

This Buddhist expansion continued apace until the Tang dynasty launched a great persecution of the Dharma in 845. During that time the state shut down about 4,600 monasteries and about 40,000 smaller temples across China.²⁸ As part of that effort, the state also took from these Buddhist monasteries “30 or 40 million qing [494–662 million acres] of fertile top-grade land,” as well as 150,000 male and female slaves that were owned by China’s Buddhist institutions.²⁹

These numbers around monastery construction and maintenance help us to better understand the environmental history of Buddhist Asia because they show how “becoming Buddhist” entailed extensive landscape transformation. But there is even more to consider when we include the Buddhist trappings within these buildings: elaborate silks, ornate furnishings, ritual implements made from products from far and wide, and so forth. Take this description of how temple construction in medieval Burma boosted industries in distant locations:

Places distant from the capital were … affected favourably by temple construction. Towns and villages whose industries included the production of raw and finished material—such as stone, marble, ivory, gold, silver, cloth, bricks—used in construction and decoration were assured a stable demand. Temple construction in Pagan sustained the economic life of villages such as… Pakokku, whose teak industry supplied the material for wooden monasteries; Cakuin, the home of goldsmiths, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, masons, stone- and wood carvers, painters and carpenters; and Muchipaw, where sugar palm, salt, coal, limestone, gold, petroleum, and gypsum industries were located…. Places that had been hitherto been considered frontier areas were being cleared, cultivated and settled. Parts of lower Burma near Pussim (Bassein) and Tala were also being settled, places that had once been considered foreign.³⁰

This dynamic played itself out repeatedly as the Dharma moved across Asia.³¹

The environmental costs of creating a Buddhist landscape, in addition to the urbanization that accompanied it, were immense.³² Its effects were apparent at the time, as we know from a complaint a Chinese official sent to the emperor: “Extensive constructions of monasteries are undertaken, and large mansions are built. Even though for such works trees are felled to the point of stripping the mountain, it does not suffice to supply all the beams and all the columns required [so more are imported]. Though earth is moved to the point of obstructing the roads, it does not suffice for the [production of bricks required for] walls and partitions [and so more are brought in].”³³ And, yet despite such evidence that Buddhist institutions were fully engaged in these ecologically destructive activities, this environmental devastation is rarely brought to bear on the history of Buddhism or the history Asia.

Notwithstanding this blind spot, there is no doubt that the spread of Buddhism as well as its institutionalization across Asia fit a pattern found around the globe:

With the intensification of agriculture, more and more land was transformed into fields, terraces, and meadows, yielding and increasing the amount of food and other products upon which society at large grew increasingly dependent. Those who owned the land were inclined to regard it mainly as an economic asset—a source of revenue and prestige. Since they managed to appropriate a sizable portion of the total wealth produced and accumulated in their societies, increases in wealth did not result in either clear-cut extensive or intensive growth, but in a lopsided increment of luxury possessions that may be typified as hypertrophy. The material remains from episodes of such hypertrophy in the past are numerous; they range from the Egyptian pyramids to the Taj Mahal, from the triumphal arches of Rome to the Aztec solar temples.³⁴

We could add to this list such Buddhist monuments as Yungang, Borobudur, and the Potala Palace.