A vihara is a Buddhist monastery: a home for monks, usually laid out around a courtyard lined with cells, halls and shrines, and often set beside a stupa that held sacred relics. From the Kushan period onward, the lands of present-day Afghanistan were dotted with them, and their sculpture and wall paintings are among the country’s great artistic legacies.
At Hadda, near Jalalabad, archaeologists found a cluster of monasteries ringed by hundreds of stupas decorated in stucco. At Mes Aynak in Logar, south of Kabul, at least seven multi-storey monastery complexes grew up beside ancient copper workings between about the 3rd and 8th centuries CE. In the Bamiyan valley, chapels and sanctuaries were cut into the cliffs around the giant Buddha niches, while the monks probably lived in a monastery at the foot of the cliff that Xuanzang mentions. Near Aybak in Samangan, Takht-e Rostam, from about the 3rd–4th century CE, is a monastery carved entirely out of the bedrock beside a stupa hewn from the neighbouring hill.