2026 Theses Doctoral

Coins, Tree Shrines, and the Monastic Institution: Bharhut and the Artistic Beginnings of the World's First Buddhist Monasteries (ca. 200 BCE-100 CE)

Gorant, Charlotte N.

This dissertation investigates the Bharhut stūpa—the first major Buddhist monument of South Asia from the second century BCE. The project consolidates the known sculptures and inscriptions from field work and excavation reports within a new analysis of artistic and architectural design. It is a first attempt to reinterpret the art historical aspects of Bharhut with a partial reconstruction of the main stūpa in its post-Mauryan historical context.

The main contribution of my analysis is the argument that artists, together with monastics and scribes, created an entirely new type of inscribed image of the Buddha by expanding upon the tree shrine image (known from coins) to articulate new philosophical ideas. Many art historians have found it perplexing that the artists of Bharhut seem to have suddenly developed the site’s sacred art in current scholarship. Instead, I shift the discussion on the rise of the divine image to precursors including images on coins and to combinations of visual signs on earlier stūpa railings.

I argue that artists, who were immersed in a culture defined by a legibility of signs across social hierarchies, which I call a “world of signs,” co-opted and expanded upon the tree shrine image that already existed for over two centuries on coins. Earlier, undecorated monastic memorials emphasized his achievement of pari-nirvāṇa in their inherent monumental design.

I demonstrate that the artists of Bharhut furthered this concept on entranceway sculptures—rather than inventing it anew—with the empty seat beneath the familiar tree shrine image to indicate the Buddha as an awakened figure in pari-nirvāṇa. This shift in our understanding of precursors sheds new light on the beginnings of the divine image of the Buddha in South Asia.