Place · Buddhist monastery · Pakistan

Takht-i-bahi

/tɑːxˈtiː bəˈhiː/

Also known as Takht-i-Bāhī

Function

Religious institution & practice

Condition

historical scholarly landscape

Tradition

Buddhism

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

34.171, 71.565

Worth knowing

Takht-i-Bahi means “Spring Throne” and refers to the site's location on a hill near natural springs. Its complex includes monastic courtyards, meditation cells, stupas and assembly spaces, built in stone and stucco. Protected by its elevated position, it escaped many later destructions and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Connections (5)

• Site adjacencyGandhāra

  Takht-i-Bahi is the best-preserved Gandharan monastery and the clearest surviving picture of what the region's Buddhist establishment looked like: a court of votive stupas, a monastic quadrangle, an assembly hall, kitchen and cells, built in diaper masonry between about the first and seventh centuries on a ridge above the Mardan plain. It survives because it stands on a hill and escaped both ploughing and stone-robbing — its sculpture was taken anyway.

• Site adjacencyTakshashilā / Taxila

  Takht-i-Bahi and Taxila were connected through Gandhara’s wider network of Buddhist monasteries, cities and trade routes. Taxila was a major urban and intellectual centre farther east, while Takht-i-Bahi lay toward the northwest. Together they illustrate the geographical spread of Buddhist institutions across Gandhara and their connections with wider South Asian networks.

• Site adjacencyBāmiyān

  Takht-i-Bahi and Bamiyan are about six hundred kilometres apart along the road through the Khyber and over the Hindu Kush, and they are two stages of one Buddhist landscape running from the Indus into Central Asia — the Gandharan monastery and the cliff sanctuary with its colossal Buddhas. What was carved in Gandharan stone in the second century was painted and cut in Afghan cliff in the sixth, and the Bamiyan figures were dynamited in 2001.

• In the same set asJamāl Garhi

  Takht-i-Bahi and Jamāl Garhi are the two great hilltop monasteries of the Mardan plain, about thirty kilometres apart, and they show the same plan: a main stupa in a court, ringed by votive stupas and image chapels, with the monastic cells and assembly hall on separate terraces below. Takht-i-Bahi survives as architecture and is a world heritage site; Jamāl Garhi survives as sculpture, its schist narrative panels dispersed to museums in the nineteenth century while the buildings were left as foundations.

• AnalogueMes Aynak

  Monasteries sat on routes and revenues, not in wildernesses. Takht-i-Bahi looks down on the Mardan plain and the roads across it; Mes Aynak sits on a copper deposit and has smelting furnaces in the same levels as its stupas. Both were endowed by the traffic they overlooked, which is the ordinary economics of Buddhist establishments in the north-west — and at Mes Aynak the relationship is unusually literal, because the monks were living on the ore body and working it.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush

Sources

Wikipedia, “Takht-i-Bahi”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.

• Wikipedia — Takht-i-Bahi