It may not be possible, in the present state of our knowledge, to explain exactly how this influence was exercised, and we must, consequently, rest content with the fact that as Buddhism did so influence the religion of the West in those early ages, the same agency may equally have acted upon the architectural or sepulchral forms of the same class in our population.
To explain this it is necessary to revert for a moment to a proposition I have often had occasion to advance, and have not yet seen refuted—that Buddhism is the religion of a Turanian race, using that word, as used by its inventors, in the broadest possible sense. The Persians say Iran and Turan, and Iran and Aniran, terms equivalent to our Aryan and non-Aryan; and Buddhism is not and never was, but exceptionally, the religion of the Aryan race, and is not now professed by any Aryan people in any quarter of the globe. It is essentially the faith of a quiescent, contemplative race, with no distinct idea of a god external to this world, or of a future state other than through transmigrations accomplished in this world, leading only to eternal repose hereafter; its followers, however, still believing in the direct influence of the temporarily-released spirits of their forefathers in guiding and controlling the destiny of their offspring, thus leading directly to ancestral worship. In India this primitive faith was refined and elevated into one of the most remarkable and beneficent of human institutions by the Aryan Sakya Muni and his Brahmin coadjutors, and did at one time nearly obliterate the Aryan faith which it superseded. After, however, a thousand years of apparent supremacy, the old faith came again to the surface and Buddhism disappeared from India, but still remains the only faith of all the Turanian nations around it and wherever the Aryan races never seem to have settled.
If any Turanian blood remained in the veins of any of the various races who inhabited Europe in the middle ages, it is easy to understand how the preaching or doctrines of any Buddhist missionaries or Turanian tribes must have struck a responsive chord in their hearts, and how easily they would have adopted any new fashion these Easterns may have taught. As we have had occasion to point out above, the dolmen-builders of Europe certainly were not Aryan. Nor, if we may trust M. Bertrand and the best French antiquaries, were they Celts; but that an old pre-Celtic people did exist in those parts of France in which the dolmens are generally found appears to me indisputable. Though the more active and progressive Celts had commenced their obliteration of this undemonstrative people at the time when written history first began in their country, there is no reason to suppose that their blood or their race was entirely exterminated till a very recent period, and it may still have been numerically the prevalent ingredient in the population between the fourth and the tenth centuries of our era.
Of course, it is not intended to assert or even to suggest that the Western nations first adopted from the East the practice of using stone to accentuate and adorn their sepulchral monuments. The whole evidence of the preceding pages contradicts such an assumption. But what they do seem to have borrowed is the use or abuse of holed stones, and the arrangement of external dolmens on the summit of tumuli combined with two or three circles of rude stones. These I fancy to have been among the latest of the forms which rude-stone architecture adopted, and may very well have been introduced in post-Constantinian times; and when we become more familiar with the peculiarities of these monuments, both in the East and the West, there may be other forms which we may recognize as modern and interchangeable, while many others, such as the great chambered tumuli and the tall solitary menhirs, seem as original and as peculiar to the West.
Having now made the tour of the Old World, it will be convenient to try to resume, in as few words as possible, the principal results we have arrived at from the preceding investigation.
First, with regard to their age. It seems that the uncivilized, ancestral-worshipping races of Europe first borrowed from the Romans—or, if any one likes, from the Phœnicians or Greeks of Marseilles—the idea of using stone to accentuate and adorn the monuments of their dead. In like manner, it certainly was from the Bactrian Greeks that the Indians first learned the use of stone as a building material. How early the Eastern nations adopted it in its rude form we do not know. In its polished form it was used as early as the middle of the third century B.C., but we have no authentic instance of the rude form till at least a century or two after Christ; but, once introduced, its use continued to the present day. Its history in the West seems somewhat different. The great chambered tumuli at Gavr Innis, and others in France, as well as those at Lough Crew, in Ireland, seem to belong to a time before the Romans occupied the states of Western Europe; but no stone monument of this class has yet made out its claim to an antiquity of more than two centuries, if so much, before the Christian era. Some of those in Greece about Mycenæ, and those at Saturnia, may be earlier, but they are as yet undescribed scientifically, and we cannot tell. From shortly before the Christian era, till the countries in which they are found became entirely and essentially Christian, the use of these monuments seems to have been continual, whenever a dolmen-building race—or, in other words, a race with any taint of Turanian blood in their veins—continued to prevail. This, in remote corners of the world, seems to have extended in France and Britain down to the eighth or ninth century. In Scandinavia it lasted down to the eleventh or twelfth, and sporadically, in out-of-the-way and neglected districts, as late both in France and Great Britain.
