TEMPLE AT KANTONUGGUR, DINAJEPORE.

HISTORY
OF
INDIAN AND EASTERN ARCHITECTURE;

By JAMES FERGUSSON, D.C.L., F.R.S, M.R.A.S.,
FELLOW OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF BRITISH ARCHITECTS,
MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF DILETTANTI,
ETC. ETC. ETC.

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ROCK-CUT TEMPLES OF INDIA. 18 Plates in Tinted Lithography, folio: with an 8vo. volume of Text, Plans, &c. 2l. 7s. 6d. London, Weale, 1845.

PICTURESQUE ILLUSTRATIONS OF ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE IN HINDOSTAN. 24 Plates in Coloured Lithography, with Plans, Woodcuts, and explanatory Text, &c. 4l. 4s. London, Hogarth, 1847.

AN HISTORICAL INQUIRY INTO THE TRUE PRINCIPLES OF BEAUTY IN ART, more especially with reference to Architecture. Royal 8vo. 31s. 6d. London, Longmans, 1849.

THE PALACES OF NINEVEH AND PERSEPOLIS RESTORED: An Essay on Ancient Assyrian and Persian Architecture. 8vo. 16s. London, Murray, 1851.

THE ILLUSTRATED HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURE. Being a Concise and Popular Account of the Different Styles prevailing in all Ages and all Countries. With 850 Illustrations. 8vo. 26s. London, Murray, 1859.

RUDE STONE MONUMENTS IN ALL COUNTRIES, THEIR AGE AND USES. With 234 Illustrations. 8vo. London, Murray, 1872.

TREE AND SERPENT WORSHIP, OR ILLUSTRATIONS OF MYTHOLOGY AND ART IN INDIA, in the 1st and 4th Centuries after Christ, 100 Plates and 31 Woodcuts. 4to. London, India Office; and W. H. Allen & Co. 2nd Edition, 1873.

THE MAUSOLEUM AT HALICARNASSUS RESTORED, IN CONFORMITY WITH THE REMAINS RECENTLY DISCOVERED. Plates 4to. 7s. 6d. London, Murray, 1862.

AN ESSAY ON THE ANCIENT TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM; with restored Plans of the Temple, and with Plans, Sections, and Details of the Church built by Constantine the Great over the Holy Sepulchre, now known as the Mosque of Omar. 16s. Weale, 1847.

THE HOLY SEPULCHRE AND THE TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM. Being the Substance of Two Lectures delivered in the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, on the 21st February, 1862, and 3rd March, 1865. Woodcuts. 8vo. 7s. 6d. London, Murray, 1865.

AN ESSAY ON A PROPOSED NEW SYSTEM OF FORTIFICATION, with Hints for its Application to our National Defences. 12s. 6d. London, Weale, 1849.

THE PERIL OF PORTSMOUTH. FRENCH FLEETS AND ENGLISH FORTS. Plan. 8vo. 3s. London, Murray, 1853.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE BRITISH MUSEUM, NATIONAL GALLERY, and NATIONAL RECORD OFFICE; with Suggestions for their Improvement. 8vo. London, Weale, 1859.

LONDON. WM. CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

PREFACE.

During the nine years that have elapsed since I last wrote on this subject,[1] very considerable progress has been made in the elucidation of many of the problems that still perplex the student of the History of Indian Architecture. The publication of the five volumes of General Cunningham’s ‘Archæological Reports’ has thrown new light on many obscure points, but generally from an archæological rather than from an architectural point of view; and Mr. Burgess’s researches among the western caves and the structural temples of the Bombay presidency have added greatly not only to our stores of information, but to the precision of our knowledge regarding them.

For the purpose of such a work as this, however, photography has probably done more than anything that has been written. There are now very few buildings in India—of any importance at least—which have not been photographed with more or less completeness; and for purposes of comparison such collections of photographs as are now available are simply invaluable. For detecting similarities, or distinguishing differences between specimens situated at distances from one another, photographs are almost equal to actual personal inspection, and, when sufficiently numerous, afford a picture of Indian art of the utmost importance to anyone attempting to describe it.

These new aids, added to our previous stock of knowledge, are probably sufficient to justify us in treating the architecture of India Proper in the quasi-exhaustive manner in which it is attempted, in the first 600 pages of this work. Its description might, of course, be easily extended even beyond these limits, but without plans and more accurate architectural details than we at present possess, any such additions would practically contribute very little that was valuable to the information the work already contains.

The case is different when we turn to Further India. Instead of only 150 pages and 50 illustrations, both these figures ought at least to be doubled to bring that branch of the subject up to the same stage of completeness as that describing the architecture of India Proper. For this, however, the materials do not at present exist. Of Japan we know almost nothing except from photographs, without plans, dimensions, or dates; and, except as regards Pekin and the Treaty Ports, we know almost as little of China. We know a great deal about one or two buildings in Cambodia and Java, but our information regarding all the rest is so fragmentary and incomplete, that it is hardly available for the purposes of a general history, and the same may be said of Burmah and Siam. Ten years hence this deficiency may be supplied, and it may then be possible to bring the whole into harmony. At present a slight sketch indicating the relative position of each, and their relation to the styles of India Proper, is all that can well be accomplished.

Although appearing as the third volume of the second edition of the ‘General History of Architecture,’ the present may be considered as an independent and original work. In the last edition the Indian chapters extended only to about 300 pages, with 200 illustrations,[2] and though most of the woodcuts reappear in the present volume, more than half the original text has been cancelled, and consequently at least 600 pages of the present work are original matter, and 200 illustrations—and these by far the most important—have been added. These, with the new chronological and topographical details, present the subject to the English reader in a more compact and complete form than has been attempted in any work on Indian architecture hitherto published. It does not, as I feel only too keenly, contain all the information that could be desired, but I am afraid it contains nearly all that the materials at present available will admit of being utilised, in a general history of the style.

When I published my first work on Indian architecture thirty years ago, I was reproached for making dogmatic assertions, and propounding theories which I did not even attempt to sustain. The defect was, I am afraid, inevitable. My conclusions were based upon the examination of the actual buildings throughout the three Presidencies of India and in China during ten years’ residence in the East, and to have placed before the world the multitudinous details which were the ground of my generalisations, would have required an additional amount of description and engravings which was not warranted by the interest felt in the subject at that time. The numerous engravings in the present volume, the extended letterpress, and the references to works of later labourers in the wide domain of Indian architecture, will greatly diminish, but cannot entirely remove, the old objection. No man can direct his mind for forty years to the earnest investigation of any department of knowledge, and not become acquainted with a host of particulars, and acquire a species of insight which neither time, nor space, nor perhaps the resources of language will permit him to reproduce in their fulness. I possess, to give a single instance, more than 3000 photographs of Indian buildings, with which constant use has made me as familiar as with any other object that is perpetually before my eyes, and to recapitulate all the information they convey to long-continued scrutiny, would be an endless, if not indeed an impossible undertaking. The necessities of the case demand that broad results should often be given when the evidence for the statements must be merely indicated or greatly abridged, and if the conclusions sometimes go beyond the appended proofs, I can only ask my readers to believe that the assertions are not speculative fancies, but deductions from facts. My endeavour from the first has been to present a distinct view of the general principles which have governed the historical development of Indian architecture, and my hope is that those who pursue the subject beyond the pages of the present work, will find that the principles I have enunciated will reduce to order the multifarious details, and that the details in turn will confirm the principles. Though the vast amount of fresh knowledge which has gone on accumulating since I commenced my investigations has enabled me to correct, modify, and enlarge my views, yet the classification I adopted, and the historical sequences I pointed out thirty years since, have in their essential outlines been confirmed, and will continue, I trust, to stand good. Many subsidiary questions remain unsettled, but my impression is, that not a few of the discordant opinions that may be observed, arise principally from the different courses which inquirers have pursued in their investigations. Some men of great eminence and learning, more conversant with books than buildings, have naturally drawn their knowledge and inferences from written authorities, none of which are contemporaneous with the events they relate, and all of which have been avowedly altered and falsified in later times. My authorities, on the contrary, have been mainly the imperishable records in the rocks, or on sculptures and carvings, which necessarily represented at the time the faith and feelings of those who executed them, and which retain their original impress to this day. In such a country as India, the chisels of her sculptors are, so far as I can judge, immeasurably more to be trusted than the pens of her authors. These secondary points, however, may well await the solution which time and further study will doubtless supply. In the meanwhile, I shall have realised a long-cherished dream if I have succeeded in popularising the subject by rendering its principles generally intelligible, and can thus give an impulse to its study, and assist in establishing Indian architecture on a stable basis, so that it may take its true position among the other great styles which have ennobled the arts of mankind.

The publication of this volume completes the history of the ‘Architecture in all Countries, from the earliest times to the present day, in four volumes,’ and there it must at present rest. As originally projected, it was intended to have added a fifth volume on ‘Rude Stone Monuments,’ which is still wanted to make the series quite complete; but, as explained in the preface to my work bearing that title, the subject was not, when it was written, ripe for a historical treatment, and the materials collected were consequently used in an argumentative essay. Since that work was published, in 1872, no serious examination of its arguments has been undertaken by any competent authority, while every new fact that has come to light—especially in India—has served to confirm me more and more in the correctness of the principles I then tried to establish.[3] Unless, however, the matter is taken up seriously, and re-examined by those who, from their position, have the ear of the public in these matters, no such progress will be made as would justify the publication of a second work on the same subject. I consequently see no chance of my ever having an opportunity of taking up the subject again, so as to be able to describe its objects in a more consecutive or more exhaustive manner than was done in the work just alluded to.

Buddha preaching.
(From a fresco painting at Ajunta.)

NOTE.

One of the great difficulties that meets every one attempting to write on Indian subjects at the present day is to know how to spell Indian proper names. The Gilchristian mode of using double vowels, which was fashionable fifty years ago, has now been entirely done away with, as contrary to the spirit of Indian orthography, though it certainly is the mode which enables the ordinary Englishman to pronounce Indian names with the greatest readiness and certainty. On the other hand, an attempt is now being made to form out of the ordinary English alphabet a more extended one, by accents over the vowels, and dots under the consonants, and other devices, so that every letter of the Devanagari or Arabic alphabets shall have an exact equivalent in this one.

In attempting to print Sanscrit or Persian books in Roman characters, such a system is indispensable, but if used for printing Indian names in English books, intended principally for the use of Englishmen, it seems to me to add not only immensely to the repulsiveness of the subject, but to lead to the most ludicrous mistakes. According to this alphabet for instance, ḍ with dot under it represents a consonant we pronounce as r; but as not one educated Englishman in 10,000 is aware of this fact, he reads such words as Kattiwaḍ, Chîtoḍ, and Himaḍpanti as if spelt literally with a d, though they are pronounced Kattiwar, Chittore, and Himarpanti, and are so written in all books hitherto published, and the two first are so spelt in all maps hitherto engraved. A hundred years hence, when Sanscrit and Indian alphabets are taught in all schools in England, it may be otherwise, but in the present state of knowledge on the subject some simpler plan seems more expedient.

In the following pages I have consequently used the Jonesian system, as nearly as may be, as it was used by Prinsep, or the late Professor Wilson, but avoiding as far as possible all accents, except over vowels where they were necessary for the pronunciation. Over such words as Nâga, Râjâ, or Hindû—as in Tree and Serpent worship—I have omitted accents altogether as wholly unnecessary for the pronunciation. An accent, however, seems indispensable over the â in Lât, to prevent it being read as Lath in English, as I have heard done, or over the î in such words as Hullabîd, to prevent its being read as short bid in English.

Names of known places I have in all instances tried to leave as they are usually spelt, and are found on maps. I have, for instance, left Oudeypore, the capital of the Rajput state, spelt as Tod and others always spelt it, but, to prevent the two places being confounded, have taken the liberty of spelling the name of a small unknown village, where there is a temple, Udaipur—though I believe the names are the same. I have tried, in short, to accommodate my spelling as nearly as possible to the present state of knowledge or ignorance of the English public, without much reference to scientific precision, as I feel sure that by this means the nomenclature may become much less repulsive than it too generally must be to the ordinary English student of Indian history and art.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Note.—Those woodcuts in the above list marked with an asterisk are borrowed from ‘L’Inde des Rajahs,’ published by Hachette et Cie, Paris, translated and republished in this country by Messrs. Chapman and Hall.

HISTORY
OF
INDIAN ARCHITECTURE.

INTRODUCTION.

It is in vain, perhaps, to expect that the Literature or the Arts of any other people can be so interesting to even the best educated Europeans as those of their own country. Until it is forced on their attention, few are aware how much education does to concentrate attention within a very narrow field of observation. We become familiar in the nursery with the names of the heroes of Greek and Roman history. In every school their history and their arts are taught, memorials of their greatness meet us at every turn through life, and their thoughts and aspirations become, as it were, part of ourselves. So, too, with the Middle Ages: their religion is our religion; their architecture our architecture, and their history fades so insensibly into our own, that we can draw no line of demarcation that would separate us from them. How different is the state of feeling, when from this familiar home we turn to such a country as India. Its geography is hardly taught in schools, and seldom mastered perfectly; its history is a puzzle; its literature a mythic dream; its arts a quaint perplexity. But, above all, the names of its heroes and great men are so unfamiliar and so unpronounceable, that, except a few of those who go to India, scarcely any ever become so acquainted with them, that they call up any memories which are either pleasing or worth dwelling upon.

Were it not for this, there is probably no country—out of Europe at least—that would so well repay attention as India. None, where all the problems of natural science or of art are presented to us in so distinct and so pleasing a form. Nowhere does nature show herself in such grand and such luxurious features, and nowhere does humanity exist in more varied and more pleasing conditions. Side by side with the intellectual Brahman caste, and the chivalrous Rajput, are found the wild Bhîl and the naked Gond, not antagonistic and warring one against the other, as elsewhere, but living now as they have done for thousands of years, each content with his own lot, and prepared to follow, without repining, in the footsteps of his forefathers.

It cannot, of course, be for one moment contended that India ever reached the intellectual supremacy of Greece, or the moral greatness of Rome; but, though on a lower step of the ladder, her arts are more original and more varied, and her forms of civilisation present an ever-changing variety, such as are nowhere else to be found. What, however, really renders India so interesting as an object of study is that it is now a living entity. Greece and Rome are dead and have passed away, and we are living so completely in the midst of modern Europe, that we cannot get outside to contemplate it as a whole. But India is a complete cosmos in itself; bounded on the north by the Himalayas, on the south by the sea, on the east by impenetrable jungle, and only on the west having one door of communication, across the Indus, open to the other world. Across that stream, nation after nation have poured their myriads into her coveted domain, but no reflex waves ever mixed her people with those beyond her boundaries.

