The article focuses on the vocabulary used to refer to early Buddhist establishments in India. Buddhist monks, in both texts and inscriptions, refer to their monasteries or cloisters as vihāras or ārāmas. The term vihāra in Classical Sanskrit meant walking or touring for pleasure, while ārāma would have referred to as a place of pleasure or garden. According to professor Daud Ali, in the first serious discussion of gardens in early India, the most prominent architectural structures in gardens were the mandapa nikuñja, which could take the form of a clump of trees which formed an enclosure.
