Place · Buddhist monastery site · India
Harwan
The 4-5th century Buddhist and later Hindu complex at Harwan in Srinagar district, Kashmir, 20 kilometres from the Srinagar city centre — the Kushan-period Kaniska-era Buddhist monastery excavated by Ram Chandra Kak in 1922-24, with a distinctive terracotta tile floor pattern showing the complex of a stupa, chaitya hall, and vihara arranged on a stepped terrace. The 7,000-plus terracotta tiles with their geometric and figurative motifs are among the finest Kushan-period terracotta surviving anywhere, including scenes from Jataka tales, Central Asian Scythian hunters, and ornamental Buddhist iconography. The site documents the Buddhist cultural flow between Kashmir and Central Asia via the Zoji-la pass to Ladakh, Khotan and the Tarim Basin. The famous Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna is said to have taught at Harwan.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Kashmir and Himalayan architectural history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.080, 74.910
Connections (4)
- Shared sacred geographyTakshashilā / Taxila
Harwan above Srinagar and Taxila are the two ends of Kashmiri and Gandhāran Buddhism. The fourth Buddhist council is placed in Kashmir under Kanishka, and the Sarvāstivāda scholarship that came out of it travelled the Karakoram routes into Central Asia and China. Harwan's moulded terracotta tiles carry Central Asian faces and Kharosthi numerals found nowhere else in India, which is the best surviving evidence of what Kashmiri Buddhism actually looked like.
- Craft tradition ofAlchi Monastery, Ladakh
Alchi's murals are Kashmiri Buddhist painting and Harwan's tiles are Kashmiri Buddhist terracotta — and Kashmir itself retains almost nothing of either. The tradition survives in Ladakh because nobody there had a reason to repaint it and in Kashmir it did not survive at all. Alchi was spared repainting because later reformers built new monasteries elsewhere rather than renovating this one, which is an accident of sectarian history rather than of conservation.
- TransmissionGandhāra
Harwan's moulded tiles show figures in trousers, boots and pointed caps — Central Asian rather than Indian dress — and its apsidal stupa court is closer to Gandharan than to Gangetic plans. Kashmir is where the Gandharan Buddhist world continued after the Huna wars broke it, and where the monks who carried the canon into Central Asia and China were trained.
- Site withinSrinagar
Harwan sits six kilometres northeast of Srinagar on a terraced slope above the Dal, with the remains of a Buddhist complex whose stamped terracotta tiles are the only evidence of Kashmir's eastern Buddhist architectural idiom. It is traditionally identified with the fourth Buddhist council site under Kanishka, which would make it one of the most important Kashmiri Buddhist sites, though the identification is contested.
On these journeys
Sources
Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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