Buddhist Architecture in the Western Himalayas: Architectural Research in Dolpo/Nepal

Since 1999, various project teams at Graz University of Technology have conducted several research pro- jects on Buddhist Architecture in the Western Himalayas, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. These projects focused on sacred buildings, which remain of the Kingdom of Purang-Guge that represented the political and religious power in the Western Himalaya between the 10th and 15th centuries. The number of the surveyed monuments until now comprises 57 individual buildings at 18 different locations in Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, and Western Tibet. Due to the imminent threat to these significant monuments, the architectural research work has to continue with the fieldwork. After the substantial documentations in Northern India and Western Tibet, we are now focusing on Nepal, in particular on the area of Dolpo to enlarge the research material. Dolpo is a culturally Tibetan region, which encompasses four valleys that are situated along the border to the Tibet Autonomous Region (China). Almost 90 percent of the region lies at an altitude above 3500 meters. Less than 5000 people live in Dolpo, making it one of the least densely populated areas of Nepal. The research will concentrate on the Nankhong valley (innermost place) in the North of Dolpo, because the oldest buildings have obviously been preserved there. In terms of the planned field research, it is crucial to collect the necessary inventory data about different buildings in Dolpo. The different types of religious buildings include temples and votive buildings as well as religious landmarks. The following step will focus on surveying and documenting significant buildings with adequate accuracy. The elaborated material will allow the analysis of various aspects of the buildings, and will show how different kinds of building types have evolved in that region. Drawing on our experience with methods we had developed for earlier documentations our goal is to elaborate the fundamental data that will become the point of reference for future building research and restoration in Dolpo. Furthermore, we are aiming at using the collected data and research results in order to establish a comprehensive typology of the early Buddhist architecture in the Western Himalaya. Therefore, the project will shed light on the connections within Buddhist archi- tecture in Northern India, Western Tibet and Nepal. The research results will support the preservation of this unique cultural heritage. In order to pro- vide a continuous overview of the documentation we will present the material on our website (www.archresearch.tugraz.at), which offers free share for the interested community. Similar to the docu- mentations of previous projects, the available information will include photographs as well as an extensive collection of architectural drawings, photomontages and spatial models of the individual buildings.

Starting point for the architectural research in Dolpo was the fact that results from different fields of research, such as Tibetology and Anthropology, clearly show that the religious significance of certain regions of Dolpo played an important role in the cultural history of Tibet as early as the 11th century. Therefore, in the first phase of the project, it was essential to start an inventory of the preserved sacred buildings of Dolpo. The documentation took into account the cultural-historical significance as well as art-historical and architectural aspects, in order to enable a comparative analysis with the already documented buildings of Buddhist architecture in the Western Himalayas. In the course of the first field research in 2018 a first inventory of relevant buildings in Dolpo could be prepared, which formed the basis for the following field research. This survey included eleven sites; for all of these ensembles settlement and site plans as well as descriptions of the buildings and a photo documentation were prepared. During the following field research in 2019, a total of five temple complexes were measured and documented more accurately. The architectural and technical documentation includes floor plans, ceiling plans, sections and elevations of the individual buildings at a scale of 1:100, as well as site plans of the ensembles and the surrounding settlement structures at a scale of 1:1000 and 1:5000. A selection of the results has been published on our website. Thus, for the first time, an inventory and some more detailed building documentations of sacred buildings in Dolpo are now available, which form the basis for further work. It has been shown that the preserved sacred buildings of Dolpo display quite diverse architectural concepts of different periods, which can be dated from the 12th to the 18th centuries. One of the most important goals of the follow-up projects is to complete and elaborate this inventory in order to generate comparative material for scientific research. The second priority of the research project involved the completion of the comparative material concerning the three most important early monastic complexes in Tholing (Tibet), Nyarma and Tabo (Northern India). Next to the comprehensive documentation of the sacred buildings, a special focus was placed on the analysis and the comparisons of the overall material. The results were published in March 2021 within the third volume of our publication series Buddhist Architecture in the Western Himalaya: The Ancient Monastic Complexes of Tholing, Tabo and Nyarma, edited by Holger Neuwirth and Carmen Auer. Furthermore, the architectural documentation of the temple complex of Alchi/Ladakh was revised and supplemented, the results will be published as a contribution to the book ALCHI - Ladakhs Hidden Buddhist Sanctuary, edited by Christian Luczanitz, in 2021.