In consequence of all this, every problem of anthropology or ethnography can be studied here more easily than anywhere else; every art has its living representative, and often of the most pleasing form; every science has its illustration, and many on a scale not easily matched elsewhere. But, notwithstanding all this, in nine cases out of ten, India and Indian matters fail to interest, because they are to most people new and unfamiliar. The rudiments have not been mastered when young, and, when grown up, few men have the leisure or the inclination to set to work to learn the forms of a new world, demanding both care and study; and till this is attained, it can hardly be hoped that the arts and the architecture of India will interest a European reader to the same extent as those styles treated of in the previous volumes of this work.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, it may still be possible to present the subject of Indian architecture in such a form as to be interesting, even if not attractive. To do this, however, the narrative form must be followed as far as is compatible with such a subject. All technical and unfamiliar names must be avoided wherever it is possible to do so, and the whole accompanied with a sufficient number of illustrations to enable its forms to be mastered without difficulty. Even if this is attended to, no one volume can tell the whole of so varied and so complex a history. Without preliminary or subsequent study it can hardly be expected that so new and so vast a subject can be grasped; but one volume may contain a complete outline of the whole, and enable any one who wishes for more information to know where to look for it, or how to appreciate it when found.

Whether successful or not, it seems well worth while that an attempt should be made to interest the public in Indian architectural art; first, because the artist and architect will certainly acquire broader and more varied views of their art by its study than they can acquire from any other source. More than this, any one who masters the subject sufficiently to be able to understand their art in its best and highest forms, will rise from the study with a kindlier feeling towards the nations of India, and a higher—certainly a correcter—appreciation of their social status than could be obtained from their literature, or from anything that now exists in their anomalous social and political position.

Notwithstanding all this, many may be inclined to ask, Is it worth while to master all the geographical and historical details necessary to unravel so tangled a web as this, and then try to become so familiar with their ever-varying forms as not only to be able to discriminate between the different styles, but also to follow them through all their ceaseless changes?

My impression is that this question may fairly be answered in the affirmative. No one has a right to say that he understands the history of architecture who leaves out of his view the works of an immense portion of the human race, which has always shown itself so capable of artistic development. But, more than this, architecture in India is still a living art, practised on the principles which caused its wonderful development in Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries; and there, consequently, and there alone, the student of architecture has a chance of seeing the real principles of the art in action. In Europe, at the present day, architecture is practised in a manner so anomalous and abnormal that few, if any, have hitherto been able to shake off the influence of a false system, and to see that the art of ornamental building can be based on principles of common sense; and that, when so practised, the result not only is, but must be, satisfactory. Those who have an opportunity of seeing what perfect buildings the ignorant uneducated natives of India are now producing, will easily understand how success may be achieved, while those who observe what failures the best educated and most talented architects in Europe are constantly perpetrating, may, by a study of Indian models, easily see why this must inevitably be the result. It is only in India that the two systems can now be seen practised side by side—the educated and intellectual European always failing because his principles are wrong, the feeble and uneducated native as inevitably succeeding because his principles are right. The Indian builders think only of what they are doing, and how they can best produce the effect they desire. In the European system it is considered more essential that a building, especially in its details, should be a correct copy of something else, than good in itself or appropriate to its purpose; hence the difference in the result.

In one other respect India affords a singularly favourable field to the student of architecture. In no other country of the same extent are there so many distinct nationalities, each retaining its old faith and its old feelings, and impressing these on its art. There is consequently no country where the outlines of ethnology as applied to art can be so easily perceived, or their application to the elucidation of the various problems so pre-eminently important. The mode in which the art has been practised in Europe for the last three centuries has been very confusing. In India it is clear and intelligible. No one can look at the subject without seeing its importance, and no one can study the art as practised there without recognising what the principles of the science really are.

In addition, however, to these scientific advantages, it will undoubtedly be conceded by those who are familiar with the subject that for certain qualities the Indian buildings are unrivalled. They display an exuberance of fancy, a lavishness of labour, and an elaboration of detail to be found nowhere else. They may contain nothing so sublime as the hall at Karnac, nothing so intellectual as the Parthenon, nor so constructively grand as a mediæval cathedral; but for certain other qualities—not perhaps of the highest kind, yet very important in architectural art—the Indian buildings stand alone. They consequently fill up a great gap in our knowledge of the subject, which without them would remain a void.

History.

One of the greatest difficulties that exist—perhaps the greatest—in exciting an interest in Indian antiquities arises from the fact, that India has no history properly so called, before the Mahomedan invasion in the 13th century. Had India been a great united kingdom, like China, with a long line of dynasties and well-recorded dates attached to them, the task would have been comparatively easy; but nothing of the sort exists or ever existed within her boundaries. On the contrary, so far as our knowledge extends, India has always been occupied by three or four different races of mankind, who have never amalgamated so as to become one people, and each of these races have been again subdivided into numerous tribes or small nationalities nearly, sometimes wholly, independent of each other—and, what is worse than all, not one of them ever kept a chronicle or preserved a series of dates commencing from any well-known era.[4]

The absence of any historical record is the more striking, because India possesses a written literature equal to, if not surpassing in variety and extent, that possessed by any other nation, before the invention, or at least before the adoption and use, of printing. The Vedas themselves, with their Upanishads and Brahmanas, and the commentaries on them, form a literature in themselves of vast extent, and some parts of which are as old, possibly older, than any written works that are now known to exist; and the Puranas, though comparatively modern, make up a body of doctrine mixed with mythology and tradition such as few nations can boast of. Besides this, however, are two great epics, surpassing in extent, if not in merit, those of any ancient nation, and a drama of great beauty, written at periods extending through a long series of years. In addition to those we have treatises on law, on grammar, on astronomy, on metaphysics and mathematics, on almost every branch of mental science—a literature extending in fact to some 10,000 or 11,000 works, but in all this not one book that can be called historical. No man in India, so far as is known, ever thought of recording the events of his own life or of repeating the previous experience of others, and it was only at some time subsequent to the Christian Era that they ever thought of establishing eras from which to date deeds or events.

All this is the more curious because in Ceylon we have, in the ‘Mahawanso,’ and other books of a like nature, a consecutive history of that island, with dates which may be depended upon within very narrow limits of error, for periods extending from B.C. 250 to the present time. At the other extremity of India, we have also in the Raja Tarangini of Kashmir, a work which Professor Wilson characterised as “the only Sanscrit composition yet discovered to which the title of History can with any propriety be applied.”[5] As we at present, however, possess it, it hardly helps us to any historical data earlier than the Christian Era, and even after that its dates for some centuries are by no means fixed and certain.

In India Proper, however, we have no such guides as even these, but for written history are almost wholly dependent on the Puranas. They do furnish us with one list of kings’ names, with the length of their reigns, so apparently truthful that they may, within narrow limits, be depended upon. They are only, however, of one range of dynasties—probably, however, the paramount one—and extend only from the accession of Chandragupta—the Sandrocottus of the Greeks—B.C. 325, to the decline of the Andra dynasty, about A.D. 400 or 408. It seems probable we may find sufficient confirmation of these lists as far back as the Anjana era, B.C. 691, so as to include the period marked by the life and labours of Sakya Muni—the present Buddha—in our chronology, with tolerable certainty. All the chronology before that period is purposely and avowedly falsified by the introduction of the system of Yugs, in order to carry back the origin of the Brahmanical system into the regions of the most fabulous antiquity. From the 5th century onwards, when the Puranas began to be put into their present form, in consequence of the revival of the Brahmanical religion, instead of recording contemporary events, they purposely confused them so as to maintain their prophetic character, and prevent the detection of the falsehood of their claim to an antiquity equal to that of the Vedas. For Indian history after the 5th century we are consequently left mainly to inscriptions on monuments or on copper-plates, to coins, and to the works of foreigners for the necessary information with which the natives of the country itself have neglected to supply us. These probably will be found eventually to be at least sufficient for the purposes of chronology. Already such progress has been made in the decipherment of inscriptions and the arrangement of coins, that all the dynasties may be arranged consecutively, and even the date of the reigns of almost all the kings in the north of India have been already approximately ascertained. In the south of India so much has not been done, but this is more because there have been fewer labourers in the field than from want of materials. There are literally thousands of inscriptions in the south which have not been copied, and of the few that have been collected only a very small number have been translated; but they are such as to give us hope that, when the requisite amount of labour is bestowed upon them, we shall be able to fix the chronology of the kings of the south with a degree of certainty sufficient for all ordinary purposes.[6]

It is a far more difficult task to ascertain whether we shall ever recover the History of India before the time of the advent of Buddha, or before the Anjana epoch, B.C. 691. Here we certainly will find no coins or inscriptions to guide us, and no buildings to illustrate the arts, or to mark the position of cities, while all ethnographic traces have become so blurred, if not obliterated, that they serve us little as guides through the labyrinth. Yet on the other hand there is so large a mass of literature—such as it is—bearing on the subject, that we cannot but hope that, when a sufficient amount of learning is brought to bear upon it, the leading features of the history of even that period may be recovered. In order, however, to render it available, it will not require industry so much as a severe spirit of criticism to winnow the few grains of useful truth out of the mass of worthless chaff this literature contains. But it does not seem too much to expect even this, from the severely critical spirit of the age. Meanwhile, the main facts of the case seem to be nearly as follows, in so far as it is necessary to state them, in order to make what follows intelligible.

Aryans.

At some very remote period in the world’s history—for reasons stated in the Appendix I believe it to have been at about the epoch called by the Hindus the Kali Yug, or B.C. 3101—the Aryans, a Sanscrit-speaking people, entered India across the Upper Indus, coming from Central Asia. For a long time they remained settled in the Punjab, or on the banks of the Sarasvati, then a more important stream than now, the main body, however, still remaining to the westward of the Indus. If, however, we may trust our chronology, we find them settled 2000 years before the Christian Era, in Ayodhya, and then in the plenitude of their power. It was about that time apparently that the event took place which formed the groundwork of the far more modern poem known as the ‘Ramayana.’ The pure Aryans, still uncontaminated by admixture with the blood of the natives, then seem to have attained the height of their prosperity in India, and to have carried their victorious arms, it may be, as far south as Ceylon. There is, however, no reason to suppose that they at that time formed any permanent settlements in the Deccan, but it was at all events opened to their missionaries, and by slow degrees imbibed that amount of Brahmanism which eventually pervaded the whole of the south. Seven or eight hundred years after that time, or it may be about or before B.C. 1200, took place those events which form the theme of the more ancient epic known as the ‘Mahabharata,’ which opens up an entirely new view of Indian social life. If the heroes of that poem were Aryans at all, they were of a much less pure type than those who composed the songs of the Vedas, or are depicted in the verses of the ‘Ramayana.’ Their polyandry, their drinking bouts, their gambling tastes, and love of fighting, mark them as a very different race from the peaceful shepherd immigrants of the earlier age, and point much more distinctly towards a Tartar, trans-Himalayan origin, than to the cradle of the Aryan stock in Central Asia. As if to mark the difference of which they themselves felt the existence, they distinguished themselves, by name, as belonging to a Lunar race, distinct from, and generally antagonistic to, the Solar race, which was the proud distinction of the purer and earlier Aryan settlers in India.

Five or six hundred years after this, or about B.C. 700, we again find a totally different state of affairs in India. The Aryans no longer exist as a separate nationality, and neither the Solar nor the Lunar race are the rulers of the earth. The Brahmans have become a priestly caste, and share the power with the Kshatriyas, a race of far less purity of descent. The Vaisyas, as merchants and husbandmen, have become a power, and even the Sudras are acknowledged as a part of the body politic; and, though not mentioned in the Scriptures, the Nagas, or Snake people, had become a most influential part of the population. They are first mentioned in the ‘Mahabharata,’ where they play a most important part in causing the death of Parikshit, which led to the great sacrifice for the destruction of the Nagas by Janemajaya, which practically closes the history of the time. Destroyed, however, they were not, as it was under a Naga dynasty that ascended the throne of Magadha, in 691, that Buddha was born, B.C. 623, and the Nagas were the people whose conversion placed Buddhism on a secure basis in India, and led to its ultimate adoption by Asoka (B.C. 250) as the religion of the State.[7]

Although Buddhism was first taught by a prince of the Solar race, and consequently of purely Aryan blood, and though its first disciples were Brahmans, it had as little affinity with the religion of the Vedas as Christianity had with the Pentateuch, and its fate was the same. The one religion was taught by one of Jewish extraction to the Jews and for the Jews; but it was ultimately rejected by them, and adopted by the Gentiles, who had no affinity of race or religion with the inhabitants of Judæa. Though meant originally, no doubt, for Aryans, the Buddhist religion was ultimately rejected by the Brahmans, who were consequently utterly eclipsed and superseded by it for nearly a thousand years; and we hear little or nothing of them and their religion till they reappeared at the court of the great Vicramaditya (490-530), when their religion began to assume that strange shape which it now still retains in India. In its new form it is as unlike the pure religion of the Vedas as it is possible to conceive one religion being to another; unlike that, also, of the older portions of the ‘Mahabharata’; but a confused mess of local superstitions and imported myths, covering up and hiding the Vedantic and Buddhist doctrines, which may sometimes be detected as underlying it. Whatever it be, however, it cannot be the religion of an Aryan, or even of a purely Turanian people, because it was invented by and for as mixed a population as probably were ever gathered together into one country—a people whose feelings and superstitions it only too truly represents.

Dravidians.

Although, therefore, as was hinted above, there might be no great difficulty in recovering all the main incidents and leading features of the history of the Aryans, from their first entry into India till they were entirely absorbed into the mass of the population some time before the Christian Era, there could be no greater mistake than to suppose that their history would fully represent the ancient history of the country. The Dravidians are a people who, in historical times, seem to have been probably as numerous as the pure Aryans, and at the present day form one-fifth of the whole population of India. As Turanians, which they seem certainly to be, they belong, it is true, to a lower intellectual status than the Aryans, but they have preserved their nationality pure and unmixed, and, such as they were at the dawn of history, so they seem to be now.

Their settlement in India extends to such remote pre-historic times, that we cannot feel even sure that we should regard them as immigrants, or, at least, as either conquerors or colonists on a large scale, but rather as aboriginal in the sense in which that term is usually understood. Generally it is assumed that they entered India across the Lower Indus, leaving the cognate Brahui in Belochistan as a mark of the road by which they came, and, as the affinities of their language seem to be with the Ugrians and northern Turanian tongues, this view seems probable.[8] But they have certainly left no trace of their migrations anywhere between the Indus and the Nerbudda, and all the facts of their history, so far as they are known, would seem to lead to an opposite conclusion. The hypothesis that would represent what we know of their history most correctly would place their original seat in the extreme south, somewhere probably not far from Madura or Tanjore, and thence spreading fan-like towards the north, till they met the Aryans on the Vindhya Mountains. The question, again, is not of much importance for our present purposes, as they do not seem to have reached that degree of civilisation at any period anterior to the Christian Era which would enable them to practise any of the arts of civilised life with success, so as to bring them within the scope of a work devoted to the history of art.

