Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. What was a chaitya?
Answer: A sacred site, tree, rock or place of natural beauty, often marked with a small shrine; the word possibly derives from “chita”, a funeral pyre.
Q. What does ‘nibbana’ literally mean?
Answer: The extinguishing of the ego and desire.
Q. What is a hagiography?
Answer: A biography of a saint or religious leader; it may not always be literally accurate, but it tells us what that tradition’s followers believed.
Q. What is a shalabhanjika?
Answer: A woman whose touch was popularly believed to make trees flower and bear fruit; an auspicious, pre-Buddhist symbol absorbed into the decoration of the stupa.
Q. What do ‘Mahayana’ and ‘Hinayana’ literally mean?
Answer: Mahayana means “the great vehicle”, and Hinayana means “the lesser vehicle” (the name Mahayana followers gave to the older tradition).
Q. What strategy, according to the chapter, did nineteenth-century European scholars use to make sense of unfamiliar Indian sculpture?
Answer: They compared it with the sculpture they already knew, that of ancient Greece, “devising yardsticks derived from the familiar to make sense of the unfamiliar”; so they rated the Greek-influenced images of the Buddha and Bodhisattas from the northwest as the best examples of early Indian art.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Name the three pitakas of the Tipitaka and what each contains.
Answer: The Vinaya Pitaka (rules and regulations for the sangha), the Sutta Pitaka (the Buddha’s teachings), and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (philosophical matters).
Q. Distinguish between anicca and anatta.
Answer: Anicca means the world is transient and constantly changing; anatta means the world is soulless, with nothing permanent or eternal in it.
Q. List the five vows taken by Jaina monks and nuns.
Answer: To abstain from killing, stealing and lying; to observe celibacy; and to abstain from possessing property.
Q. Name the structural parts of a mature stupa.
Answer: The anda (the semi-circular mound holding the relics), the harmika, the yashti (with its chhatri, or umbrella), and the surrounding railing.
Q. Who was Mahapajapati Gotami, and why does she matter?
Answer: The Buddha’s foster mother, and the first woman to be ordained as a bhikkhuni, after Ananda’s mediation persuaded the Buddha to admit women into the sangha.
Q. Who were Fa Xian and Xuan Zang, and what did they contribute?
Answer: Chinese Buddhist pilgrims who travelled to India in search of texts, which they carried back to China to be translated by scholars there, helping preserve and spread Buddhist literature.
3 3-Mark Questions
Q. Why do you think women and men joined the sangha?
Answer: The sangha treated everyone as equal once they shed their earlier social identity, so kings and wealthy gahapatis lived alongside workers, slaves and craftspeople. Buddhism valued conduct over birth and emphasised metta and karuna towards the weaker, appealing to people unsettled by rapid social change and dissatisfied with existing practice; Ananda’s mediation also opened the sangha to women such as Mahapajapati Gotami and, later, Punna.
Q. What does Punna’s conversation with the Brahmana (the Therigatha) reveal about Buddhist attitudes to ritual?
Answer: Punna, a dasi who fetched water each morning, questioned a Brahmana performing bathing rituals in the cold, arguing that if washing removed evil, frogs, turtles and water-snakes would also go to heaven. Her argument reflects the Buddhist view that an act should be judged by its ethical content, not by a ritual performed on the body.
Q. Describe any three rules laid down in the Vinaya Pitaka, and explain what they were really doing.
Answer: A new felt blanket had to be kept for at least six years before another could be made; a bhikkhu visiting a household could accept only two or three bowlfuls of food, to be shared among the bhikkhus; bedding taken from sangha lodgings had to be put away, or leave taken, before departing. Together these rules curbed personal accumulation and enforced collective rather than individual ownership.
Q. What was H.H. Cole’s argument, and why did it succeed at Sanchi but fail at Amaravati?
Answer: Cole argued that it was “a suicidal and indefensible policy to allow the country to be looted of original works of ancient art”, and that museums should hold plaster-cast facsimiles while originals remained in situ. Amaravati was found in 1796, long before this view gained ground, so officials kept removing sculpture; Sanchi’s fate was decided later, by when in-situ preservation had enough support to prevail.
Q. Why do symbols such as the shalabhanjika and the serpent matter at Buddhist monuments?
Answer: They show that not every carving at a Buddhist site reflects Buddhist doctrine directly. These popular, pre-Buddhist auspicious symbols were absorbed into stupa decoration alongside doctrinal symbols such as the empty seat and wheel, showing how Buddhism enriched itself with existing local beliefs and practices.
Q. What symbols did early sculptors use to represent the Buddha, and what did each stand for?
Answer: An empty seat represented his meditation, a stupa represented the mahaparinibbana, and a wheel represented his first sermon at Sarnath. Each symbol stands for a specific event in the Buddha’s life, not for the literal object itself.
