On the monumental pillars, known as lāts, set up by this emperor, besides the Persepolitan form of capital, we find the honeysuckle with the bead and reel and the cable ornaments that were employed in earlier Persian carvings; and though not continued later in India proper, these prevailed in use in Afghanistan for some centuries after the Christian era. This seems to indicate that these forms first came from Persia along with the ideas that led to the change of wooden architecture for that of stone.

The stūpas were structures that may be regarded as conventional architectural substitutes for funeral tumuli, and were constructed to enshrine relics of Buddha or of his more notable disciples, or even to mark the scene of notable events in the tradition of his life. How relic-worship originated and came to hold so large a place in the Buddhist cult we can hardly conjecture: the sentiment could not have arisen for the first time on the death of Gotama Buddha, when, we are told, eight stūpas were built over his corporeal relics, a ninth over the vessel with which they were divided, and a tenth over the charcoal of the funeral pile.

These stūpas, known as dāgabas in Ceylon, and chaityas in Nepal, are called topes in the ordinary patois of upper India. They consisted of a low circular drum supporting a hemispherical dome of less diameter and leaving a ramp or berme round it of a few feet in width. Round the drum was an open passage for circumambulation, and the whole was enclosed by a massive stone railing with lofty gates on four sides. These railings and gateways are their principal architectural features; the rails are constructed as closely as possible after wooden patterns, and examples are still found at Sānchi and Buddh-Gayā[1]; what remained of the Bharahat stūpa was transferred to the Calcutta Museum, and portions of the Amrāvatī rail are now in the British and Madras museums. The uprights and cross bars of the rails were in many cases covered with elaborate carvings of scenes of the most varied kinds, and are illustrative of manners and customs as well as of the art of sculpture.

Plate I.

Photo, F. Frith & Co.
Fig. 8.—SĀNCHI NORTH GATEWAY.Fig. 9.—THE KUTB MINAR NEAR DELHI.
Photo lent by the India Office.
Fig. 10.—SHER SHAH’S MOSQUE AT DELHI.

Plate II.

Fig. 11.—GREAT TEMPLE AT HALEBID.
Fig. 12.—ROOF OF DOME OF VIMALA’S TEMPLE ON MOUNT ABU.
(From Photographs kindly lent by the India Office.)

The great stūpa at Sānchi in Bhopal is now the most entire of the class, as it still retains the gateways—styled torans—which must have been a feature of all stūpas, though perhaps mostly in wood (see Plate I. fig. 8). The whole of the superstructure of the Sānchi examples is essentially wooden in character, and we are astonished that it should have stood “for twenty centuries nearly uninjured.” These torans reappear to this day in Japan as tori-i and in China as p’ai-lus or p’ai-fangs. The whole of the surfaces, inside and out, are carved with elaborate sculptures of much interest. A cast of the eastern toran from Sānchi is to be seen in the museums at S. Kensington, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris and Berlin. On the southern one, an inscription appears to indicate that it was erected about 150 B.C.

Fig. 1.—Cave at Kārli near Bombay. Section and plan.

The earlier cave temples are of about the same age as the stūpas; some of those in Behar bear inscriptions of Asoka and of his successor in the 2nd century B.C. And the earlier cave façades in western India indicate the identity of style and construction in the patterns from which both must have been copied. These Buddhist rock excavations are of two types: the chaitya or chapel caves, with vaulted roofs of considerable height, the earliest with wooden fronts and later with a screen wall left in the rock, but in both forms with a large horse-shoe shaped window over the entrance. The interior usually consisted of a nave, separated from the side aisles by pillars, and containing a chaitya or small stūpa at the inner and circular end. The façades of these chaitya chapels were covered with sculpture—some of them very richly; and to protect them from the weather a screen was contrived and cut in the rock in front of the façade, with large windows in the upper half for the entrance of light. This mode of lighting by a great arch over the entrance has attracted considerable attention, as being admirably adapted for its purpose. As Fergusson remarked, “nothing invented before or since is lighted so perfectly, and the disposition of the parts or interior for an assembly of the faithful ... is what the Christians nearly reached in after-times but never quite equalled.”