When most people picture an ancient city, they imagine walls, streets, and crowded markets. But in the Taxila valley, some of the most important structures stood deliberately outside the city limits. Stupas crowned hilltops, monasteries nestled beside spring-fed streams, and a Greek-style temple rose on an artificial mound just beyond a city gate. These sacred spaces were not afterthoughts. They formed a religious landscape that wrapped around the urban core of one of the subcontinent’s oldest centres of learning and trade. Understanding why monks, merchants, and rulers built outside the walls tells us a great deal about how early historic cities actually worked.
Table of Contents
- Buddhist monastic complexes across the valley
- Dharmarajika: the anchor of the valley
- Jaulian and Mohra Moradu: monastic life in detail
- A landscape of many faiths
- The puzzle of the Jandial temple
- Jain and other sacred sites
- How sacred spaces served the cities
- From Bhir to Sirkap to Sirsukh
- Spiritual, social, and economic functions
Buddhist monastic complexes across the valley
The Taxila valley became, over several centuries, a dense network of Buddhist sites. The monuments erected throughout the valley turned it into a religious heartland that drew pilgrims from as far as Central Asia and China. These were not isolated shrines. They clustered along routes, near water sources, and within walking distance of the settled cities, creating a layered geography of worship and study.
Dharmarajika: the anchor of the valley
The oldest and largest complex is Dharmarajika, locally known as Chir Tope. Its great stupa was raised to enshrine bodily relics of the Buddha, and tradition credits its construction to the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, when Taxila received a share of the relics distributed across his empire. The complex was not static. It covers almost the entire history of Buddhism in Taxila, from the 3rd century BCE to the 7th century CE, with the main stupa damaged in a 1st-century earthquake and rebuilt during the Kushan period.
Its placement matters. Dharmarajika sits along an eastern route by the Tamra stream, close to the urban settlements of Bhir Mound and Sirkap. Buddhist monastic tradition held that a monastery should sit neither too close to a city nor too far from it, and Dharmarajika followed exactly this principle. The result was a sacred centre near enough for daily contact with townspeople, yet separate enough for quiet practice.
Jaulian and Mohra Moradu: monastic life in detail
If Dharmarajika shows scale, the hilltop monastery of Jaulian shows daily life. Founded around the 2nd century CE and abandoned by the mid-5th century, Jaulian preserves an assembly hall, store rooms, a refectory, a kitchen, and even bathrooms. Its name has been translated as the “seat of saints,” and its main stupa is surrounded by smaller votive stupas decorated with stucco figures. Because it survived relatively intact, Jaulian gives us a rare picture of how a working monastery was organised.
A short distance away lies Mohra Moradu, a stupa and monastery set in a quiet valley with views of the surrounding hills. In one of the monks’ cells, archaeologists found a small votive stupa preserved with nearly all of its decorative detail intact, offering a model of how the larger structures once looked when fully ornamented. Both sites were excavated under Sir John Marshall, the archaeologist who led much of the early systematic work at Taxila.
The architectural story across these sites is one of evolution. Early structures used rubble and diaper masonry, while later phases under the Kushans show more refined ashlar and elaborate stucco sculpture. The shift in building styles is so consistent that scholars use masonry type as a rough dating tool. Together, the spread of complexes like Dharmarajika, Jaulian, and Mohra Moradu shows how Buddhism grew from a single Mauryan foundation into a valley-wide institution of learning and pilgrimage.
A landscape of many faiths
Buddhism dominated the sacred landscape, but it never stood alone. Taxila was a meeting point of peoples and beliefs, and its temples reflect a striking religious plurality. Within and around the cities you can trace structural remains of different traditions, from Buddhist shrines to classical temples, each shaped by the rulers and communities of its time.
The puzzle of the Jandial temple
The most debated structure is the Jandial temple, which stands on an artificial mound a short walk north of Sirkap’s gate. It has been called one of the most Hellenic buildings ever found on the soil of the subcontinent. The plan follows a classical Greek paradigm, with a central shrine fronted by four Ionic columns supporting a porch. Yet there are no exterior colonnades in the usual Greek manner; instead, solid masonry walls are pierced with window openings.
What was it for? The leading view holds that it served as a Zoroastrian fire temple dressed in Greek architectural clothing, with a rear platform that may have housed a fire sanctuary. Some scholars connect it to the temple described by the ancient writer Philostratus in his account of the sage Apollonius of Tyana. The ambiguity is the point. Jandial is a single building that fuses Greek form with what was probably an Iranian religious function, capturing the syncretism of the Indo-Greek and Indo-Parthian world.
Jain and other sacred sites
The plurality went further. Excavations at Sirkap revealed a Jain temple and a Jain stupa alongside Buddhist shrines, a Hindu temple, and the well-known double-headed eagle shrine with its Corinthian pilasters. The presence of so many traditions in one urban space reflects the cosmopolitan character of a city governed in turn by Mauryan, Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian, and Kushan rulers. The Mauryan principle that contact between religions is beneficial, expressed in Ashoka’s rock edicts, seems to have remained a working reality at Taxila long after his reign.
How sacred spaces served the cities
Why does it matter that these sites stood outside the city walls? Because the relationship between the sacred and the urban was practical, not just spiritual. Taxila’s settlement history runs through three main cities, and each interacted with the religious landscape around it.
From Bhir to Sirkap to Sirsukh
The earliest city, Bhir Mound, dates to roughly the 6th century BCE, with its irregular streets and house blocks representing an early form of urban life on the subcontinent. After the Bactrian Greeks arrived in the early 2nd century BCE, a new city, Sirkap, was laid out on a grid plan in the Greek fashion, complete with stupas and temples integrated into its blocks. Later, under the Kushans, the city shifted again to Sirsukh, a fortified settlement with rounded bastions showing Central Asian influence. The ruins of these settlement sites reveal the pattern of urban evolution across more than five centuries.
Crucially, the monasteries grew up alongside this shifting urban core. Dharmarajika sat near Bhir and Sirkap; Jandial faced Sirkap’s northern gate; and the later monasteries flourished as the Kushan-period city expanded. The sacred and the urban moved together through time.
Spiritual, social, and economic functions
These complexes served several roles at once. Spiritually, they were centres of meditation, relic veneration, and monastic education; Jaulian is sometimes described as one of the early Buddhist places of higher learning. Socially, they connected urban and rural populations. Townspeople, farmers, and travelling merchants could all gather at a stupa for festivals and worship, making the monastery a shared meeting ground that the dense city itself could not easily provide.
Economically, monasteries depended on donations from urban patrons, traders, and rulers, and in turn they offered rest, ritual, and prestige along the trade routes that made Taxila wealthy. The richly decorated interiors at Dharmarajika, where Buddhist accounts describe the use of frankincense and floors paved with coloured glass tiles, hint at the resources that flowed from the city into these sacred spaces. Placing them just outside the walls kept them accessible to everyone while preserving the calm that monastic discipline required.
Seen this way, the sacred spaces of Taxila were not separate from urban life but an extension of it. The city handled administration, craft, and commerce; the monasteries and temples handled learning, ritual, and the social bonds that tied diverse communities together. One could not have thrived without the other.
What do you think? If sacred spaces were deliberately built just beyond the city walls to balance accessibility with quiet, what does that tell us about how ancient planners thought about the relationship between religion and daily urban life? And do you see any echoes of that same logic in how modern Indian cities place their major temples, mosques, and pilgrimage sites today?
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