4 4-Mark Questions
Q. In what ways did the ideas of the Upanishadic thinkers differ from those of the Ajivikas and Lokayatas?
Answer: Upanishadic thinkers, from about the sixth century BCE, explored the meaning of life, the possibility of an afterlife, and whether rebirth followed from past actions. The Ajivikas, represented by Makkhali Gosala, held that pleasure and pain were fixed and could not be altered by virtue or penance, comparing existence to a thrown ball of string that must unwind to its full length regardless of effort: a fatalist position. The Lokayatas, represented by Ajita Kesakambalin, held there was no alms, sacrifice, this world or the next; a person was merely the four elements, which dispersed at death, so nothing survived: a materialist position. So the three arrived at very different conclusions: the Upanishadic thinkers, working within the Vedic tradition, questioned and reinterpreted it (Source 2 calls the blowing wind the true sacrifice) and searched for the self and the ultimate reality; the Ajivikas taught a fixed fate; and the Lokayatas denied any survival after death.
Q. Summarise the central teachings of Jainism.
Answer: Jainism holds that the entire world is animated, with life even in stones, rocks and water, so non-injury to living beings, ahimsa, is central and has shaped Indian thought broadly. Birth and rebirth are shaped by karma; only asceticism and penance, achieved through renouncing the world, can free a person from it, which is why monastic life is necessary for salvation. Jaina monks and nuns took five vows: to abstain from killing, stealing and lying, to observe celibacy, and to abstain from possessing property. Jaina tradition holds that 23 tirthankaras preceded Vardhamana (Mahavira), and Jainism spread across India through literature in Prakrit, Sanskrit and Tamil.
5 5-Mark Questions
Q. To what extent does knowledge of Buddhist literature help in understanding the sculpture at Sanchi?
Answer: Sanchi’s carvings work like a charanachitra, a storyteller’s scroll; without reading the Jatakas, an art historian could not have identified an apparently rural scene as the Vessantara Jataka. Sculptors also used symbols, an empty seat, a stupa, a wheel, to represent the Buddha, and reading these needs familiarity with hagiographies and the Sutta Pitaka; a tree at the site of enlightenment stands for a specific event, not a literal tree. However, not all carvings are doctrinal: the shalabhanjika and the serpent motif are pre-Buddhist, popular symbols that Buddhist literature alone cannot explain. James Fergusson’s mistaken conclusion that Sanchi was a centre of tree and serpent worship, reached without access to translated Buddhist texts, shows the risk of reading images without literature. Yet even text-based reading is not always conclusive, as the disputed Mahabalipuram panel shows. So Buddhist literature is very helpful, but knowledge of popular tradition and careful comparison of text and image together are also necessary.
Q. Discuss the developments in sculpture and architecture associated with the rise of Vaishnavism and Shaivism.
Answer: The idea of a saviour was not unique to Buddhism: Vaishnavism (Vishnu as the principal deity) and Shaivism (Shiva as the chief god) developed alongside Mahayana Buddhism, both centred on bhakti, devotion visualised as a bond of love between devotee and god. Vaishnavism developed cults around ten avatars, forms the deity was believed to assume to save the world from disorder, and recognising local deities as one of these avatars helped unify scattered traditions; Shiva was mostly represented by the linga, occasionally in human form. Reading such sculpture requires knowing the stories behind head-dresses, ornaments and ayudhas (weapons or auspicious objects), which survive mainly in the Puranas, compiled by Brahmanas in simple Sanskrit meant to be read aloud to everyone, including women and Shudras. Vasudeva-Krishna, for instance, began as an important local deity of the Mathura region before spreading more widely. Alongside this, the first temples were built to house divine images: the earliest was a small square garbhagriha with a single doorway; later a tall shikhara was raised over the shrine, and temple walls carried sculpture. A parallel tradition carved temples directly out of rock as artificial caves, going back to the Ajivika caves built on Asoka’s orders in the third century BCE, and culminating in the eighth century in the single-rock Kailashnatha temple at Ellora.
Q. Discuss how and why stupas were built.
Answer: Stupas were built because certain places became sacred once they held relics, the Buddha’s bodily remains or objects he had used, buried in mounds. According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, as the Buddha lay dying, he told Ananda that stupas should be erected at the four crossroads; the Ashokavadana records that Asoka later distributed the Buddha’s relics to every important town and ordered stupas built over them. By the second century BCE, stupas stood at Bharhut, Sanchi and Sarnath. They were built through donations: kings such as the Satavahanas, guilds such as the ivory workers who financed part of a gateway at Sanchi, and hundreds of ordinary women and men who recorded their names, home town, occupation and relatives on the railings and pillars; bhikkhus and bhikkhunis also contributed. A mature stupa had an anda holding the relics, a harmika, a yashti topped by a chhatri, and a surrounding railing; worshippers entered through the eastern gateway and walked around it clockwise, keeping the mound on their right, imitating the sun’s path.
Q. Compare the fate of the stupas at Amaravati and Sanchi, and explain what this reveals about the history of archaeological preservation in colonial India.