It may be that at some future period, when we know more of the ancient arts of these Dravidians than we now do, and have become familiar with the remains of the Accadians or early Turanian inhabitants of Babylonia, we may detect affinities which may throw some light on this very obscure part of history. At present, however, the indications are much too hazy to be at all relied upon. Geographically, however, one thing seems tolerably clear. If the Dravidians came into India in historical times, it was not from Central Asia that they migrated, but from Babylonia, or some such southern region of the Asiatic continent.

Dasyus.

In addition to these two great distinct and opposite nationalities, there exists in India a third, which, in pre-Buddhist times, was as numerous, perhaps even more so, than either the Aryans or Dravidians, but of whose history we know even less than we do of the two others. Ethnologists have not yet been even able to agree on a name by which to call them. I have suggested Dasyus,[9] a slave people, as that is the name by which the Aryans designated them when they found them there on their first entrance into India, and subjected them to their sway. Whoever they were, they seem to have been a people of a very inferior intellectual capacity to either the Aryans or Dravidians, and it is by no means clear that they could ever of themselves have risen to such a status as either to form a great community capable of governing themselves, and consequently having a history,[10] or whether they must always have remained in the low and barbarous position in which we now find some of their branches. When the Aryans first entered India they seem to have found them occupying the whole valley of the Ganges—the whole country in fact between the Vindhya and the Himalayan Mountains.[11] At present they are only found in anything like purity in the mountain ranges that bound that great plain. There they are known as Bhîls, Coles, Sontals, Nagas, and other mountains tribes. But they certainly form the lowest underlying stratum of the population over the whole of the Gangetic plain.[12] So far as their affinities have been ascertained, they are with the trans-Himalayan population, and it either is that they entered India through the passes of that great mountain range, or it might be more correct to say that the Thibetans are a fragment of a great population that occupied both the northern and southern slope of that great chain of hills at some very remote pre-historic time.

Whoever they were, they were the people who, in remote times, were apparently the worshippers of Trees and Serpents; but what interests us more in them, and makes the inquiry into their history more desirable, is that they were the people who first adopted Buddhism in India, and they, or their congeners, are the only people who, in historic times, as now, adhered, or still adhere to, that form of faith. No purely Aryan people ever were, or ever could be, Buddhist, nor, so far as I know, were any Dravidian community ever converted to that faith. But in Bengal, in Ceylon, in Thibet, Burmah, Siam, and China, wherever a Thibetan people exists, or a people allied to them, there Buddhism flourished and now prevails. But in India the Dravidians resisted it in the south, and a revival of Aryanism abolished it in the north.

Architecturally, there is no difficulty in defining the limits of the Dasyu province: wherever a square tower-like temple exists with a perpendicular base, but a curvilinear outline above, such as that shown in the woodcut on the following page, there we may feel certain of the existence, past or present, of a people of Dasyu extraction, retaining their purity very nearly in the direct ratio to the number of these temples found in the district. Were it not consequently for the difficulty of introducing new names and obtaining acceptance to what is unfamiliar, the proper names for the style prevailing in northern India would be Dasyu style, instead of Indo-Aryan or Dasyu-Aryan which I have felt constrained to adopt. No one can accuse the pure Aryans of introducing this form in India, or of building temples at all, or of worshipping images of Siva or Vishnu, with which these temples are filled, and they consequently have little title to confer their name on the style. The Aryans had, however, become so impure in blood before these temples were erected, and were so mixed up with the Dasyus, and had so influenced their religion and the arts, that it may be better to retain a name which sounds familiar, and does not too sharply prejudge the question. Be this as it may, one thing seems tolerably clear, that the regions occupied by the Aryans in India were conterminous with those of the Dasyus, or, in other words, that the Aryans conquered the whole of the aboriginal or native tribes who occupied the plains of northern India, and ruled over them to such an extent as materially to influence their religion and their arts, and also very materially to modify even their language. So much so, indeed, that after some four or five thousand years of domination we should not be surprised if we have some difficulty in recovering traces of the original population, and could probably not do so, if some fragments of the people had not sought refuge in the hills on the north and south of the great Gangetic plain, and there have remained fossilised, or at least sufficiently permanent for purposes of investigation.

Hindu Temple, Bancorah.

Sisunaga Dynasty, B.C. 691 TO 325.

Leaving these, which must, for the present at least, be considered as practically pre-historic times, we tread on surer ground when we approach the period when Buddha was born, and devoted his life to rescue man from sin and suffering. There seems very little reason for doubting that he was born in the year 623, in the reign of Bimbasara, the fifth king of this dynasty, and died B.C. 543, at the age of eighty years, in the eighth year of Ajattasatru, the eighth king. New sources of information are opening out so rapidly regarding these times, that there seems little doubt we shall before long be able to recover a perfectly authentic account of the political events of that period, and as perfect a picture of the manners and the customs of those days. It is too true, however, that those who wrote the biography of Buddha in subsequent ages so overlaid the simple narrative of his life with fables and absurdities, that it is now difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff; but we have sculptures extending back to within three centuries of his death, at which time we may fairly assume that a purer tradition and correcter version of the Scriptures must have prevailed. From what has recently occurred, we may hope to creep even further back than this, and eventually to find early illustrations which will enable us to exercise so sound a criticism on the books as to enable us to restore the life of Buddha to such an extent, as to place it among the authentic records of the benefactors of mankind.

Immense progress has been made during the last thirty or forty years in investigating the origin of Buddhism, and the propagation of its doctrines in India, and in communicating the knowledge so gained to the public in Europe. Much, however, remains to be done before the story is complete, and divested of all the absurdities which subsequent commentators have heaped upon it; and more must yet be effected before the public can be rendered familiar with what is so essentially novel to them. Still, the leading events in the life of the founder of the religion are simple, and sufficiently well ascertained for all practical purposes.[13]

The founder of this religion was one of the last of a long line of kings, known as the Solar dynasties, who, from a period shortly subsequent to the advent of the Aryans into India, had held paramount sway in Ayodhya—the modern Oude. About the 12th or 13th century B.C. they were superseded by another race of much less purely Aryan blood, known as the Lunar race, who transferred the seat of power to capitals situated in the northern parts of the Doab. In consequence of this, the lineal descendants of the Solar kings were reduced to a petty principality at the foot of the Himalayas, where Sakya Muni was born about 623 B.C. For twenty-nine years he enjoyed the pleasures, and followed the occupations, usual to the men of his rank and position; but at that age, becoming painfully impressed by the misery incident to human existence, he determined to devote the rest of his life to an attempt to alleviate it. For this purpose he forsook his parents and wife, abandoned friends and all the advantages of his position, and, for the following fifty-one years, devoted himself steadily to the task he had set before himself. Years were spent in the meditation and mortification necessary to fit himself for his mission; the rest of his long life was devoted to wandering from city to city, teaching and preaching, and doing everything that gentle means could effect to disseminate the doctrines which he believed were to regenerate the world, and take the sting out of human misery.

He died, or, in the phraseology of his followers, obtained Nirvana—was absorbed into the deity—at Kusinara, in northern Behar, in the 80th year of his age, 543 years[14] B.C.

With the information that is now fast accumulating around the subject, there seems no great difficulty in understanding why the mission of Sakya Muni was so successful as it proved to be. He was born at a time when the purity of the Aryan races in India had become so deteriorated by the constant influx of less pure tribes from the north and west, that their power, and consequently their influence, was fast fading away. At that time, too, it seems that the native races had, from long familiarity with the Aryans, acquired such a degree of civilisation as led them to desire something like equality with their masters, who were probably always in a numerical minority in most parts of the valley of the Ganges. In such a condition of things the preacher was sure of a willing audience who proclaimed the abolition of caste, and taught that all men, of whatever nation or degree, had an equal chance of reaching happiness, and ultimately heaven, by the practice of virtue, and by that only. The subject races—the Turanian Dasyus—hailed him as a deliverer, and it was by them that the religion was adopted and proclaimed, and that of the Aryan Brahmans was for a time obliterated, or at least overshadowed and obscured.

It is by no means clear how far Buddha was successful in converting the multitude to his doctrines during his lifetime. At his death, the first synod was held at Rajagriha, and five hundred monks of a superior order, it is said, were assembled there on that occasion,[15] and if so they must have represented a great multitude. But the accounts of this, and of the second convocation, held 100 years afterwards at Vaisali, on the Gunduck, have not yet had the full light of recent investigation brought to bear upon them. Indeed the whole annals of the Naga dynasty, from the death of Buddha, B.C. 543, to the accession of Chandragupta, 325, are about the least satisfactory of the period. Those of Ceylon were purposely falsified in order to carry back the landing of Vyjya, the first conqueror from Kalinga, to a period coincident with the date of Buddha’s death, while a period apparently of sixty years at least elapsed between the two events. All this may, however, be safely left to future explorers. We have annals and coins,[16] and we may recover inscriptions and sculptures belonging to this period, and, though it is most improbable we shall recover any architectural remains, there are evidently materials existing which, when utilised, may suffice for the purpose.

The kings of this dynasty seem to have been considered as of a low caste, and were not, consequently, in favour either with the Brahman or, at that time, with the Buddhist; and no events which seem to have been thought worthy of being remembered, except the second convocation, are recorded as happening in their reigns, after the death of the great Ascetic—or, at all events, of being recorded in such annals as we possess.

Maurya Dynasty, B.C. 325 TO 188.

The case was widely different with the Maurya dynasty, which was certainly one of the most brilliant, and is fortunately one of the best known, of the ancient dynasties of India. The first king was Chandragupta, the Sandrocottus of the Greeks, to whom Megasthenes was sent as ambassador by Seleucus, the successor of Alexander in the western parts of his Asiatic empire. It is from his narrative—now unfortunately lost—that the Greeks acquired almost all the knowledge they possessed of India at that period. The country was then divided into 120 smaller principalities, but the Maurya residing in Palibothra—the modern Patna—seems to have exercised a paramount sway over the whole. It was not, however, this king, but his grandson, the great Asoka (B.C. 272 to 236), who raised this dynasty to its highest pitch of prosperity and power. Though utterly unknown to the Greeks, we have from native sources a more complete picture of the incidents of his reign than of any ancient sovereign of India. The great event that made him famous in Buddhist history was his conversion to that faith, and the zeal he showed in propagating the doctrines of his new religion. He did, in fact, for Buddhism, exactly what Constantine did for Christianity, and at about the same distance of time from the death of the founder of the faith. From a struggling sect he made it the religion of the State, and established it on the basis on which it lasted supreme for nearly 1000 years. In order to render his subjects familiar with the doctrines of his new faith, he caused a series of edicts embodying them to be engraved on rocks near Peshawur, in Gujerat, in the valley of the Dhoon under the Himalayas, in Cuttack, and in several intermediate places. He held the third and greatest convocation of the faithful in his capital at Patna, and, on its dissolution, sent missionaries to spread the faith in the Yavana country, whose capital was Alexandria, near the present city of Cabul. Others were despatched to Kashmir and Gandhara; one was sent to the Himawanta—the valleys of the Himalaya, and possibly part of Thibet; others were despatched to the Maharatta country, and to three other places in Central and Western India which have not yet been identified with certainty. Two missionaries were sent to the Souverna Bhumi, a place now known as Thatun on the Sitang river, in Pegu, and his own son and daughter were deputed to Ceylon.[17] All those countries, in fact, which might be called foreign, but which were inhabited by races who might in any way be supposed to be allied to the Dasyus of Bengal, were then sought to be converted to the faith. He also formed alliances with Antiochus the Great, Antigonus, and with Ptolemy Philadelphus, and Magas of Cyrene, for the establishment of hospitals and the protection of his co-religionists in their countries. More than all this, he built innumerable topes and monasteries all over the country; and, though none of those now existing can positively be identified as those actually built by him, there seems no reason whatever for doubting that the sculptured rails at Buddh Gaya and Bharhut, the caves at Bharabar in Behar, some of those at Udyagiri in Cuttack, and the oldest of those in the Western Ghâts were all erected or excavated during the existence of this dynasty, if not by him himself. These, with inscriptions and coins, and such histories as exist, make up a mass of materials for a picture of India during this dynasty such as no other can present; and, above all, they offer a complete representation of the religious forms and beliefs of the kings and people, which render any mistake regarding them impossible. It was Buddhism, but without a personal Buddha, and with Tree and Serpent worship cropping up in every unexpected corner.

There is certainly no dynasty in the whole range of ancient Indian history that would better repay the labour of an exhaustive investigation than that of these Maurya kings. Not only were they the first in historical times who, so far as we know, united the whole of India into one great kingdom, but they were practically the first who came in contact with European civilisation and Western politics. More than even this, it is probably owing to the action of the third king of this dynasty that Buddhism, from being the religion of an obscure sect, became, at one time, the faith of a third of the human race, and has influenced the belief and the moral feelings of a greater number of men than any other religion that can be named.

Fortunately, the materials for such a monograph as is required are abundant, and every day is adding to them. It is to this dynasty, and to it only, that must be applied all those passages in classical authors which describe the internal state of India, and they are neither few nor insignificant. Though the Hindus themselves cannot be said to have contributed much history, they have given us, in the ‘Mudra Rakshasa,’[18] a poetical version of the causes of the revolution that placed the Mauryas on the throne. But, putting these aside, their own inscriptions give us dates, and a perfectly authentic contemporary account of the religious faith and feelings of the period; while the numerous bas-reliefs of the rails at Buddh Gaya and Bharhut afford a picture of the manners, customs, and costumes of the day, and a gauge by which we can measure their artistic status and judge how far their art was indigenous, how far influenced by foreign elements. The dates of the kings of this dynasty are also perfectly well known,[19] and the whole framework of their history depends so completely on contemporary native monuments, that there need be no real uncertainty regarding any of the outlines of the picture when once the subject is fairly grasped and thoroughly handled.

It is the firmest standpoint we have from which to judge of Indian civilisation and history, whether looking to the past or to the future, and it is one that gives a very high idea of the position at which the Hindus had arrived before they came practically into contact with the civilisation of the West.

Sunga Dynasty, B.C. 188 TO 76.
Kanwa Dynasty, B.C. 76 TO 31.