These results do not, of course, touch the age of the earthen tumuli or barrows, for the determination of whose age no scale has yet been invented; still less do they approach the question of the antiquity of the Cave men or the palæolithic stone implements, the age of which we must, for the present at least, leave wrapped in the mists of the long prehistoric past.
Their uses seem more easily determined than their dates; with only a few rare and easily-recognizable exceptions, all seem originally to have been intended for sepulchral or cenotaphic purposes. Either, like the great chambered tumuli and the dolmens, they were actually the burying-places of the illustrious dead; or, like the greater circles and the alignments, they marked battle-fields, and were erected in honour of those slain there, whether their bodies were actually laid within their precincts or not; or, like the rude stone pillars of the Khassia hills, they were offerings to the spirits of the departed.
With the fewest possible exceptions[593] and these of the most insignificant character, their connexion with the relics of the dead can be proved from all having become places for ancestral worship and having under various forms been used for commemorating or honouring departed spirits. No single instance has been authenticated of either circles or dolmens in any other form, except perhaps single stones, having ever been used for the worship of Odin, or of the gods called Mercury, Mars, Venus, or the other gods of the Druids, still less is there any trace of the worship of the sun or moon or any of the heavenly host; nor, I am sorry to think, can the serpent lay claim to any temple of this class. Honour to the dead and propitiation of the spirits of the departed seem to have been the two leading ideas that both in the East and West gave rise to the erection of these hitherto mysterious structures which are found numerously scattered over the face of the Old World.
Footnotes
[531] 'History of Architecture,' by the Author, ii. p. 459, fig. 968.
[532] 'Caves of Baja and Bedsa in Western Ghâts;' unpublished.
[533] 'Tree and Serpent Worship,' quotation from Hiouen Thsang, p. 135, and plates, passim.
[534] 'History of Architecture,' by the Author, ii. p. 649.
[535] 'Architecture of Ahmedabad.' 120 photographs, with text. Murray, 1868.
[536] Yule, 'Mission to the Court of Ava,' p. 43, pl. ix.
[537] 'J. A. S. B.,' vii. p. 930.
[538] 'J. R. A. S.,' new series, iv. p. 88.
[539] 'Tods Rajastan,' i. p. 224.
[540] The information regarding the Khonds is principally derived from a work entitled 'Memorials of Service,' by Major Charteris-Macpherson (Murray, 1865), and his papers in 'J. R. A. S.' xiii. pp. 216 et seq. I quote by preference from the latter, as the more generally accessible.
[541] For several years past I have officially and privately been exerting all the influence I possess to try and get two bassi relievi that exist in these caves cast or photographed, or at least carefully copied in some form, but hitherto in vain. In 1869 the Government sent an expedition to Cuttack with draftsmen, photographers, &c., but they knew so little what was wanted that they wasted their time and money in casting minarets and sculptures of no beauty or interest, and, having earned their pay, returned re infecta. I am not without hopes that something may be done during the present cold season. When representations are obtained, they will throw more light on the history of the Yavanas or Greeks in that remote part of India than anything else that could be done, and would clear up some points in the history of Indian art that are now very obscure.
[542] Sterling's account of Cuttack, 'Asiatic Researches,' xv. p. 306.
[543] Loc. s. c. p. 315.
[544] Tacitus' 'Germania,' 9.
