05/19 05. South Asian Art: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism

Religious Art as Sacred Practice

Early South Asian art cannot be separated from religious practice. Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain communities commissioned buildings, sculptures, paintings, and manuscripts to make sacred ideas visible, establish pilgrimage sites, preserve stories, and support devotion.

These traditions developed in overlapping regions across present-day India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. They shared motifs such as lotus flowers, halos, auspicious nature spirits, idealized bodies, sacred animals, and narrative reliefs. Their purposes nevertheless differed: Buddhist art often emphasized relics, the Buddha’s teachings, and the path to enlightenment; Hindu art presented the powers and manifestations of deities; and Jain art emphasized disciplined stillness and liberation.

A useful starting principle is that a sacred image was not merely an illustration or an object for detached viewing. It could support meditation, embody divine or enlightened presence, mark sacred geography, receive offerings, or participate in ritual.

Historical Setting and Shared Visual Languages

Buddhism and Jainism emerged in northern India during a period of intense religious debate conventionally dated to the middle of the first millennium BCE. Both challenged the exclusive authority of Vedic ritual and emphasized individual discipline, karma, rebirth, and liberation. Buddhism centered on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, while Jainism revered twenty-four enlightened teachers known as tirthankaras, with Mahavira as the most recent.

Hindu visual traditions developed from Vedic and Brahmanical practices while incorporating local deities, fertility spirits, epic narratives, and devotional worship of Shiva, Vishnu, and the Goddess.

Important developments include the expansion of Buddhist patronage during the Mauryan period, especially under Ashoka; the flourishing of Buddhist railings, gateways, caves, and narrative reliefs during the Shunga and Satavahana periods; the growth of Buddha images in Mathura and Gandhara during the Kushan period; and the influential idealized Buddhist and Hindu forms of the Gupta period. From approximately the sixth through twelfth centuries, Hindu temples, Buddhist caves, Jain shrines, and portable metal images developed in many regional styles.

Dates describe broad developments rather than a simple replacement of one religion by another. The traditions continued to overlap in their artistic environments, materials, patrons, and visual languages.

Takeaway: Shared artistic forms reveal interaction, but the religious purpose of an image must be understood within its specific tradition.

Stupa, Relic, and Circumambulation

A stupa is a Buddhist reliquary monument associated with the burial or enshrinement of relics. Relics of the Buddha or revered monks made the monument a potent site of sacred presence. Its hemispherical mound, called the anda, covered the relic chamber. Above it stood the harmika, a square railing-like enclosure, and a central mast supporting a series of umbrellas called chatras. A stone railing and gateways, or toranas, often enclosed the path around the monument.

The stupa was designed to be approached and circumambulated rather than entered like a conventional building. Through Pradakshina, devotees walked around the sacred monument while keeping it to the right. Their movement transformed architecture into a ritual path, and the surrounding imagery connected bodily action with stories and teachings.

The Great Stupa at Sanchi began under Ashoka in the third century BCE and was enlarged and faced with stone in later centuries. Its gateways present scenes from the Buddha’s life and previous lives along with auspicious figures, animals, plants, and architectural forms. Inscriptions show that monks, nuns, merchants, and other laypeople contributed donations, making the monument a collective religious and social undertaking.

At Amaravati, sculpted railings and drum slabs surrounded a major Buddhist shrine. Reliefs presented episodes from the Buddha’s life, Buddhist symbols, worshippers, and auspicious beings. Because devotees encountered these images while moving around the monument, visual narrative unfolded through both looking and walking.

Takeaway: The Buddhist stupa joined relics, architecture, narrative imagery, and bodily movement into a single practice of pilgrimage and devotion.

Buddhist Representation and Sacred Architecture

Early Buddhist art often used Aniconism: the Buddha was suggested through signs rather than shown as a human figure. An empty throne could indicate his presence without his body; footprints could mark the path of the enlightened teacher; the bodhi tree could recall enlightenment; the dharma wheel could symbolize teaching; and a riderless horse could refer to the Great Departure. A stupa could stand for the Buddha’s relics and continuing presence.

Aniconism was not necessarily a strict prohibition against images. Symbolic representation coexisted with narrative, architectural, and devotional forms of presence. By approximately the first or second century CE, fully anthropomorphic Buddha images were produced in several regions, including Gandhara and Mathura.

Buddha images became recognizable through a visual vocabulary that included monastic robes, elongated earlobes, the cranial protuberance called the ushnisha, the forehead mark called the urna, calm idealized features, and particular hand gestures. A Mudra could identify meditation, teaching, protection, or another aspect of the Buddha’s activity.

Buddhist communities also built viharas and chaitya-grihas near trade routes and pilgrimage centers. A Vihara was a monastery or monastic residence. A chaitya-griha was a prayer hall, often ending in a stupa. Rock-cut sanctuaries reproduced earlier wooden and structural forms through vaulted roofs, columns, apses, and horseshoe-shaped windows.

At Ajanta, early caves emphasized the stupa as an object of worship, while later Mahayana caves increasingly featured anthropomorphic Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Murals included Jatakas, courtly figures, musicians, animals, celestial beings, and richly patterned settings. These paintings were not merely decorative: narrative imagery provided ethical instruction within an emotionally compelling sacred environment.