Answer: Amaravati was found in 1796 by a local raja who mined the site for stone; Colin Mackenzie’s later drawings went unpublished; in 1854 Walter Elliot, commissioner of Guntur, collected panels that came to be called the Elliot marbles, and by the 1850s slabs had been dispersed to the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, the India Office in Madras, London and private British gardens, each new official removing more on the grounds that earlier ones had done the same. H.H. Cole’s objection that this was “a suicidal and indefensible policy” failed to save Amaravati, which today is just an insignificant mound. Sanchi, by contrast, was discovered in 1818 with three of its four gateways still standing; even here it was suggested that a gateway be moved to Paris or London, but a number of factors finally kept it in place, and Cole’s in-situ argument, which failed at Amaravati, held for Sanchi. This shows that a monument’s survival depended less on its own importance than on when it happened to be found, relative to the shift in official and scholarly attitudes from removal to in-situ preservation.
Q. Read the inscription of Dhanavati (Kushana ruler Huvishka’s 33rd year) and answer: how did she date her inscription, why might she have installed the Bodhisatta image, who were her relatives, what text did she know, and from whom did she learn it?
Answer: Dhanavati dated her inscription by the regnal year of the ruler Huvishka (his 33rd year), the season (the hot season), and the month and day (the eighth day of its first month). She most likely installed the Bodhisatta image to earn religious merit, to express her and her family’s devotion, and to record herself publicly as a knower of the Tipitaka. Her named relatives are her aunt (her mother’s sister), the bhikkhuni Buddhamita, and her own father and mother, who joined her in setting up the image. She knew the Tipitaka, and she learned it from her teacher, the bhikkhu Bala, who himself knew the Tipitaka.
6 6-Mark Questions
Q. Can we ever fully ‘see’ everything about the ancient religious and cultural life described in this chapter? Discuss.
Answer: Nineteenth-century European scholars, confronted with unfamiliar figures such as multi-armed deities, made sense of them by comparing them to familiar Greek sculpture, “devising yardsticks derived from the familiar to make sense of the unfamiliar”, which judged Indian art by Greek standards; this is exactly why north-western Buddha and Bodhisatta images with clear Greek influence were prized by these scholars. Matching image to text is a better method, but it is not always conclusive: the rock-cut panel at Mahabalipuram is read by some historians as the descent of the river Ganga and by others as Arjuna’s penance, even though both sides agree on the method. James Fergusson’s mistaken conclusion that Sanchi was a centre of tree and serpent worship, reached without access to translated Buddhist literature, shows what can go wrong when text is unavailable. Finally, most religious life, daily practice, festivals and oral belief, was never recorded as a monument, sculpture or painting at all; the spectacular survivals this chapter focuses on are, quite literally, the tip of the iceberg. So while historians can reconstruct a great deal using texts, sculpture, architecture and inscriptions together, they can never claim to see the whole picture.
Q. Compare the teachings of the Buddha with the central message of Jainism, bringing out both similarities and differences.
Answer: Similarities: both traditions questioned the authority of the Vedas and the Brahmanical, sacrifice-centred order; both stressed individual agency, the idea that anyone could work towards liberation regardless of birth; both centred renunciation and built a monastic organisation, the sangha for Buddhism; and Mahavira and the Buddha both taught around the sixth century BCE, when new kingdoms and cities were developing in the Ganga valley. Differences: Jainism holds that the entire world is animated, even stones, rocks and water, and places ahimsa at its centre, with freedom from the cycle of karma reached only through asceticism and penance; Buddhism teaches a middle path between severe penance and self-indulgence, built on the ideas of anicca, anatta and dukkha, with nibbana as its goal. Jaina tradition counts 23 tirthankaras before Mahavira, while accounts of the Buddha rely heavily on his own personal life story, reconstructed through hagiography. Later Buddhism’s Mahayana turn added image worship and the saviour-like figure of the Bodhisatta, a development with no direct Jaina parallel.
7 Case Studies
— advice given by the Buddha to the householder Sigala, Sutta Pitaka (Source 5)
(A) 2 marks Which text is this advice taken from, and to whom was it given?
Answer: It is taken from the Sutta Pitaka, and was given to the wealthy householder Sigala.
(B) 3 marks According to this advice, in what five ways should a master look after his servants and employees?
Answer: By assigning them work suited to their strength, supplying them with food and wages, tending them in sickness, sharing delicacies with them, and granting leave at times.
(C) 3 marks What does this passage show about the Buddha’s social teachings?
Answer: The Buddha regarded the social world as a human creation rather than of divine origin, so he urged kings and gahapatis to be humane and ethical, expecting individual effort and righteous conduct to transform social relations, including between a master and those who served him.
— the Mahaparinibbana Sutta (Source 8)
(A) 2 marks On what occasion was this said, and who asked the question that prompted it?
Answer: It was said as the Buddha lay dying; Ananda had asked him what should be done with the remains of the Tathagata.
(B) 3 marks What did the Buddha say first, and what did he say later when pressed further?
Answer: He first told Ananda not to trouble himself with honouring his remains, but to be zealous and attend to his own good; when pressed further, he said stupas should be erected at the four crossroads.
(C) 3 marks What does this passage suggest about the origins of stupa worship?
Answer: It suggests that relic-worship and stupa-building, though they later became one of Buddhism’s most visible legacies, developed somewhat apart from the Buddha’s own initial priority of self-effort, and were sanctioned only once his followers pressed him for guidance.