[545] H. Walters, 1828, 'Asiatic Researches,' xvii. pp. 499 et seq. Colonel Yule, 'Proceedings, Soc. of Antiq. Scot.' i. p. 92. Hooker's 'Himalayan Journals,' ii. p. 276. Major Godwin Austen, 'Journal Anthropological Institute,' vol. i. Part II.
[546] Schlagintweit, in 'Ausland,' No. 23, 1870, pp. 530 et seq.
[547] 'Asiatic Researches,' xvii. p. 502.
[548] Major Godwin Austen, 'Journal Anthrop. Institute,' i. p. 127.
[549] 'Journal Anthrop. Inst.' i. p. 126.
[550] 'Mémoires sur les Contrées occidentales,' iii. p. 76.
[551] Colonel Forbes Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland,' vol. ii. pls. lviii. lix. lx. They have also been described by Dr. Stevenson, 'J. R. A. S.' v. pp. 192 et seq. It would be extremely interesting, in an ethnographic point of view, if some further information could be obtained regarding these stone rows.
[552] 'Early Races of Scotland,' ii. 459.
[553] 'J. R. A. S.' xiii. p. 268.
[554] I quote from a paper by him, published in the 'Trans. R. Irish Academy,' xxiv. pp. 329 et seq. There is an earlier paper by him in the 'J. B. B. R. A. S.' vol. iii. p. 179, but it is superseded by the later publication.
[555] 'Proceedings, Asiat. Soc. Bengal, 1868,' p. 152.
[556] 'International Prehistoric Congress,' Norwich volume, p. 200.
[557] 'International Prehistoric Congress,' Norwich volume, p. 245.
[558] 'J. R. A. S.' new series, iii. p. 143.
[559] 'International Prehistoric Congress,' Norwich volume, p. 257.
[560] Published on a reduced scale, 'Tree and Serpent Worship,' p. xlvi.
[561] The principal sources of information on the subject are the papers of Sir Walter Elliot and Col. Meadows Taylor, so often referred to above. But I am also indebted to Mr. M. J. Walhouse, M.C.S., for a great amount of valuable information on the subject. His private letters to me are replete with details which if he would only consent to arrange and publish would throw a flood of light on the subject.
[562] Norwich volume, 'International Prehistoric Congress,' pp. 252 et seq. He places the destruction of the Karumbers as early as the seventh century, but the dates are, to say the least, often very doubtful. When, for instance, Hiouen Thsang visited Conjeveran in 640—the Buddhist establishment—they were still flourishing, and no signs apparent of the storm, which did not, I fancy, break out till at least a century after that time. See also 'The Seven Pagodas,' by Capt. Carr, Madras, 1869, p. 127.
[563] Second Report by the Rev. W. Taylor, 'Madras Lit. Jour.' vii. p. 311 et passim.
[564] Caldwell's 'Dravidian Grammar,' pp. 9 et seq. 'The Tribes of the Nilgiri Hills,' by a German missionary (Madras, 1856)—the Rev. F. Metz, who probably knows more of their language than any one now living. Mr. Walhouse's letters are also strong on this point.
[565] See 'Rock-cut Temples,' by the Author, p. 50.
[566] Sir Walter Elliot, 'J. R. A. S.' iv. pp. 7 et seq.; and new series, i. 250.
[567] Sir W. Elliot, 'Journal Ethnological Soc.,' new series, 1869, p. 110.
[568] Lieut. Cole, R.E., has brought home a cast of the upper part of this pillar, which is now at the South Kensington Museum.
[569] 'Journal Asiatic Soc. Bengal,' vii. p. 629.
[570] The crack and bend in the upper part of the pillar are caused by a cannon shot, the dent of which is distinctly visible on the opposite side. I hope it was not fired by the English, but I do not know who else would, or could, have done it.
[571] Hooker's 'Himalayan Journals,' ii. p. 310. Percy's 'Metallurgy: Iron and Steel,' p. 254 et seq. All the original authorities will be found referred to in the last-named work.
