From Monastic Cells to Corridors: Historical Significance of Sixth-Seventh Centuries Changes in the Chi-nese Buddhist Monastery

Abstract

Most scholarship on third-to-seventh-century Chinese architecture concerns Buddhist monasteries undergoing a progressive trend of sinicization. Thus, in the center of its four-sided courtyard, Buddha halls, a Chinese-looking architectural type, consequently replaced the non-Chinese pagoda. Few studies give sufficient emphasis to the changing conditions of the surrounding structure that defined the courtyard. Historians have demonstrated, through several excavated Tang dynasty (618-907) monastic sites and a number of contemporary examples from Korea and Japan, that large Tang monasteries were usually enclosed by covered corridors. On the other hand, archeological sources show that in most of the excavated pre-Tang Buddhist sites, the courtyards are enclosed by monks’ residential cells. There is obviously an interesting transformation, which has not been addressed in previous studies. To understand this phenomenon, this paper revisits early Buddhist architecture in South and Central Asia, and identifies two distinctive sources that monasteries in Northern Dynasties and Southern Dynasties were respectively modeled on: the north was under strong influence of the Gandhāran monastery, while the south was more likely to be rooted in the Central Indian monastery. Furthermore, this paper argues the universal use of the corridor type in the fifth-to-seventh-century temple construction of Korea and Japan resulted from indirect Central Indian influence via their cultural exchange with the Southern Dynasties. Lastly, considering the political and religious agenda of seventh-century China, the change of enclosing structure from monks’ quarters to corridors in the northern/Tang monasteries can be understood as a multifaceted consequence of both the cultural reconciliation of the re-unified north and south and establishment of more orthodox Indian monasticism in China initiated by several important early-Tang Buddhist elites. This paper enriches our current understanding of Buddhist architecture by re-mapping its transmission course in East Asia.