History affords us little beyond the dates of the kings’ reigns for the next two dynasties, but there seems no reason to doubt the general correctness with which these are recorded in the Puranas, and by degrees we are collecting inscriptions and finding caves that certainly belong to their time, so that we may hope to breathe life into what has hitherto appeared only a dry list of names. Such inscriptions as bear their names have yet only been discovered on the western caves at Karli, Nassick, and similar places, but there seems no reason for doubting that they reigned also in Magadha, and, if so, over Orissa, so that we may look for further information regarding them on the eastern as well as on the western side of India. These dynasties were not, however, apparently known to the Greeks, and, being Buddhist, are passed over in comparative silence in the Puranas. It is thus only from their monuments that we can hope to recover their history. Up to the present time, those identified as belonging to them are few and far between, but they have not yet been systematically searched for, and till this is done there is no reason to despair of ultimate success.

Andra Dynasty, B.C. 31 TO A.D. 429.

The dynasty that succeeded to these Rois fainéants is—after the Mauryas—the most important of all those about this period of Indian history. To the classical authors they are known as the Andræ, in the Puranas as Andrabrityas, and in the inscriptions as Satakarnis or Satavahanas; but under whatever name, notwithstanding occasional periods of depression, they played a most important part in the history of India, during more than four centuries and a half. Latterly they have been very much overlooked in consequence of their leaving no coins behind them, while it is from numismatic researches, principally, that precision has been given to much of the history of the period. The dynasties in India, however, who practically introduced coinage within her limits, all came across the Indus as strangers bringing with them an art they had learnt from the Bactrians, or those who succeeded them in the north-west. The Andras, being a native dynasty of Central India, had no coinage of importance, and have consequently no place in these numismatic researches; they have, however, left many and most interesting inscriptions in the western caves, and traces of their existence occur in many parts of India.

Architecturally, their history begins with the gateways of the Tope at Sanchi; the southern or oldest of these was almost certainly erected during the reign of the first Satakarni in the first quarter of the 1st century—while Christ was teaching at Jerusalem—and the other three in the course of that century. It ends with the completion of the rail at Amravati, which with almost equal certainty was commenced in the first quarter of the 4th century, and completed about A.D. 450.[20]

Between these two monuments there is no great difficulty in filling up the architectural picture from the caves, at Nassick and Ajunta, and other places in western India, and more materials will no doubt eventually be discovered.

The history of this dynasty is more than usually interesting for our purposes, as it embraces nearly the whole period during which Buddhism reigned almost supreme in India. It became the state religion, it is true, two centuries earlier under Asoka, but there is no reason for believing that the Vedic religion or Brahmanism vanished immediately. During the first four centuries, however, of the Christian Era we have not a trace of a Hindu building or cave, and, so far as any material evidence goes, it seems that Buddhism at the time was the religion of the land. It cannot, of course, be supposed that the Hindu faith was wholly obliterated, but it certainly was dormant, and in abeyance, and, to use a Buddhist expression, the yellow robes shone over the length and breadth of the land.

It was during the reign of these Andras, though not by them, that the fourth convocation was held by Kanishka, in the north of India, and the new doctrine, the Mahayana, introduced by Nagárjuna—a change similar to that made by Gregory the Great when he established the Church, as opposed to the primitive forms of Christianity, at about the same distance of time from the death of the founder of the religion. My impression is, that this convocation was held in the last quarter of the first century of our era, probably 79. Certain at least it is, that it was about that time that Buddhism was first practically introduced into China, Thibet, and Burmah, and apparently by missionaries sent out from this as they were from the third convocation.

It was towards the end of the reign of the Andras that Fa Hian visited India (A.D. 400). As his objects in doing so were entirely of a religious nature, he does not allude to worldly politics, nor give us a king’s name we can identify; but the picture we gather from his narrative is one of peace and prosperity in so far as the country is concerned, and of supremacy for his religion. Heretics are, it is true, mentioned occasionally, but they are few and far between. Buddhism was then certainly the religion of the north, especially in the north-west of India; but even then there were symptoms of a change, in the central provinces and outlying parts of the country.

Guptas, 319 TO 465.
Ballabhis, 465 TO 712 (?).

At the time when Fa Hian was visiting the sacred places in India, the power of the Andra dynasty was passing away. It had culminated with Gautamiputra (312 to 333), and they were fast sinking into a second-class position among Indian princes. The dynasty that superseded them was that of the Guptas, who, at the end of the fourth century of our era, seem to have attained to the position of lords paramount in northern India. They date their inscriptions, which are numerous and interesting, from an era established by the Andra king Gautamiputra, four cycles of 60 years each, or 240 years after the Saka era of A.D. 79, or in 319; but it was not apparently till under the third king, Samudra, about 380, that they really obtained the empire of northern India, which they retained till the death of Skandagupta, about the year 465, or it may be a little later.

It is during their reign that we first perceive in high places the germs of that change which was gradually creeping over the religious system of India. That the Guptas were patrons of Buddhism is evident from the gifts Chandragupta II. made to the tope at Sanchi in the year 400, and recorded on the rail of that Monument, but their other inscriptions, on the lâts at Allahabad and Bhitari, show a decided tendency towards Hinduism, but a class of Hinduism which was still far removed from the wild extravagances of the Puranas. There seems little doubt that the boar at Erun, and the buildings there, belong to this dynasty, and are consequently among the earliest if not the very oldest temples in India, dedicated to the new religion, which was then raising its head in defiance to Buddhism.

From their coins and inscriptions, we may feel certain that the Guptas possessed when in the plenitude of their power the whole of northern India with the province of Gujerat, but how far the boasts of Samudra Gupta on the Allahabad pillar were justified is by no means clear. If that inscription is to be believed, the whole of the southern country as far as Ceylon, together with Assam and Nepal, were subject to their sway. However brilliant it may have been, their power was of short duration. Gujerat and all the western provinces were wrested from them by the Ballabhis, about the year 465, and a new kingdom then founded by a dynasty bearing that name, which lasted till the great catastrophe, which about two and a half centuries afterwards revolutionised India.

Ujjain Dynasty.

Although it was becoming evident in the time of the Guptas that a change was creeping over the religious belief of India, it was not then that the blow was struck which eventually proved fatal, but by a dynasty which succeeded them in Central India. Being Hindus, we know less that is authentic about their history than about the Buddhist dynasties, who lived to inscribe their names on rocks and in caves; but there seems very little doubt that the great Vicramaditya reigned in Malwa from 495 to 530, though the Hindus, in order to connect his name with an era they thought fit to establish 56 years B.C., have done all they can to mystify and obscure the chronology of the period. Notwithstanding this, it seems perfectly clear that about this time there reigned in central India a king who, by his liberality and magnificence, acquired a renown among the Hindus, only second to that obtained by Solomon among the Jews. By his patronage of literature and his encouragement of art, his fame spread over the length and breadth of the land, and to this day his name is quoted as the symbol of all that is great and magnificent in India. What is more to our present purpose, he was an undoubted patron of the Brahmanical religion, a worshipper of Siva and Vishnu, and no tradition associates his name directly or indirectly with anything connected with Buddhism. Unfortunately we have no buildings which can be attributed to him, and no inscriptions. But the main fact of a Brahmanical king reigning and acquiring such influence in Central India at that time is only too significant of the declining position of the Buddhist religion at that period.

His successor, Siladitya, seems to have returned to the old faith, and during his long reign of sixty years to have adhered to the Buddhist doctrines.

In the beginning of the next century, after a short period of anarchy, we find a second Siladitya seated on the throne of Canouge as lord paramount in India, and, during a prosperous reign of thirty-eight to forty years, exercising supreme sway in that country. It was during his reign that the Chinese pilgrim, Hiouen Thsang visited India, and gave a much more full and graphic account of what he saw than his predecessor Fa Hian. Nothing can be more characteristic of the state of religious feeling, and the spirit of toleration then prevailing, than the fête given by this king at Allahabad in the year 643, at which the kings of Ballabhi and Kamarupa (Assam) were present. The king being himself a Buddhist, the first days were devoted to the distribution, among the followers of that religion, of the treasures accumulated during the previous five years, but then came the turn of the Brahmans, who were treated with equal honour and liberality; then followed the fête of the other sects, among whom the Jains appear conspicuous. All were feasted and fêted, and sent away laden with gifts and mementos of the magnificence and liberality of the great king.

Pleasant as this picture is to look upon, it is evident that such a state of affairs could hardly be stable, and it was in vain to expect that peace could long be maintained between a rising and ambitious sect, and one which was fast sinking into decay; apparently beneath the load of an overgrown priesthood. Accordingly we find that ten years after the death of Siladitya troubles supervened as prophesied,[21] and the curtain soon descends on the great drama of the history of northern India, not to be raised again for nearly three centuries. It is true, we can still follow the history of the Ballabhis for some little time longer, and it would be satisfactory if we could fix the date of their destruction with precision, as it was the event which in the Hindu mind is considered the closing act of the drama. If it was destroyed by a foreign enemy, it must have been by the Moslem, either before or during the time Mohammed Kasim, A.H. 712, 713. It was a flourishing city in 640, when visited by Hiouen Thsang, and from that time, till the death of Kasim, the Moslems were in such power on the Indus, and their historians tell us the events of these years in such detail, that no other foreigner could have crossed the river during that period. If it perished by some internal revolution of convulsion, which is more probable, it only shared the fate that overtook all northern India about this period. Strange to say, even the Moslems, then in the plenitude of their power during the Khalifat of Bagdad, retired from their Indian conquests, as if the seething cauldron were too hot for even them to exist within its limits.

The more southern dynasty of the Chalukyas of Kalyan seem to have retained their power down to about 750, and may, up to that time, have exercised a partial sway to the north of the Nerbudda, but after that we lose all sight of them; while, as a closing act in the great drama, the Raja Tarangini represents the King of Kashmir—Lalitaditya—as conquering India from north to south, and subjecting all the five kingdoms, into which it was nominally divided, to his imperious sway.

We need not stop now to inquire whether this was exactly what happened or not. It is sufficient for present purposes to know that about the middle of the 8th century a dark cloud settled over the north of India, and that during the next two centuries she was torn to pieces by internal troubles, which have left nothing but negative evidence of their existence. During that period no event took place of which we have any record; no dynasty rose to sufficient distinction to be quoted even in the lists of the bard; no illustrious name appears whose acts have been recorded; no buildings were erected of which we have a trace;[22] and but few inscriptions engraved. Dark night seems to have settled over the land, and whether we shall ever be able to penetrate into its mysteries seems more than doubtful.

When light again appears in the middle of the 10th century the scene is wonderfully changed. Buddhism had practically disappeared in the north and west at least, though it still lingered on in Bengal, and Jainism had supplanted it in most places; but the mass of the people had become followers of Vishnu or Siva. New dynasties had arisen which, though they try to trace their lineage back to the troublous times when Ballabhi fell, were new to Indian history. Old India had passed away, and the history of modern India was about to open. The old dynasties had become extinct, and the Rajput races were gaily stepping forward to assume their places—too soon, alas! to be engaged in a life or death struggle with the most implacable foe to their race and religion that India has ever known. It was a cruel Nemesis that their victories over the Buddhists should soon have been followed by the fatal siege at Somnath in 1024, and the fight on the banks of the Ghaghar in 1193, which practically laid India at the feet of the Moslem invader, and changed the whole course of her subsequent career. But, as hinted above, with the appearance of the Moslem on the scene, our chronological difficulties cease, and the subject need not therefore be further pursued in this introduction.

IMMIGRATIONS.

From the above brief sketch of ancient Indian history it may be gathered that it is doubtful whether we shall ever be able to clothe with solid flesh the skeleton of history which is all we possess anterior to the advent of Buddha. It is also possible that pious frauds may have so confused the sequence of events between his death and the rise of the Mauryas, that there will be great difficulty in restoring that period to anything like completeness. But for the thousand years that elapsed between “the revenge of Chanakya” and the fall of Ballabhi the materials are ample, and when sufficient industry is applied to their elucidation there is little doubt that the whole may be made clear and intelligible. It does not fall within the scope of this work to attempt such a task; but it is necessary to endeavour to make its outlines clear, as, without this being done, what follows will be utterly unintelligible; while, at the same time, one of the principal objects of this work is to point out how the architecture, which is one important branch of the evidence, may be brought to bear on the subject.

No direct evidence, however, derived only from events that occurred in India itself, would suffice to make the phenomena of her history clear, without taking into account the successive migrations of tribes and peoples who, in all ages, so far as we know, poured across the Indus from the westward to occupy her fertile plains.

As mentioned above, the great master fact that explains almost all we know of the ancient history of India is our knowledge that two or three thousand years before the birth of Christ a Sanscrit-speaking nation migrated from the valleys of the Oxus and Jaxartes. They crossed the Indus in such numbers as to impress their civilisation and their language on the whole of the north of India, and this to such an extent as practically to obliterate, as far as history is concerned, the original inhabitants of the valley of the Ganges, whoever they may have been. At the time when this migration took place the power and civilisation of Central Asia were concentrated on the lower Euphrates, and the Babylonian empire never seems to have extended across the Carmanian desert to the eastward. The road, consequently, between Bactria and India was open, and nations might pass and re-pass between the two countries without fear of interruption from any other people.

If any of the ancient dynasties of Babylonia extended their power towards the East, it was along the coast of Gedrosia, and not in a north-easterly direction. It is, indeed, by no means improbable, as hinted above, that the origin of the Dravidians may be found among the Accadian or in some of the Turanian peoples who occupied southern Babylonia in ancient times, and who may, either by sea or land, have passed to the western shores of India. Till, however, further information is available, this is mere speculation, though probably in the direction in which truth may hereafter be found.

When the seat of power was moved northward to Nineveh, the Assyrians seem to have occupied the country eastward of the Caspian in sufficient force to prevent any further migration. At least, after that time—say B.C. 1000—we have no further trace of any Aryan tribe crossing the Indus going eastward, and it seems mainly to have been a consequence of this cutting off of the supply of fresh blood that the purity of their race in India was so far weakened as to admit of the Buddhist reform taking root, and being adopted to the extent it afterwards attained.

During the period of the Achemænian sway, the Persians certainly occupied the countries about the Oxus in sufficient strength to prevent any movement of the peoples. So essentially indeed had Bactria and Sogdiana become parts of the Persian empire, that Alexander was obliged to turn aside from his direct route to conquer them, as well as the rest of the kingdom of Darius, before advancing on India.

Whether it were founded for that purpose or not, the little Greek kingdom of Bactria was sufficiently powerful, while it lasted, to keep the barbarians in check; but when about the year 127-126 B.C., the Yuechi and other cognate tribes invaded Sogdiana, and finally about 120 B.C. conquered the whole of Bactria,[23] they opened a new chapter in the history of India, the effects of which are felt to the present day.

