Dome of Heaven enters the long-standing debate in architectural history on the origins and significance of the dome as both an idea and a building technique. Examining the material evidence and intellectual foundations of Buddhist ceilings in a trans-Eurasian context, Di Luo and Gerald Kozicz reveal the multiple genealogies and meanings of the Buddhist dome to unravel the deep-seated connections between the East and the West and the “in-between” in architectural and astronomical knowledge and practice during the first millennium.

On the Indian subcontinent, the arched shape of the dome emerged from Śākyamuni’s “fragrant chamber,” the first Buddhist temple and the embodiment of ascetism. As the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools spread across Asia along the Silk Road, this humble design evolved to incorporate increasingly complex cosmological diagrams, pictorial and calligraphic, in ceiling spaces, culminating in a mandalic universe pivoting around Mount Meru, the center of the Buddhist cosmos.

Foregrounding areas often described as “peripheries” to the great Silk Road empires, Luo and Kozicz establish a geographical framework for the Buddhist Dome of Heaven. They identify three major channels of transmission: the trans-Hindukush, the trans-Taklamakan, and the trans-Himalayan. Along these routes, builders traded ideas and goods like architectural models and miniatures, facilitating exchanges that shaped Buddhist domes into vessels of the ethical universe, visual and kinesthetic aids to meditation, and roadmaps to enlightenment.

Abundantly illustrated with more than eighty drawings, 3D models, maps, and photographs, Dome of Heaven offers a wealth of insights into the creation of a theological world order through spatial choreography, iconography, and pictorial storytelling.

• Di Luo, Author

  Di Luo is Chu-Niblack Associate Professor of Art History and Architectural Studies at Connecticut College.

• Gerald Kozicz, Author

  Gerald Kozicz is an architectural historian who specializes in the art and architecture of northern India and the Himalayan regions.