Vihara

Origin

The Vinaya requires that monastics cease travelling during the monsoon and remain in one place. The shelters provided for these retreats — first temporary, then donated buildings and parks — became permanent residences as the order settled, and the word vihara came to mean monastery.

The canonical accounts of donations of parks and dwellings by merchants and kings mark the beginning of monastic property, which the Vinaya then had to regulate.

Form

The developed Indian vihara is a square courtyard surrounded by small cells, with a shrine on the axis opposite the entrance. Rock-cut viharas at Ajanta, Ellora and elsewhere reproduce the plan underground, cutting cells with stone beds into the rock around a pillared hall.

Larger establishments added lecture halls, libraries, refectories, storerooms and stupas, and at the greatest sites — Nalanda, Vikramashila, Odantapuri — grew into complexes of many buildings housing thousands.

Function

Viharas were not only residences. They were the institutions of Buddhist learning, where texts were copied, taught, debated and composed, and where the Abhidharma and later philosophy were developed. They held land and endowments, employed servants and cultivators, and functioned as economic entities of some scale, which is documented in inscriptions recording grants.

This is also why their destruction was decisive. When the great monasteries of eastern India were sacked in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the institutional structure that sustained Indian Buddhism — its libraries, its teachers and its endowments — went with them, and the tradition did not recover in the land of its origin.

The word

Vihara survives in place names across South Asia. The Indian state of Bihar takes its name from the density of Buddhist monasteries once found there.