It is not yet quite clear how soon after the destruction of the Bactrian kingdom these Turanian tribes conquered Cabul, and occupied the country between that city and the Indus. Certain it is, however, that they were firmly seated on the banks of that river before the Christian Era, and under the great king Kanishka had become an Indian power of very considerable importance. The date of this king is, unfortunately, one of those small puzzles that still remain to be solved. Generally, it is supposed he reigned till about twenty to forty years after Christ.[24] Evidence, however, has lately been brought to light, which seems to prove that he was the founder of the Saka era, A.D. 79, and that his reign must be placed in the last quarter of the first century of our era, instead of in the earlier half.[25]

Be this as it may, it seems quite certain that the power of these Turuska kings spread over the whole Punjab, and extended as far at least as Muttra on the Jumna, in the first century of the Christian Era.

At the same time another horde, known to us only from the coins and inscriptions in which they call themselves Sahs or Sah kings, crossed the Indus lower down, and occupied the whole of the province of Gujerat. It is not quite clear whether the first of them, Nahapana, was only the Viceroy of one of these northern kings—probably of Kanishka himself—though he and his successors afterwards became independent, and founded a kingdom of their own. They seem to date their coins and inscriptions from the Saka era, A.D. 79, and the series extends from that date to A.D. 349, or at latest to 371.[26] It thus happens that though Gautamiputra, the Andra king (312-333), boasts of having humbled them,[27] they were only in fact finally disposed of by the rise of the Guptas.

No other foreign race, so far as we know, seems to have crossed the Lower Indus into India. But the whole external history of northern India, from the time of Kanishka to that of Ahmed Shah Durani (1761) is a narrative of a continuous succession of tribes of Scythian origin, pouring across the Upper Indus into India, each more Turanian than the one that preceded it, till the whole culminated in the Mogul conquest of India, in the 15th century, by a people as distinct in blood from the Aryans as any that exist.

Of the older races, it seems probable that the Yavanas must be distinguished from the Turanians. It will hardly now be contended that they were pure Greeks, though their name may be merely a mispronunciation of Ionian. The term seems to have been applied by Indian authors to any foreign race coming from the westward who did not belong to one of the acknowledged kingdoms known to them. As such it would apply to any western adventurers, who during the existence of the Bactrian kingdom sought to establish settlements in any part of India, and would also apply to the expatriated Bactrians themselves when driven from their homes by the Yuechi, 120 or 130 years B.C. It is only in this sense that we can explain their presence in Orissa before and about the Christian Era, but in the west the term may have been more loosely applied. The Cambojas seem to have been a people inhabiting the country between Candahar and Cabul, who, when the tide was setting eastward, joined the crowd, and sought settlements in the more fertile countries within the Indus.

The Sakas were well known to classical authors as the Sacæ, or Scythians. They pressed on with the rest, and became apparently most formidable during the first four centuries of the Christian Era. It was apparently their defeat by the great Vicramaditya in the battle at Korûr, on the banks of the Indus, A.D. 524 or 544, that raised the popularity of that monarch to its highest pitch, and induced the Hindus at a subsequent age to institute the era known by his name 600 years before his time, and another called by his other name, Sri Harsha, 1000 years before the date of the battle of Korûr.[28]

Another important horde were the Ephthalites, or White Huns, who came into India apparently in the 4th century, and one of whose kings, if we may trust Cosmas Indicopleustes, was the head of a powerful state in northern India, about the year 535. They, too, seem to have been conquered about the same time by the Hindus, and, as both the Sakas and Hunas were undoubtedly Buddhists, it may have been their destruction that first weakened the cause of that religion, and which led to its ultimate defeat a little more than a century afterwards.

During the dark ages, 750 to 950, we do not know of any horde passing the Indus. The Mahomedans were probably too strong on the frontier to admit of its being done, and after that age they—and they only—conducted the various invasions which completely changed the face and character of northern India. For seven centuries they were continued, with only occasional interruptions, and at last resulted in placing the Mahomedan power supreme, practically, over the whole of India, but only to fall to pieces like a house of cards, before the touch of Western civilisation. All this, however, is written, and written so distinctly, in so many books, that it need not be recapitulated here.

Southern India.

If the records of the ancient history of northern India are unsatisfactory and untrustworthy, those of the southern part of the peninsula are at least ten times more so. The Dravidians have no ancient literature like that of the Vedas. They have no traditions which point to any seat of their race out of India, or of their having migrated from any country with whose inhabitants they can claim any kindred. So far as they know, they are indigenous and aboriginal. The utmost extent to which even their traditions extend is to claim for their leading race of kings—the Pandyas—a descent from Arjuna, one of the heroes of the ‘Mahabharata.’ He, it is said, when on his travels, married a princess of the land, and she gave birth to the eponymous hero of their race, and hence their name. It is true, indeed, that they produce long lists of kings, which they pretend stretch back till the times of the Pandus. These were examined by the late Professor Wilson in 1836, and he conjectured that they might extend back to the 5th or 6th century before our era.[29] But all that has since come to light has tended to show that even this may be an over-estimate of their antiquity. If, however, as Dr. Kern believes, the Choda, Pada, and Keralaputra of the second edict of Asoka do really represent the Cholas, Pandyas, Cheras, of modern times, this triarchy existed in the third century B.C.; but there are difficulties in the way of this identification which have not yet been removed. In fact, all we really do know is that, in classical times, there was a Regio Pandionis in the country afterwards known as the Pandyan kingdom of Madura, and it has been conjectured that the king who sent an embassy to Augustus in 27 B.C.[30] was not a Porus, which would indicate a northern race, but this very king of the south. Be this, however, as it may, we do know, by the frequent mention of this country by classical authors, that it was at least sufficiently civilised in the early centuries of our era to carry on a considerable amount of commerce with the western nations, and there is consequently no improbability that at least one powerful dynasty may then have been established in the south. If so, that dynasty was certainly the Pandyan. The Chola and the Chera became important states only at a much later date.

When we turn to their literature we find nothing to encourage any hope that we may penetrate further back into their history than we have hitherto been able to do. Dr. Caldwell, the best and latest authority on the subject, ascribes the oldest work in the Tamil, or any southern language, to the 8th or 9th century of our era,[31] and that even then can hardly be called native, as it undoubtedly belongs to the Jains, who are as certainly a northern sect. According to the same authority, it was superseded by a Vaishnava literature about the 12th or 13th century, and that again made way for one of Saiva tendency about the latter date. There is no trace of any Buddhist literature in the south, and nothing, consequently, that would enable us to connect the history of the south with the tolerably well-ascertained chronology of Ceylon or Northern India, nor am I aware of the existence of any ancient Buddhist monuments in the south which would help us in this difficulty.[32]

Not having passed through Bactria, or having lived in contact with any people making or using coins, the Dravidians have none of their own, and consequently that source of information is not available. Whatever hoards of ancient coins have been found in the Madras Presidency have been of purely Roman origin, brought there for the purpose of trade, and buried to protect them from spoliation.

The inscriptions, which are literally innumerable all over the Presidency, are the one source from which we can hope that new light may be thrown on the history of the country, but none of those hitherto brought to light go further back than the 5th or 6th century, and it is not clear that earlier ones may be found.[33] It is, at all events, the most hopeful field that lies open to future explorers in these dark domains. There is nothing, however, that would lead us to expect to find any Tamil or native inscription in the country extending so far back as the age of Constantine. Those on the raths at Mahavellipore, or the caves at Badami, which may be as old as the age of Justinian, are in Sanscrit, and consequently look more like an evidence of the northern races pushing southward than of the southern races extending themselves northward, or being sufficiently advanced in civilisation to erect for themselves the monuments on which these inscriptions are found.

From a study of the architecture of the south we arrive at precisely the same conclusions as to the antiquity of Dravidian civilisation that Dr. Caldwell arrived at from a study of their literature. The only important Buddhist monument yet discovered in the Presidency is that at Amravati, on the Kistnah,[34] but that is avowedly a foreign intrusion. It was a colony or settlement formed by the northern Buddhists at or near their port of departure for Java and their eastern settlements. The rock-cut temples at Mahavellipore and Badami seem to be the works of northern Hindus advancing southward in the 5th or 6th century, and engraving the evidence of their religion on the imperishable rock. So far as is yet known, no indigenous native temple has been brought to light, built by any native king, or with inscriptions in any southern tongue, whose date can be carried further back than the 8th century. From that time forward their building activity was enormous. The style culminated in the 16th and 17th centuries, to perish in the 18th, under the influence of a foreign and unsympathetic invader. It is, however, by no means impossible that future investigation may enable us to fill up a portion at least of the gap that exists between the 5th and the 8th century. There may be buildings yet undescribed which are older than any we now know. But if they do carry us back to the 5th century, which is more than can reasonably be expected, they are still seven or eight centuries behind what we know for certainty to have existed in the north. There we have buildings and caves certainly, extending back to B.C. 250, and it seems by no means impossible that with sculptures, coins, and inscriptions, and written documents, we may some day be able to bridge over the gulf that exists between the death of Buddha and the accession of the Mauryas. In other words, the materials for history in the North of India carry us back with the same relative degree of certainty for more than a thousand years beyond what those found in the south enable us to trace of her history or her arts.

When the history of the south does acquire something like consistency it takes the form of a triarchy of small states. The eldest and most important, that of Mádura—so called after Muttra on the Jumna—was also the most civilised, and continued longest as a united and independent kingdom.

The Chola rose into power on the banks of the Cauvery, and to the northward of it, about the year 1000, though no doubt they existed as a small state about Conjeveram for some centuries before that time. The third, the Chera, were located in the southern Mysore country, and probably extending to the coast as early as the 4th or 5th century, and gradually worked their way northward, and became so powerful that there is reason for believing that during the dark ages of the north (750 to 950) their power extended to the Nerbudda, and it may be to them that we owe the Kylas and other excavations at Ellora, erected in the southern style about that time. They were, however, superseded, first by the Cholas, about A.D. 1000, and finally eclipsed by the Hoisala Bellalas, a century or so afterwards. These last became the paramount power in the south, till their capital—Hullabîd—was taken, and their dynasty destroyed by the Mahomedan, in the year 1310.

With the appearance of the Mahomedans on the scene the difficulties of Indian chronology disappear in the south, as well as in the north. From that time forward the history of India is found in such works as those written by Ferishta or Abul Fazl, and has been abstracted and condensed in numerous works in almost every European language. There are still, it must be confessed, slight discrepancies and difficulties about the sequence of some events in the history of the native principalities. These, however, are not of such importance as at all to affect, much less to invalidate, any reasoning that may be put forward regarding the history or affinities of any buildings, and this is the class of evidence which principally concerns what is written in the following pages.

Sculptures.

In order to render the subject treated of in the following pages quite complete, it ought, no doubt, to be preceded by an introduction describing first the sculpture and then the mythology of the Hindus in so far as they are at present known to us. There are in fact few works connected with this subject more wanted at the present day than a good treatise on these subjects. When Major Moor published the ‘Hindu Pantheon’ in 1810, the subject was comparatively new, and the materials did not exist in this country for a full and satisfactory illustration of it in all its branches. When, in 1832, Coleman published his ‘Mythology of the Hindus,’ he was enabled from the more recent researches of Colebroke and Wilson, to improve the text considerably, but his illustrations are very inferior to those of his predecessor. Moor chose his from such bronzes or marbles as existed in our museums. Coleman’s were generally taken from modern drawings, or the tawdry plaster images made for the Durga puja of Bengali Babus. By the aid of photography any one now attempting the task would be able to select perfectly authentic examples from Hindu temples of the best age. If this were done judiciously, and the examples carefully engraved, it would not only afford a more satisfactory illustration of the mythology of the Hindus than has yet been given to the public, but it might also be made a history of the art of sculpture in India, in all the ages in which it is known to us. It is doubtful, however, whether such a work could be successfully carried through in this country at the present day. The photographs that exist of the various deities have generally been taken representing them only as they appear as ornaments of the temples, without special reference to their mythological character. They are sufficient to show what the sculptor intended, but not so detailed as to allow all their emblems or characteristics being distinctly perceived. To be satisfactory as illustrations of the mythology, it is indispensable that these points should all be made clear. At the same time it is to be feared that there is hardly any one in this country so familiar with all the details of emblems and symbols as to be able to give the exact meaning of all that is represented. It would require the assistance of some Pandit brought up in the faith, and who is familiar with the significance of all the emblems, to convey to others the true meaning of these innumerable carvings. In India it could easily be accomplished, and it is consequently hoped it may before long be attempted there.

From its very nature, it is evident that sculpture can hardly ever be so important as architecture as an illustration of the progress of the arts, or the affinities of nations. Tied down to the reproduction of the immutable human figure, sculpture hardly admits of the same variety, or the same development, as such an art as architecture, whose business it is to administer to all the varied wants of mankind and to express the multifarious aspirations of the human mind. Yet sculpture has a history, and one that can at times convey its meaning with considerable distinctness. No one, for instance, can take up such a book as that of Cicognara,[35] and follow the gradual development of the art as he describes it, from the first rude carvings of the Byzantine school, till it returned in the present day to the mechanical perfection of the old Greek art, though without its ennobling spirit, and not feel that he has before him a fairly distinct illustration of the progress of the human mind during that period. Sculpture in India may fairly claim to rank, in power of expression, with mediæval sculpture in Europe, and to tell its tale of rise and decay with equal distinctness; but it is also interesting as having that curious Indian peculiarity of being written in decay. The story that Cicognara tells is one of steady forward progress towards higher aims and better execution. The Indian story is that of backward decline, from the sculptures of the Bharhut and Amravati topes, to the illustrations of Coleman’s ‘Hindu Mythology.’

When Hindu sculpture first dawns upon us in the rails at Buddh Gaya, and Bharhut, B.C. 200 to 250, it is thoroughly original, absolutely without a trace of foreign influence, but quite capable of expressing its ideas, and of telling its story with a distinctness that never was surpassed, at least in India. Some animals, such as elephants, deer, and monkeys, are better represented there than in any sculptures known in any part of the world; so, too, are some trees, and the architectural details are cut with an elegance and precision which are very admirable. The human figures, too, though very different from our standard of beauty and grace, are truthful to nature, and, where grouped together, combine to express the action intended with singular felicity. For an honest purpose-like pre-Raphaelite kind of art, there is probably nothing much better to be found elsewhere.

The art certainly had declined when the gateways at Sanchi were executed in the first century of the Christian Era. They may then have gained a little in breadth of treatment, but it had certainly lost much in delicacy and precision. Its downward progress was then, however, arrested, apparently by the rise in the extreme north-west of India of a school of sculpture strongly impregnated with the traditions of classical art. It is not yet clear whether this arose from a school of art implanted in that land by the Bactrian Greeks, or whether it was maintained by direct intercourse with Rome and Byzantium during the early centuries of the Christian Era. Probably both causes acted simultaneously, and one day we may be able to discriminate what is due to each. For the present it is sufficient to know that a quasi-classical school of sculpture did exist in the Punjab, and to the west of the Indus during the first five centuries after Christ, and it can hardly have flourished there so long, without its presence being felt in India.

