Though there was a community kitchen and dining establishment, many of the resident monks (probably sramanas: lay-students) preferred to cook their meals individually inside their cells.

Discoveries made during explorations and excavations suggests that this establishment may probably have some provision for accommodating poorer lay students (sramanas) from neighbouring settlements with cheaper arrangements for cooking their own food with materials brought from home, an age-old practice still in vogue in certain parts of rural Bengal .

In the middle of each wing, the monastery verandah is provided with a shallow projection to serve as the base for a flight of steps leading down to the brick-paved courtyard, the arrangement in the front side being larger and more elaborate.

Objects recovered in and around them strongly indicate that these were primarily intended for keeping votive images, oil lamps and reading and writing materials.

It is an exceedingly interesting piece of architecture resembling in ground plan a Greek cross, 51.8m long with chapels built in the projecting arms.

Its basement walls are embellished with a string course of delightfully sculptured terracotta plaques set within parallel bands of ornamental bricks.

This shrine bearing a striking resemblance with that of Paharpur represents a fully developed and finished example of the 7th- to 8th-century Buddhist temple architecture of Bengal.

Mainamati supplied prototypes of cruciform shrines not only for Paharpur and Vikramashila in eastern India but also for the subsequent Buddhist architectural development in Burma, Indonesia and Indochina.

In these structural changes may lie the primary reason for discontinuing the earlier Buddhist tradition of the delightful terracotta decorations in the early Muslim architecture of Bengal, though in a somewhat different form.