2. Sri seated on a Lotus, with two Elephants pouring water over her.
(From a modern sculpture from Indore.)
CHAPTER II.
STAMBHAS OR LÂTS.
It is not clear whether we ought to claim a wooden origin for these, as we can for all the other objects of Buddhist architecture. Certain it is, however, that the lâts of Asoka, with shafts averaging twelve diameters in height, are much more like wooden posts than any forms derived from stone architecture, and in an age when wooden pillars were certainly employed to support the roofs of halls, it is much more likely that the same material should be employed for the purposes to which these stambhas were applied, than the more intractable material of stone.
The oldest authentic examples of these lâts that we are acquainted with, are those which King Asoka set up in the twenty-seventh year after his consecration—the thirty-first of his reign—to bear inscriptions conveying to his subjects the leading doctrines of the new faith he had adopted. The rock-cut edicts of the same king are dated in his twelfth year, and convey in a less condensed form the same information—Buddhism without Buddha—but inculcating respect to parents and priests, kindness and charity to all men, and, above all, tenderness towards animals.[49]
The best known of these lâts is that set up by Feroze Shah, in his Kotila at Delhi, without, however, his being in the least aware of the original purpose for which it was erected, or the contents of the inscription. A fragment of a second was recently found lying on