Its effects were certainly apparent at Amravati in the 4th and 5th centuries, where a school of sculpture was developed, partaking of the characteristics of both those of Central India and of the west. Though it may, in some respects, be inferior to either of the parent styles, the degree of perfection reached by the art of sculpture at Amravati may probably be considered as the culminating point attained by that art in India.

When we meet it again in the early Hindu temples, and later Buddhist caves, it has lost much of its higher æsthetic and phonetic qualities, and frequently resorts to such expedients as giving dignity to the principal personages by making them double the size of less important characters, and of distinguishing gods from men by giving them more heads and arms than mortal man can use or understand.

All this is developed, it must be confessed, with considerable vigour and richness of effect in the temples of Orissa and the Mysore, down to the 13th or 14th century. After that, in the north it was checked by the presence of the Moslems; but, in the south, some of the most remarkable groups and statues—and they are very remarkable—were executed after this time, and continued to be executed, in considerable perfection down to the middle of the last century.

As we shall see in the sequel, the art of architecture continues to be practised with considerable success in parts of India remote from European influence; so much so, that it requires a practised eye to discriminate between what is new and what is old. But the moment any figures are introduced, especially if in action, the illusion vanishes. No mistake is then possible, for the veriest novice can see how painfully low the art of sculpture has fallen. Were it not for this, some of the modern temples in Gujerat and Central India are worthy to rank with those of past centuries; but their paintings and their sculptured decorations excite only feelings of dismay, and lead one to despair of true art being ever again revived in the East.

To those who are familiar with the principles on which these arts are practised, the cause of this difference is obvious enough. Architecture being a technic art, its forms may be handed down traditionally, and its principles practised almost mechanically. The higher phonetic arts, however, of sculpture and painting admit of no such mechanical treatment. They require individual excellence, and a higher class of intellectual power of expression, to ensure their successful development. Architecture, may, consequently, linger on amidst much political decay; but, like literature, the phonetic arts can only be successfully cultivated where a higher moral and intellectual standard prevails than, it is feared, is at present to be found in India.

Mythology.

Whenever any one will seriously undertake to write the history of sculpture in India, he will find the materials abundant and the sequence by no means difficult to follow; but, with regard to mythology, the case is different. It cannot, however, be said that the materials are not abundant for this branch of the inquiry also; but they are of a much less tangible or satisfactory nature, and have become so entangled, that it is extremely difficult to obtain any clear ideas regarding them; and it is to be feared they must remain so, until those who investigate the subject will condescend to study the architecture and the sculpture of the country as well as its books. The latter contain a good deal, but they do not contain all the information available on the subject, and they require to be steadied and confirmed by what is built or carved, which alone can give precision and substance to what is written.

Much of the confusion of ideas that prevails on this subject no doubt arises from the exaggerated importance it has of late years been the fashion to ascribe to the Vedas, as explaining everything connected with the mythology of the Hindus. It would, indeed, be impossible to over-estimate the value of these writings from a philological or ethnological point of view. Their discovery and elaboration have revolutionised our ideas as to the migrations of races in the remote ages of antiquity, and establish the affiliation of the Aryan races on a basis that seems absolutely unassailable; but it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the Aryans are a race of strangers in India, distinct from the Indian people themselves. They may, as hinted above, have come into India some three thousand years before Christ, and may have retained their purity of blood and faith for two thousand years; but with the beginning of the political Kali Yug—or, to speak more correctly, at the time of the events detailed in the ‘Mahabharata,’ say 1200 years B.C.—they had lost much of both; while every successive wave of immigration that has crossed the Indus during the last three thousand years has impaired the purity of their race. From this cause, and from their admixture with the aborigines, it may probably be with confidence asserted that there is not now five per cent.—perhaps not one—of pure Aryan blood in the present population of India, nor, consequently, does the religion of the Vedas constitute one-twentieth part of the present religion of the people.

Though this may be absolutely so, it must not be overlooked that there are few things more remarkable, as bearing on this subject, than the extraordinary intellectual superiority of the Aryans over the Dasyus, or whatever we may call the people they found in India when they entered it. This superiority was sufficient to enable them to subdue the country, though they were probably infinitely inferior in numbers to the conquered people, and to retain them in subjection through long ages of time. Even now, when their purity of blood has become so diluted that they are almost lost among the people, their intellect, as embalmed in their writings, has left its impress on every corner of the land, and is still appealed to as a revelation of the will of God to man.

With the Vedas, however, we have very little to do in the present work. The worship they foreshadow is of a class too purely intellectual to require the assistance of the stonemason and the carver to give it expression. The worship of the Aryans was addressed to the sun and moon. The firmament and all its hosts; the rain-bearing cloud; the sun-ushering dawn; all that was beautiful in the heavens above or beneficent on earth, was sung by them in hymns of elevated praise, and addressed in terms of awe or endearment as fear or hope prevailed in the bosom of the worshipper.[36] Had this gone on for some time longer than it did, the objects worshipped by the Aryans in India might have become gods, like those of Greece and Rome, endowed with all the feelings and all the failings of humanity. In India it was otherwise; the deities were dethroned, but never were degraded. There is no trace in Vedic times, so far as at present known, of Indra or Varuna, of Agni or Ushas, being represented in wood or stone, or of their requiring houses or temples to shelter them. It is true indeed that the terms of endearment in which they are addressed are frequently such as mortals use in speaking of each other; but how otherwise can man express his feeling of love or fear, or address his supplication to the being whose assistance he implores?

The great beauty of the Veda is, that it stops short before the powers of nature are dwarfed into human forms, and when every man stood independently by himself and sought through the intervention of all that was great or glorious on the earth, or in the skies, to approach the great spirit that is beyond and above all created things.

Had the Aryans ever been a numerical majority in India, and consequently able to preserve their blood and caste in tolerable purity, the religion of India never could have sunk so low as it did, though it might have fallen below the standard of the Veda. What really destroyed it was, that each succeeding immigration of less pure Aryan or Turanian races rendered their numerical majority relatively less and less, while their inevitable influence so educated the subject races as to render their moral majority even less important. These processes went on steadily and uninterruptedly till, in the time of Buddha, the native religions rose fairly to an equality with that of the Aryans, and afterwards for a while eclipsed it. The Vedas were only ultimately saved from absolute annihilation in India, by being embedded in the Vaishnava and Saiva superstitions, where their inanimate forms may still be recognised, but painfully degraded from their primitive elevation.

When we turn from the Vedas, and try to investigate the origin of those religions that first opposed and finally absorbed the Vedas in their abominations, we find our means of information painfully scanty and unsatisfactory. As will appear in the sequel, all that was written in India that is worth reading was written by the Aryans; all that was built was built by the Turanians, who wrote practically nothing. But the known buildings extend back only to the 3rd century B.C., while the books are ten centuries earlier, or possibly even more than that, while, as might be expected, it is only accidentally and in the most contemptuous terms that the proud Aryans even allude to the abject Dasyus or their religion. What, therefore, we practically know of them is little more than inferences drawn from results, and from what we now see passing in India.

Notwithstanding the admitted imperfection of materials, it seems to be becoming every day more and more evident, that we have in the north of India one great group of native or at least of Turanian religions, which we know in their latest developments as the Buddhist, Jaina, and Yaishnava religions. The first named we only know as it was taught by Sakya Muni before his death in 543 B.C., but no one I presume supposes that he was the first to invent that form of faith, or that it was not based on some preceding forms. The Buddhists themselves, according to the shortest calculation, admit of four preceding Buddhas—according to the more usual accounts, of twenty-four. A place is assigned to each of these, where he was born, and when he died, the father and mother’s name is recorded, and the name, too, of the Bodhi-tree under whose shade he attained Buddhahood. The dates assigned to each of these are childishly fabulous, but there seems no reason for doubting that they may have been real personages, and their dates extend back to a very remote antiquity.[37]

The Jains, in like manner, claim the existence of twenty-four Tirthankars, including Mahavira the last. Their places of birth and death are equally recorded, all are in northern India, and though little else is known of them, they too may have existed. The series ends with Mahavira, who was the contemporary—some say the preceptor—of Sakya Muni.

The Vaishnava series is shorter, consisting of only nine Avatars, but it too, closes at the same time, Buddha himself being the ninth and last. Its fifth Avatur takes us back to Rama, who, if our chronology is correct, may have lived B.C. 2000; the fourth,—Narasinha, or man lion—points to the time the Aryans entered India. The three first deal with creation and events anterior to man’s appearance on earth. In this respect the Vaishnava list differs from the other two. They only record the existence of men who attained greatness by the practice of virtue, and immortality by teaching the ways of God to man. The Vaishnavas brought God to earth, to mix and interfere in mundane affairs in a manner that neither the Aryan nor the Buddhist ever dreamt of, and so degraded the purer religion of India into the monstrous system of idolatry that now prevails in that country.

No attempt, so far as I know, has been made to explain the origin of the Saiva religion, or even to ascertain whether it was a purely local superstition, or whether it was imported from abroad. The earliest authentic written allusion to it seems to be that of the Indian ambassador to Bardasanes (A.D. 218, 222), who described a cave in the north of India which contained an image of a god, half-man, half-woman.[38] This is beyond doubt the Ardhanari form of Siva, so familiar afterwards at Elephanta and in every part of India. The earliest engraved representations of this god seem to be those on the coins of Kadphises (B.C. 80 to 100[39]), where the figure with the trident and the Bull certainly prefigure the principal personage in this religion. Curiously enough, however, he or she is always accompanied by the Buddhist trisul emblem, as if the king, or his subjects at least, simultaneously professed both religions. Besides all this, it seems now tolerably well ascertained, that the practice of endowing gods with an infinity of limbs took an earlier, certainly a greater development in Thibet and the trans-Himalayan countries than in India, and that the wildest Tantric forms of Durga are more common and more developed in Nepal and Thibet than they are even in India Proper. If this is so, it seems pretty clear, as the evidence now stands, that Saivism is a northern superstition introduced into India by the Yuechi or some of the northern hordes who migrated into India, either immediately before the Christian Era, or in the early centuries succeeding it.

It does not seem at first to have made much progress in the valley of the Ganges, where the ground was preoccupied by the Vaishnava group, but to have been generally adopted in Rajputana, especially among the Jats, who were almost certainly the descendants of the White Huns or Ephthalites, and it seems also to have been early carried south by the Brahmans, when they undertook to instruct the Dravidians in the religion of the Puranas. That of the Vedas never seems to have been known in the south, and it was not till after the Vedas had been superseded by the new system, that the Brahmanical religion was introduced among the southern people. It is also, it is to be feared, only too true that no attempt has yet been made to ascertain what the religion of the Dravidians was before the northern Brahmans induced them to adopt either the Jaina or the Vaishnava or Saiva forms of faith. It is possible that among the Pandu Kolis, and other forms of ‘Rude Stone Monuments’ that are found everywhere in the south, we may find the fossil remains of the old Dravidian faith before they adopted that of the Hindus. These monuments, however, have not been examined with anything like the care requisite for the solution of a problem like this, and till it is done we must rest content with our ignorance.[40]

In the north we have been somewhat more fortunate, and enough is now known to make it clear that, so soon as the inquirers can consent to put aside personal jealousies, and apply themselves earnestly to the task, we may know enough to make the general outline at least tolerably clear. When I first published my work on ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ seven years ago, no one suspected, at least no one had hinted in type, that such a form of religion existed in Bengal. Since that time, however, so much has been written on the subject, and proof on proof has accumulated with such rapidity, that few will now be bold enough to deny that Trees were worshipped in India in the earliest times, and that a Naga people did exist, especially in the north-west, who had a strange veneration for snakes. It may be too bold a generalisation to assert, at present, that no people became Buddhists who had not previously been serpent worshippers, but it certainly is nearer the truth than at first sight appears. It is, at all events, quite certain that underlying Buddhism we everywhere find evidence of a stratum of Tree and Serpent Worship. Sometimes it may be repressed and obscured, but at others it crops up again, and, to a certain extent, the worship of the Tree and the Serpent, at some times and in certain places, almost supersedes that of the founder of the religion himself.

The five, or seven, or one thousand-headed Naga is everywhere present in the temples of the Jains, and pervades the whole religion of the Vaishnavas. In the great act of creation the Naga performs the principal part in the churning of the ocean, and in almost every representation of Vishnu he appears either as supporting and watching over him, or as performing some subsidiary part in the scene. It is, in fact, the Naga that binds together and gives unity to this great group of religions, and it is the presence of the Tree and Serpent worship underlying Buddhism, Jainism, and Vishnuism that seems to prove almost incontestably that there existed a people in the north of India, whether we call them Dasyus, Nishadhas, or by any other name, who were Tree and Serpent worshippers, before they adopted any of the Hindu forms of faith. Nothing can be more antagonistic to the thoughts and feelings of any Aryan race than such forms of worship, and nothing more completely ante-Vedic than its rites. It seems also to have no connection with Saivism.[41] Nor is there any trace of it found among the Dravidians. There appears, in fact, no solution of the riddle possible, but to assume that it was an aboriginal superstition in the north of India, and it was the conversion of the people to whom it belonged that gave rise to that triarchy of religions that have succeeded each other in the north during the last two thousand years.

This solution of the difficulty has the further advantage that it steps in at once clearly to explain what philology is only dimly guessing at, though its whole tendency now seems in the same direction. If this view of the mythology be correct, it seems certain that there existed in the north of India, before the arrival of the Aryans, a people whose affinities were all with the Thibetans, Burmese, Siamese, and other trans-Himalayan populations, and who certainly were not Dravidians, though they may have been intimately connected with one division at least of the inhabitants of Ceylon.

Both the pre-Aryan races of India belonged, of course, to the Turanian group; but my present impression is, as hinted above, that the Dravidians belong to that branch of the great primordial family of mankind that was developed in Mesopotamia and the countries to the westward of the Caspian. The Dasyus, on the contrary, have all their affinities with those to the eastward of that sea, and the two might consequently be called the Western and the Eastern, or the Scythian and Mongolian Turanians. Such a distinction would certainly represent our present knowledge of the subject better than considering the whole as one family, which is too often the case at the present day.

These, however, are speculations which hardly admit of proof in the present state of our knowledge, and would consequently be quite out of place here, were it not that some such theory seems indispensable to explain the phenomena of the architectural history of India. That of the north is so essentially different from that of the south that they cannot possibly belong to the same people. Neither of them certainly are Aryan; and unless we admit that the two divisions of the country were occupied by people essentially different in blood, though still belonging to the building races of mankind, we cannot possibly understand how they always practised, and to the present employ, styles so essentially different. Until these various ethnographical and mythological problems are understood and appreciated, the styles of architecture in India seem a chaos without purpose or meaning. Once, however, they are grasped and applied, their history assumes a dignity and importance far greater than is due to any merely æsthetic merits they may possess. Even that, however, is in many respects remarkable, and, when combined with the scientific value of the styles, seem to render them as worthy of study as those of any other people with whose arts we are acquainted.

