In the first millennium CE, Buddhism underwent changes that would profoundly transform the history of Eurasia: The Buddha was depicted in human form for the first time; new schools, now collectively known as Mahāyāna, supplanted old orthodoxies and took over China and the rest of East Asia; and Buddhist monasticism spread from the Chinese capital of Xi’an to the Egyptian port of Berenike, contributing to religious mixture across the Silk Roads.

At the heart of this extraordinary religious moment was Gandhāra (northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan). Ravaged by wars, colonial violence, and political instability in recent history, from the first to fifth century CE, Gandhāra was a vibrant center of Buddhist learning. The richness of Buddhist life is testified not only by the monasteries constellating the landscape, but also by an impressive sculptural production, ranging from stone panels depicting the Buddha’s life to monumental plaster statues anchored to walls and natural cliffs.

Since the beginning of Gandhāran studies in the late 1800s, most scholars have focused on the mixture of foreign elements in this sculptural production. Gandhāran art was often deemed as derivative, indebted to the Greco-Roman tradition for daring to imagine the Buddha in human form, like an eastern Olympian god. Questions of style reflected colonial tensions in the subcontinent, where the recently established British Raj (1858–1947) found in the art of Gandhāra confirmation of the alleged superiority of the European visual traditions over local components. Stylistic matters obscured other relevant research avenues, such as the religious function of these objects, their archaeological context, and their relationship to the cultural life of Eurasia in late antiquity.

My work corrects this course by contextualizing stylistic and iconographical analyses in the religious milieu of early Buddhism. The dissertation I completed at the Center, titled “Paradigms of Beholding: The Architecture of Religious Experience in Gandhāra,” investigates religious affect, beholder’s response, and the role of perception in crafting Buddhist religious aesthetics of salvation. The protagonist of this project is the Buddhist monastery, whose heart was the stupa—the reliquary mounds of Buddhist tradition. Together with a host of shrines, the stupa was attended to by monks and laity alike with offerings and worship.

The main claim of my work is that Buddhist monasteries in Gandhāra were designed to lead beholders through journeys of spiritual refinement. I ask: How was monastic space designed to elicit such religious responses? What were the formal mechanisms that architects and artists, in collaboration with the monastic community, put in place to establish these spiritual itineraries? And how did these mechanisms ultimately serve the community as tools of spiritual refinement?

The answers, I argue, lie in the tension between physical and represented space, where the boundary between reality and illusion is thin and the former is revealed as just another flavor of the latter. This understanding is predicated upon a philosophical and religious substratum that saw space as a malleable substance that could be manipulated by those with enough spiritual prowess to do so.

Indeed, a Buddha can make what he wants of the physical matter of the world and move through space as he likes: He levitates, multiplies himself, flies through walls, touches the end of the universe. “Walls, doors, and rocks were no obstacle then, they are as space too today. Assuredly you will be a Buddha,” says the Buddha of the past Dīpaṅkara to the ascetic Megha in the Buddhavaṃsa, a text from the Pali Canon. Eons later, Megha does in fact fulfill the prophecy when he becomes Śākyamūni, the Buddha of our present age.

It should not be surprising, then, that in the tension between the real and the represented, art and architecture have a fundamental role to play: Not only showcasing the illusory nature of reality, but also suggesting ways to go beyond it. Relief panels on stupa drums, for example, construct a clear model of architectural hierarchy that aided the legibility of a stupa surface. Additionally, the patterning model also engendered complementary figurative spaces that recalled opposing ritual movements—circumambulation or stationary worship—that beholders were expected to perform around a stupa. Buddhist steles played with real and represented space by employing a system of visual recursivity, so that beholders would understand that they are already embedded within the endless and expansive system of Buddhist cosmology. Gandhāran art is thus made to compel its viewers, to ask them one thing: That when confronted with our own inescapable position in the cosmos, we learn to see it with our own eyes.

University of Chicago
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2024–2026

In August 2026, Alice Casalini will join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow.