The Buddha's Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia by Johan Elverskog

Author:Johan Elverskog [Elverskog, Johan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812251838
Google: B8TRDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2020-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

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

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