When reading Pierre Dupont's L'archéologie mône de Dvāravatī ,' which is "devoted to the first historical period in Southern Thailand" from the seventh to the twelfth centuries CE, I was interested in how the origin and development of Mon architecture of central Thailand might relate to Indian prototypes. In his rigorous analysis of the iconography of the standing and seated statues of the Buddha, Dupont begins with the Indian tradition and then moves across Southeast Asia. Yet, in his analysis of Mon architecture, discussing the stupa of Nakhon Pathom, he does not identify an Indian prototype and concludes that it was "natural to look to monuments outside India." I was already familiar with the research of J. E. van Lohuizen-de Leeuw who, in 1956, identified terraced and other archaeological features, similar to those of the stupa of Nakhon Pathom, in the small stupa of Stage I and the colossal stupa of Stage III at Nandangarh, Bihar, India, built in the fourth to third centuries BCE and the first century BCE, respectively. Dupont's pointed seeking of architectural prototypes for features, such as cruciform plans, notched sides with redans, raised terraces, square bases, and so forth, outside India, late in 1959, was therefore even more intriguing. It, together with Lohuizen-de Leeuw's work, brought me to the Nandangarh stupa to explore further the archaeological details in order to ascertain their subsequent influences and to identify the religious significance of the colossal stupa.
目次
Introduction 179 The Nandangarh Site 181 The Sizes of Bricks 186 The Small Stupa of Stage I 187 The Circular Wall of the Stupa of Stage II 188 The Colossal Stupa of Stage III 189 The Architectural Importance of the Stupa of Nandangarh 211 Earlier Assumptions of Architectural Influences 213 Acknowledgments 216 Tables 217