Takeaway: Buddhist representation ranges from symbolic signs to human images, while architecture and narrative guide both physical movement and religious understanding.

Hindu Temples, Deities, and Devotion

The Hindu temple was understood as a dwelling place and manifestation of a deity. Its central sanctuary, the Garbhagriha, housed the primary image or emblem. The temple could also be imagined as a cosmic mountain connecting the earthly site to the divine realm. Exterior walls often carried a dense sculptural program of principal deities, related gods, guardians, river goddesses, musicians, lovers, animals, and mythical beings.

Devotees might circumambulate the temple and then approach the inner shrine for Darshan, the auspicious act of seeing and being seen by the deity. A sacred image could be dressed, garlanded, perfumed, bathed, fed, and carried in procession. Bhakti, or devotional attachment to a chosen deity, could be expressed through prayer, song, offerings, image worship, and pilgrimage.

Hindu deities are identified through attributes, gestures, companions, vehicles, and bodily forms. Vishnu may hold a discus, conch, mace, and lotus and may be associated with Garuda. Shiva may carry a trident, wear matted locks, display a third eye, or appear as the dancing Nataraja. Durga is frequently shown defeating the buffalo demon Mahishasura. Ganesha has an elephant head and is associated with the removal of obstacles. Lakshmi is associated with prosperity, beauty, and auspiciousness.

Multiple arms do not represent ordinary physical anatomy. They visualize superhuman capacity by allowing a deity to display several attributes at once, turning the body into a theological diagram.

In the Chola-period bronze Shiva as Lord of Dance, or Nataraja, Shiva dances within a ring of flames. The drum evokes creation, fire signals destruction, one hand offers protection, and the raised foot provides refuge. The dwarf beneath Shiva’s foot represents ignorance or illusion. Portable South Indian bronzes could also be carried in festival processions, allowing the deity to encounter the community beyond the inner temple.

Takeaway: Hindu temple art connects divine presence, cosmic structure, recognizable attributes, devotion, and ritual action.

Jain Liberation and Shared Sacred Space

Jain art focuses on the twenty-four tirthankaras, enlightened teachers who show the way across the cycle of rebirth. Jain images usually emphasize intense stillness, symmetrical bodies, meditation, and a lack of worldly ornament. Figures may be seated in the lotus posture or standing in rigid meditation.

A Tirthankara can resemble a Buddha because both traditions value disciplined meditation and release from desire. Distinguishing features may include the shrivatsa mark on the chest, emblems associated with individual tirthankaras, and serpent imagery in depictions of Parshvanatha. Jain figures may be nude in the Digambara tradition or clothed in the Svetambara tradition.

A Jain temple generally contains a central tirthankara image, often surrounded by subsidiary shrines. The central image focuses worship in the inner sanctuary. Jain art also includes protective attendants, goddesses, manuscript paintings, diagrams, and images of sacred teachers. These works support meditation, temple ritual, donation, and the preservation of religious knowledge.

Ellora demonstrates how Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain communities shared a sacred landscape while maintaining religious differences. Buddhist caves emphasize monasteries, prayer halls, stupas, Buddhas, and bodhisattvas. Hindu caves emphasize divine myth, temple sanctums, monumental gods, and cosmic architecture. Jain caves emphasize tirthankaras, disciplined bodies, sacred attendants, and multiple shrine spaces. The famous Kailasa temple is a monumental Hindu shrine carved from living rock, while later Jain caves contain images of tirthankaras, yakshas, yakshis, and painted decoration.

Takeaway: Jain images make liberation visible through disciplined stillness, while Ellora shows that shared artistic technologies did not erase theological differences.

Narrative, Ritual, and Visual Analysis

Narrative art communicated religious teachings across Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain traditions. Buddhist reliefs presented the Buddha’s life and previous births. Hindu temples depicted episodes from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Puranic mythology. Jain art represented the lives of tirthankaras and exemplary religious figures.

Artists often used continuous narration, in which the same central figure appears more than once within a single field to represent different moments. Gestures, attributes, scale, architectural settings, and repeated motifs helped viewers identify characters and events. The goal was not always to create the illusion of one instant; it was to make moral, cosmic, and devotional meaning legible.

When analyzing a narrative relief, ask:

1. Who is the central figure? Look for attributes, posture, scale, and attendants.

2. How is time organized? Look for repeated figures, separated architectural settings, or overlapping events.

3. What is the viewer expected to do? Stand before the image, walk around it, meditate, listen to a recitation, or participate in ritual?

4. What ethical or theological idea is communicated? Consider compassion, renunciation, divine intervention, protection, cosmic order, or liberation.

Across all three traditions, an image could remind viewers of an absent teacher, mark or contain relics, visualize divine powers, focus meditation, receive offerings, or participate in bathing, dressing, procession, music, and festival. Its meaning depended not only on its material form but also on ritual activation and the relationship between image, community, and sacred space.

Final takeaway: South Asian religious art is best understood as active religious practice. Buddhist stupas, Hindu temple images, and Jain tirthankara sculptures use visual form to connect bodies, stories, rituals, sacred powers, and paths toward liberation.

• Jataka