[572] Josephus, 'Bell. Jud.,' v. p. 6.
[573] 'Journal Madras Lit. Soc.' xiv. pl. 8.
[574] 'J. A. S. B.' xxxvii. p. 116 et seq.
[575] An elaborate paper by the Rev. Mr. Joyce, in the 'Archæological Journal,' 108, 1870, shows, I think clearly, that these crosses could not be earlier than 470 A.D.—all the crosses he quotes being of the usual Greek form, though possessing one longer limb. Indeed, I do not myself know of any crosses like those at Nirmul earlier than the 10th or 11th century; but, as my knowledge of the subject is not profound, I have allowed the widest possible margin in the text. I cannot prove it, but my impression is, that they belong to the 11th or 12th century.
[576] As it is wholly beside the object of this work I have not attempted to go into the history of the Siganfu Tables, nor the records of the early churches in the East. If the reader cares to know more, he will find the subject fully and clearly discussed in Col. Yule's 'Cathay, and the Way Thither,' published by the Hakluyt Society, 1866. It is the last work on the subject, and contains references to all the earlier ones.
[577] 'J. R. A. S.,' xiii. 164 et seq.
[578] Wilson's 'Ariana Antiqua,' Introduction passim. Cunningham, 'Bhilsa Topes,' &c., passim.
[579] Hiouen Thsang, 'Vie et Voyages,' p. 77.
[580] 'Madras Journal of Lit. and Science,' xiii. pl. 14.
[581] 'Tree and Serpent Worship,' p. 82, woodcut 8.
[582] 'Foe Koué Ki,' p. 335.
[583] 'J.R.A.S.' xii. p. 233. 'J.B.A.S.' vii. p. 261 et seq.
[584] Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall,' iv. p. 392, where the original authorities are found.
[585] Josephus, 'B. J.,' II. viii. p. 9.
[586] "The prestige of such a witness as Buddhaghosa soon dwindles away, and his statements as to kings and councils 800 years before his time are, in truth, worth no more than the stories told of Arthur, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, or the accounts we read in Livy of the early history of Rome"—Chips from a German Workshop, i. p. 198. As a mere linguist, and dependent wholly on books, Max Müller was perfectly justified in making this statement, while his ignorance of everything connected with the archæology or art of India, prevented his perceiving how these wild statements could be verified or controlled. Till he learns that there are other means of investigation than mere words his statements on these subjects are untrustworthy, and, in many cases, absolutely worthless.
[587] Turnour's 'Mahawanso,' 12 et seq. 'J. A. S. B.,' vii. passim.
[588] Huc and Gabet, in their 'Travels in Thibet,' give a most amusing account of their bewilderment on observing there these things:—"La crosse, la mitre, la dalmatique, la chape ou pluvial, que les grands Lamas portent en voyage, ou lorsqu'ils font quelque cérémonie hors du temple; l'office des deux chœurs, la psalmodie, les exorcismes, l'encensoir soutenu par cinque chaines, et pouvant s'ouvrir et se fermer à volonté; les bénédictions données par les Lamas, en étendant la main droite sur la tête des fidèles; le chapelet, le célibat ecclesiastique, les retraites spirituelles, le culte des saints, les jeûnes, les processions, les litanies, l'eau bénite: voilà autant des rapports que les Bouddhistes ont avec nous."—Vol. ii. p. 110.
[589] 'Mahavanso,' p. 26.
[590] Cunningham, 'Bhilsa Topes,' p. 289 et seq.
[591] Clemens, i. 194. Oxford, 1715.
[592] Clemens, i. 132. Translation by Potter, ut sup. p. 504.
[593] The accidental resemblance of the microlithic temples of the Deccan mentioned above ([p. 467]) can hardly be quoted as an exception. They are said to be dedicated to Vetal, but it is not clear that the stones of the circle do not represent dead, as they certainly do absent persons, and the sacrifice, after all, is offered up to their departed spirits; it being a form of the present day we do not know how much its spirit may not be changed from the ancient rite which it was originally intended to typify.