Statistics.

It would add very much to the clearness of what follows if it were possible to compile any statistical tables which would represent with anything like precision the mode in which the people of India are distributed, either as regards their religious beliefs or their ethnographical relations. The late census of 1871-72 has afforded a mass of new material for this purpose, but the information is distributed through five folio volumes, in such a manner as to make it extremely difficult to abstract what is wanted so as to render it intelligible to the general reader. Even, however, if this were done, the result would hardly, for several reasons, be satisfactory. In the first place, the census is a first attempt, and the difficulty of collecting and arranging such a mass of new materials was a task of the extremest difficulty. The fault of any shortcomings, however, lay more with the enumerated than with the enumerators. Few natives know anything of ethnography, or can give a distinct answer with regard to their race or descent; and even with regard to religion their notions are equally hazy. Take for instance the table, page 93 of the Bombay Report. The compilers there divide the Hindus of that Presidency into three classes:—

The mixed class they proceed to define as “all who simply worship some god or goddess, without knowing anything of theology”—a description that probably applies with equal truth to two-thirds of the Hindu population of the other presidencies. The upper and educated classes do know now what sect they belong to, and the sects are so distinctly marked as to admit of no doubt; but even that was not so clear in former days.

The great defect, however, of the census is, that it does not include the population of the Native States, estimated at 46,245,000, or one-fifth of the whole population of India; and, though it may be fair to assume that the proportions of races and their beliefs are the same as those of the adjacent states under British rule, this is only an assumption, and as such must vitiate any attempt at precision in statements regarding the whole of India.

Notwithstanding these difficulties or defects, it may be useful to state here that the population of the whole of India—exclusive, of course, of British Burmah—was ascertained by the late census to amount to 235,000,000 of souls. Of these, about 7-10ths—or, more nearly, 15-20ths—or 175,000,000, belonged to the various branches of the Hindu religion; more than 1-5th or 4-20ths or 50,000,000, professed the Mahomedan faith; and the remaining 1-20th was made up principally of the uncivilised hill tribes, and various minor sects which cannot correctly be classified with the followers of Siva and Vishnu. In this last group of 11,000,000 are the Jains and the Christians, who, though so influential from their wealth or intellect, form numerically but a very small fraction of the entire population.

The tables of the census, unfortunately, afford us very little information that is satisfactory with regard to the distribution of races among the people. From the new edition of Caldwell’s ‘Dravidian Grammar,’ we learn that upwards of 45,000,000 are Dravidian or speak Tamil, or languages allied to that dialect.[42] This may be somewhat of an over-estimate, but, taking it as it stands, it accounts for only 1-5th of the population; and what are we to say regarding the other 4-5ths, or 190,000,000 of souls? Four or five millions may be put on one side as Koles, Bhîls, Sontals, Nagas, &c.—hill tribes of various classes, whose affinities are not yet by any means settled, but whose ethnic relations are of very minor importance compared with those of the 185,000,000 remaining.

As the census leaves us very much in the dark on this subject, supposing we assume that one-half, or 90,000,000 more or less, of the inhabitants of northern India are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the country—Dasyus, Nishadhas, or whatever we may call them. Let us further divide the remaining 90,000,000 into three parts, and assume that one-third are lineal descendants of the Aryans who entered India before the time of Buddha; one-third the descendants of Yavanas, Sakas, Hunas, and other Scythian tribes who crossed the Indus between the Christian Era and the time of the Mahomedan invasion; and that the remainder are the Moslem races, or their descendants, who have entered India during the last 800 years. Such a scheme may nearly represent the facts of the case; but it seems almost certainly to exaggerate the importance of the foreign immigrant element. Taking, for instance, the last, about which we know most, it seems hardly probable that since the time of Mahmood of Guzni any such number of tribes professing the Mahomedan religion could have entered India so as to be able to procreate a population of 30,000,000 of souls, even supposing they had brought their women with them—which they certainly did not, except in the most exceptional cases. Two or three millions of warriors may have crossed the Indus in that time and settled in India, and, marrying the females of the country, may have had a numerous progeny; but thirty millions is a vast population by direct descent, especially as we know how many of the Moslems of India were recruited from slaves purchased and brought up in the faith of their masters. In Bengal especially, where they are most numerous, they are Bengalis pure and simple, many, perhaps most, of whom have adopted that faith quite recently from motives it is not difficult to understand or explain. Though there may consequently be 50,000,000 of Mussulmans in India at the present day, we may feel quite certain that not one-half of this number are immigrants or the descendants of emigrants who entered India during the last eight centuries.

The same is probably true of the Turanian races, who entered India in the first ten centuries after our era. It is most improbable that they were sufficiently numerous to be the progenitors of thirty millions of people, and, if they were so, the mothers, in nine cases out of ten, were most probably natives of India.

Of the Aryans we know less; but, if so great a number as thirty millions can trace anything like a direct descent from them at the present day, the amount of pure Aryan blood in their veins must be infinitesimally small. But, though their blood may be diluted, the influence of their intellect remains so powerfully impressed on every institution of the country that, had they perished altogether, their previous presence is still an element of the utmost importance in the ethnic relations of the land.

Another census may enable us to speak with more precision with regard to these various divisions of the mass of the people of Hindustan, but meanwhile the element that seems to be most important, though the least investigated hitherto, is the extent of the aboriginal race. It has hitherto been so overlooked, that putting it at ninety millions may seem to many an exaggeration. Its intellectual inferiority has kept it in the background, but its presence everywhere seems to me the only means of explaining most of the phenomena we meet continually, especially those connected with the history of the architecture of the country. Except on some such hypothesis as that just shadowed forth, I do not know how we are to account for the presence of certain local forms of buildings we find in the north, or to explain the persistence with which they were adhered to.

When from these purely ethnographic speculations we turn to ask how far religion and race coincide, we are left with still less information of a reliable character. As a rule, the Dravidians are Saiva, and Saiva in the exact proportion of the purity of their blood. In other words, in the extreme south of India they are immensely in the majority. In Tanjore, 7 to 1 of the followers of Vishnu; in Mádura, 5 to 1; in Trichinopoly, 4 to 1; and Salem, and generally in the south, 2 to 1;[43] but as we proceed northward they become equal, and in some of the northern districts of the Madras Presidency the proportions are reversed.

In Bengal, and wherever Buddhism once prevailed, the Vaishnava sects are, as might be expected, the most numerous. Indeed if it were not that so much of the present Hindu religion is an importation into the south, and was taught to the Dravidians by Brahmans from the north, it would be difficult to understand how the Vaishnava religion ever took root there, where Buddhism itself only existed to a slight extent, and where it, too, was an importation. If, however, it is correct to assume that Saivism had its origin to the northward of the Himalayas, among the Tartar tribes of these regions, there is no difficulty in understanding its presence in Bengal to the extent to which it is found to prevail there. But, on the other hand, nothing can be more natural than that an aboriginal Naga people, who worshipped trees and serpents, should become Buddhists, as Buddhism was originally understood, and, being Buddhists, should slide downwards into the corruptions of the present Vaishnava form of faith, which is avowedly that most fashionable and most prevalent in the north of India.

One of the most startling facts brought out by the last census, is the discovery that nearly one-third of the population of Eastern Bengal are Mahomedan—20,500,000 out of 66,000,000—while in the north-west provinces the Mahomedans are less than 1-6th—4,000,000 among 25,000,000; and in Oude little more than 1-10th. It thus looks more like a matter of feeling than of race; it seems that as the inhabitants of Bengal were Buddhists, and clung to that faith long after it had been abolished in other parts of India, they came in contact with the Moslem religion before they had adopted the modern form of Vishnuism, and naturally preferred a faith which acknowledged no caste, and freed them from the exactions and tyranny of a dominant priesthood. The Mahomedan religion is in fact much more like Buddhism than are any of the modern Hindu forms, and when this non-Aryan casteless population came in contact with it, before they had adopted the new faith, and were free to choose, after the mysterious evaporation of their old beliefs, they naturally adopted the religion most resembling that in which they had been brought up. It is only in this way that it seems possible to account for the predominance of the Moslem faith in Lower Bengal and in the Punjab, where the followers of the Prophet outnumber the Hindus, in the proportion of 3 to 2, or as 9,000,000 to 6,000,000.

Where Buddhism had prevailed the choice seemed to lie between Vishnu or Mahomet. Where Saivism crept in was apparently among those races who were Turanians, or had affinities with the Tartar races, who immigrated from the north between the Christian era, and the age of the Mahomedan conquest.

To most people these may appear as rash generalisations, and at the present stage of the inquiry would be so in reality, if no further proof could be afforded. After reading the following pages, I trust most of them at least will be found to rest on the firm basis of a fair induction from the facts brought forward. It might, consequently, have appeared more logical to defer these statements to the end of the work, instead of placing them at the beginning. Unless, however, they are read and mastered first, a great deal that is stated in the following pages will be unintelligible, and the scope and purpose of the work can be neither understood nor appreciated.

1. Naga people worshipping the Trisul emblem of Buddha, on a fiery pillar.
(From a bas-relief at Amravati.)

Map of

INDIA,

Showing the Principal

BUDDHIST & JAINA

LOCALITIES.

BOOK I.
BUDDHIST ARCHITECTURE.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION AND CLASSIFICATION.

It may create a feeling of disappointment in some minds when they are told that there is no stone architecture in India older than two and a half centuries before the Christian Era; but, on the other hand, it adds immensely to the clearness of what follows to be able to assert that India owes the introduction of the use of stone for architectural purposes, as she does that of Buddhism as a state religion, to the great Asoka, who reigned from B.C. 272 to 236.

It is not, of course, meant to insinuate that the people of India had no architecture before that date; on the contrary it can be proved that they possessed palaces and halls of assembly, perhaps even temples, of great magnificence and splendour, long anterior to Asoka’s accession; but, like the buildings of the Burmese at the present day, they were all in wood. Stone, in those days, seems to have been employed only for the foundations of buildings, or in engineering works, such as city walls and gates, or bridges or embankments; all else, as will appear from the sequel, were framed in carpentry. Much as we may now regret this, as all these buildings have consequently perished, it is not so clear, as it may at first appear, that the Indians were wrong in this, inasmuch as, in all respects, except durability, wood is a better building material than stone. It is far more easily cut and carved, larger spaces can be covered with fewer and less cumbrous points of support than is possible with stone, and colour and gilding are much more easily applied to wood than to stone. For the same outlay twice the space can be covered, and more than twice the splendour obtained by the use of the more perishable material, the one great defect being that it is ephemeral. It fails also in producing that impression of durability which is so essential to architectural effect; while, at the same time, the facility with which it can be carved and adorned tends to produce a barbaric splendour far less satisfactory than the more sober forms necessitated by the employment of the less tractable material.

Be this as it may, it will, if I mistake not, become quite clear when we examine the earliest “rock-cut temples” that, whether from ignorance or from choice, the Indians employed wood, and that only in the construction of their ornamental buildings, before Asoka’s time.[44] From this the inference seems inevitable that it was in consequence of India being brought into contact with the western world, first by Alexander’s raid, and then by the establishment of the Bactrian kingdom in its immediate proximity, that led to this change. We do not yet know precisely how early the Bactrian kingdom extended to the Indus, but we feel its influence on the coinage, on the sculpture, and generally on the arts of India, from a very early date, and it seems as if before long we shall be able to fix with precision not only the dates, but the forms in which the arts of the Western world exerted their influence on those of the East. This, however, will be made clearer in the sequel. In the meanwhile it may be sufficient to state here that we know absolutely nothing of the temples or architecture of the various peoples or religions who occupied India before the rise of Buddhism,[45] and it is only by inference that we know anything of that of the Buddhists before the age of Asoka. From that time forward, however, all is clear and intelligible; we have a sufficient number of examples whose dates and forms are known to enable us to write a perfectly consecutive history of the Buddhist style during the 1000 years it was practised in India, and thence to trace its various developments in the extra Indian countries to which it was carried, and where it is still practised at the present day.[46]

If our ethnography is not at fault, it would be in vain to look for any earlier architecture of any importance in India before Asoka’s time. The Aryans, who were the dominant people before the rise of Buddhism, were essentially a non-artistic race. They wrote books and expressed their ideas in words like their congeners all the world over, but they nowhere seem successfully to have cultivated the æsthetic arts, or to have sought for immortality through the splendour or durability of their buildings. That was always the aspiration of the less intellectual Turanian races, and we owe it to this circumstance that we are enabled to write with such certainty the history of their rise and fall as evidenced in their architectural productions.

There is no à priori improbability that the Dravidian races of the south of India, or the indigenous races of the north, may not have erected temples or other buildings at a very early date, but if so, all that can be said is that all trace of them is lost. When we first meet the Buddhist style it is in its infancy—a wooden style painfully struggling into lithic forms—and we have no reason to suppose that the other styles were then more advanced. When, however, we first meet them, some six or seven centuries afterwards, they are so complete in all their details, and so truly lithic in their forms, that they have hitherto baffled all attempts to trace them back to their original types, either in the wood or brick work, from which they may have been derived. So completely, indeed, have all the earlier examples been obliterated, that it is now doubtful whether the missing links can ever be replaced. Still, as one single example of a Hindu temple dating before the Christian Era might solve the difficulty, we ought not to despair of such being found, while the central provinces of India remain so utterly unexplored as they now are. Where, under ordinary circumstances, we ought to look for them, would be among the ruins of the ancient cities which once crowded the valley of the Ganges; but there the ruthless Moslem or the careless Hindu have thoroughly obliterated all traces of any that may ever have existed. In the remote valleys of the Himalaya, or of Central India, there may, however, exist remains which will render the origin and progress of Hindu architecture as clear and as certain as that of the Buddhist; but till these are discovered, it is with the architecture of the Buddhist that our history naturally begins. Besides this, however, from the happy accident of the Buddhists very early adopting the mode of excavating their temples in the living rock, their remains are imperishably preserved to us, while it is only too probable that those of the Hindu, being in less durable forms, may have disappeared. The former, therefore, are easily classified and dated, while the origin of the latter, for the present, seems lost in the mist of the early ages of Indian arts. Meanwhile, the knowledge that the architectural history of India commences B.C. 250, and that all the monuments now known to us are Buddhist for at least five or six centuries after that time, are cardinal facts that cannot be too strongly insisted upon by those who wish to clear away a great deal of what has hitherto tended to render the subject obscure and unintelligible.

Classification.

