Paradigms of Beholding: The Architecture of Religious Experience in Gandhāra (1st-4th century CE)

The dissertation examines religious architecture and religious imagery in Gandhāra, an ancient region stretching between northwestern Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan, between the first and fourth centuries CE. It discusses the formal and iconographic devices that Gandhāran artists and architects put in place in Buddhist monasteries to design spaces that invited and incited specific types of religious engagement with religious monuments (such as stupas and shrines) and religious objects. The dissertation shows that architecture and sculptural décor in sacred space lead beholders through journeys of spiritual refinement according to the Buddhist soteriological message and connects this creative use of space to the philosophical-religious environment of the time as well as to the debates surrounding spatial thinking in the Buddhist northwest of the South Asian subcontinent.