For convenience of description it will probably be found expedient to classify the various objects of Buddhist art under the five following groups, though of course it is at times impossible to separate them entirely from one another, and sometimes two or more of them must be taken together as parts of one monument.

1st. Stambhas, or Lâts.—These pillars are common to all the styles of Indian architecture. With the Buddhists they were employed to bear inscriptions on their shafts, with emblems or animals on their capitals. With the Jains they were generally Deepdans, or lamp-bearing pillars; with the Vaishnavas they as generally bore statues of Garuda or Hunaman; with the Saiva they were flag-staffs; but, whatever their destination, they were always among the most original, and frequently the most elegant, productions of Indian art.

2nd. Stupas, or Topes.—These, again, may be divided into two classes, according to their destination: first, the true Stupas or towers erected to commemorate some event or mark some sacred spot dear to the followers of the religion of Buddha: secondly, Dagobas, or monuments containing relics of Buddha, or of some Buddhist saint.[47] If it were possible, these two ought always to be kept separate, but no external signs have yet been discovered by which they can be distinguished from one another, and till this is so, they must be considered, architecturally at least, as one.

3rd. Rails.—These have recently been discovered to be one of the most important features of Buddhist architecture. Generally they are found surrounding Topes, but they are also represented as enclosing sacred trees, temples, and pillars, and other objects. It may be objected that treating them separately is like describing the peristyle of a Greek temple apart from the cella. The Buddhist rail, however, in early ages at least, is never attached to the tope, and is used for so many other, and such various purposes, that it will certainly tend to the clearness of what follows if they are treated separately.

4th. Chaityas,[48] or Assembly Halls.—These in Buddhist art correspond in every respect with the churches of the Christian religion. Their plans, the position of the altar or relic casket, the aisles, and other peculiarities are the same in both, and their uses are identical, in so far as the ritual forms of the one religion resemble those of the other.

5th. Viharas, or Monasteries.—Like the Chaityas, these resemble very closely the corresponding institutions among Christians. In the earlier ages they accompanied, but were detached from, the Chaityas or churches. In later times they were furnished with chapels and altars in which the service could be performed independently of the Chaitya halls, which may or may not be found in their proximity.

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

3. Lât at Allahabad.

the ground near Hindu Rao’s house, north of Delhi.[50] Two others exist in Tirhoot at Radhia, and Mattiah, and a fragment of another was recognised utilised as a roller for the station roads, by an utilitarian member of the Bengal Civil Service. The most complete, however, is that which, in 1837, was found lying on the ground in the fort at Allahabad, and then re-erected with a pedestal, from a design by Captain Smith.[51] This pillar is more than usually interesting, as in addition to the Asoka inscriptions it contains one by Samudra Gupta (A.D. 380 to 400), detailing the glories of his reign, and the great deeds of his ancestors.[52] It seems again to have been thrown down, and was re-erected, as a Persian inscription tells us, by Jehangir (A.D. 1605), to commemorate his accession. It is represented without the pedestal ([Woodcut No. 3]). The shaft, it will be observed, is more than 3 ft. wide at the base, diminishing to 2 ft. 2 in. at the summit, which in a length of 33 ft.[53] looks more like the tapering of the stem of a tree—a deodar pine, for instance—than anything designed in stone. Like all the others of this class, this lât has lost its crowning ornament, which probably was a Buddhist emblem—a wheel or the trisul ornament[54]—but the necking still remains ([Woodcut No. 4]), and is almost a literal

4. Assyrian honeysuckle ornament from capital of Lât, at Allahabad.

copy of the honeysuckle ornament we are so familiar with as used by the Greeks with the Ionic order. In this instance, however, it is hardly probable that it was introduced direct by the Greeks, but is more likely to have been borrowed from its native country Assyria, whence the Greeks also originally obtained it. The honeysuckle ornament, again, occurs as the crowning member of a pillar at Sankissa, in the Doab, half-way between Muttra and Canouge ([Woodcut No. 5]), and this time surmounting a capital of so essentially Persepolitan a type, that there can be little doubt that the design of the whole capital came from Central Asia. This pillar, which is of a much stouter and shorter proportion than the edict lâts, is surmounted by an elephant, but so mutilated that even in the 7th century the Chinese traveller Hiouen Thsang mistook it for a lion, if this is indeed the effigy he was looking at, as General Cunningham supposes,[55] which, however, is by no means so clear as might at first sight appear.

Another capital of a similar nature to that last described crowns a lât at Bettiah in Tirhoot—this time surmounted by a lion of bold and good design ([Woodcut No. 6]). In this instance, however, the honeysuckle ornament is replaced by the more purely Buddhist ornament of a flock of the sacred hansas or geese. In both instances there are cable ornaments used as neckings, and the bead and reel so familiar to the student of classical art. The last named form is also, however, found at Persepolis. These features it may be remarked are only found on the lâts of Asoka, and are never seen afterwards in India, though common in Gandhara and in the Indus for long afterwards, which seems a tolerably clear indication that it was from Persia, though probably on a suggestion from the Greeks, that he obtained those hints which in India led to the conversion of wooden architecture into stone. After his death, these classical features disappear, and wooden forms resume their sway, though the Persian form of capital long retained its position in Indian art.

It is more than probable that each of these Asoka lâts stood in front of, or in connection with some stupa, or building of some sort; but all these have disappeared, and the lâts themselves have—some of them at least—been moved more than once, so that this cannot now be proved. So far, however, as can now be ascertained, one or two stambhas stood in front of, or beside each gateway of every great tope, and one or two in front of each chaitya hall. At least we know that six or seven can now be traced at Sanchi, and nearly an equal number at Amravati,[56] and in the representation of topes at the latter place, these lâts are frequently represented both outside and inside the rails.

At Karli, one still stands in front of the great cave surmounted by four lions, which, judging from analogy, once bore a chakra or wheel, probably in metal.[57] A corresponding pillar probably once stood on the opposite side of the entrance bearing some similar emblem. Two such are represented in these positions in front of the great cave at Kenheri, which is an exact but debased copy of the great Karli cave.[58]

The two lâts at Erun and the iron pillar at Delhi, though similar in many respects to those just described, seem certainly to belong to the era of the Guptas at the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century of our era, and to be dedicated to the Vaishnava faith, and in consequence belong to a subsequent chapter. That at Pathari is not inscribed or is at least unedited, and though it looks old, may also be of the Gupta times.

This is a meagre account, it must be confessed, of Buddhist lâts, which probably at one time could be counted by hundreds in the important Buddhist localities in Bengal; but it is feared we shall hardly be able to add many more to our list. They are so easily overthrown and so readily utilised in populous localities, that all trace of most of them has probably been irrecoverably lost, though one or two more examples may probably be found in remote, out-of-the-way places.

There is no instance, so far as I am aware, of a built monumental pillar now standing in India. This is sufficiently accounted for by the ease with which they could be thrown down and their materials removed, when they had lost the sanctity which alone protected them. There are, however, two such pillars among the topes of Cabul, and evidently coeval with them, now called the Surkh Minar ([Woodcut No. 7]), and the Minar Chakri. These are ascribed by the traditions of the place to Alexander the Great, though they are evidently Buddhist monuments, meant to mark some sacred spot, or to commemorate some event, the memory of which has passed away. There can be little doubt that their upper members are meant to be copies of the tall capitals of the Persepolitan pillars, which were probably common also in Assyria, and throughout this part of Asia, but their shape and outline exhibit great degeneracy from the purer forms with which that architecture commenced in India, and which were there retained in their purity to a much later period than in this remote province. No reliable data seem to exist for ascertaining what the age of these monuments may be. It probably was the third or fourth century of our era, or it may be even earlier.

7. Surkh Minar, Cabul.
(From a Drawing by Mr. Masson, in Wilson’s ‘Ariana Antiqua.’)

CHAPTER III.
STUPAS.

CONTENTS.

Bhilsa Topes—Topes at Sarnath and in Behar—Amravati Tope—Gandhara Topes—Jelalabad Topes—Manikyala Tope.

There are few subjects of like nature that would better reward the labour of some competent student than an investigation into the origin of Relic Worship and its subsequent diffusion over the greater part of the old world. So far as is at present known, it did not exist in Egypt, nor in Greece or Rome in classical times, nor in Babylon or Assyria. In some of these countries the greatest possible respect was shown to the remains of departed greatness, and the bones and ashes of persons who were respected in life were preserved with care and affection; but there was no individual so respected that a hair of his head, a tooth, or a toe-nail, even a garment or a utensil he had used, was considered as a most precious treasure after his death. In none of these countries does it appear to have occurred to any one that a bone or the begging-pot of a deceased saint was a thing worth fighting for; or that honour done to such things was a meritorious act, and that prayers addressed to them were likely to be granted. Yet so ingrained do these sentiments appear to be among the followers of Buddha, that it is difficult to believe that the first occasion on which this sentiment arose, was at the distribution of his remains on his attaining Nirvana at Kusinagara, B.C. 543. On that occasion, eight cities or kingdoms are said to have contended for the honour of possessing his mortal remains, and the difficulty was met by assigning a portion to each of the contending parties, who are said to have erected stupas to contain them in each of their respective localities.[59] None of these can now be identified with certainty—everything in future ages being ascribed to Asoka, who, according to popular tradition, is said to have erected the fabulous number of 84,000 relic shrines, or towers to mark sacred spots.[60] Some of these may be those we now see, or are encased within their domes; but if so, they, like everything else architectural in India, are the earliest things we find there. It is true, the great pagoda—the Shewé Dagon—at Rangoon is said to contain relics of all the four Buddhas of the present Kalpa, the staff of Kakasanda; the water-dipper of Konagamma; the bathing garment of Kasyapa, and eight hairs from the head of Gautama Buddha;[61] but supposing this to be true, we only now see the last and most modern, which covers over the older erections. This is at least the case with the great Dagoba at Bintenne, near Kandy, in Ceylon, in which the thorax-bone of the great ascetic lies enshrined. The ‘Mahawanso,’ or great Buddhist history of Ceylon, describes the mode in which this last building was raised, by successive additions, in a manner so illustrative of the principle on which these relic shrines arrived at completion, that it is well worth quoting:—“The chief of the Devos, Sumano, supplicated of the deity worthy of offerings for an offering. The Vanquisher, passing his hand over his head, bestowed on him a handful of his pure blue locks from the growing hair of the head. Receiving and depositing it in a superb golden casket, on the spot where the divine teacher had stood, he enshrined the lock in an emerald dagoba, and bowed down in worship.

“The thero Sarabhu, at the demise of the supreme Buddha, receiving at his funeral pile the Thorax-bone, brought and deposited it in that identical dagoba. This inspired personage caused a dagoba to be erected 12 cubits high to enshrine it, and thereon departed. The younger brother of King Devenampiatisso (B.C. 259), having discovered this marvellous dagoba, constructed another encasing it, 30 cubits in height. King Duttagamini (B.C. 161), while residing there, during his subjugation of the Malabars, constructed a dagoba, encasing that one, 80 cubits in height.” This was the “Mahiyangana dagoba completed.”[62] It is possible that at each successive addition some new deposit was made; at least most of the topes examined in Afghanistan and the Punjab, which show signs of these successive increments, seem also to have had successive deposits, one above the other.

Of all the relics of Buddha, the most celebrated is the left canine tooth. At the original distribution it is said to have fallen to the lot of Orissa, and to have been enshrined in a town called from that circumstance “Dantapura.” This, most probably, was the modern town of Puri, and the celebrated temple of Juggernath, which now flourishes there, not only in all probability occupies the same spot, but the worship now celebrated there is the same, mutato nomine, as that which was once performed in honour of this tooth. Be this as it may, it seems to have remained there in peace for more than eight centuries, when the king of the country, being attracted by some miracles performed by it, and the demeanour of the priests, became converted from the Brahmanical faith, to which he had belonged, to the religion of Buddha. The dispossessed Brahmans thereon complain to his suzerain lord, resident at Palibothra, in the narrative called only by his title Pandu, but almost certainly the Gautamiputra of the Andrabhitya dynasty. He ordered the tooth to be brought to the capital, when, from the wonders it exhibited, he was converted also; but this, and the excitement it caused, led to its being ultimately conveyed surreptitiously to Ceylon, where it arrived about the year 311;[63] and in spite of various vicissitudes still remains in British custody, the Palladium of the kingdom, as it has done during the last fifteen centuries and a half.[64]

About the same time (A.D. 324[65]) another tooth of Buddha was enshrined in a tope on the island of Salsette, in Bombay harbour, apparently in the time of the same Gautamiputra, but what its subsequent fate was is not known.[66] When the tope was opened for Dr. Bird, it was not there, but only a copper plate, which recorded its enshrinement, by a noble layman called Pushyavarman.[67]

Almost as celebrated as these was the begging-pot of Sakya Muni, which was long kept in a dagoba or vihara erected by Kanishka at Peshawur, and worshipped with the greatest reverence.[68] After paying a visit to Benares,[69] it was conveyed to Kandahar, and is still said to be preserved there by the Mussulmans, and looked upon even by them as a most precious relic.[70]

All this will become plainer as we proceed, for we shall find every Buddhist locality sanctified by the presence of relics, and that these were worshipped apparently from the hour of the death of the founder of the religion to the present day. Were this the place to do it, it would be interesting to try and trace the path by which, and the time when, this belief in the efficacy of relics spread towards the west, and how and when it was first adopted by the early Christian Church, and became with them as important an element of worship as with the Buddhists. That would require a volume to itself; meanwhile, what is more important for our present purpose is the knowledge that this relic-worship gave rise to the building of these great dagobas, which are the most important feature of Buddhist architectural art.

No one can, I fancy, hesitate in believing that the Buddhist dagoba is the direct descendant of the sepulchral tumulus of the Turanian races, whether found in Etruria, Lydia, or among the Scyths of the northern steppes. The Indians, however, never seem to have buried, but always to have burnt, their dead, and consequently never, so far as we know, had any tumuli among them. It may be in consequence of this that the dagobas, even in the earliest times, took a rounded or domical form, while all the tumuli, from being of earth, necessarily assumed the form of cones. Not only out of doors, but in the earliest caves, the forms of dagobas are always rounded; and no example of a straight-lined cone covering a dagoba has yet been discovered. This peculiarity, being so universal, would seem to indicate that they had been long in use before the earliest known example, and that some other material than earth had been employed in their construction; but we have as yet no hint when the rounded form was first employed, nor why the conical form of the tumulus was abandoned when it was refined into a relic shrine. We know, indeed, from the caves, and from the earliest bas-reliefs, that all the roofs of the Indians were curvilinear; and if one can fancy a circular chamber with a domical roof—not in stone, of course—as the original receptacle of the relic, we may imagine that the form was derived from this.[71]

Bhilsa Topes.

The most extensive, and taking it altogether, perhaps the most interesting, group of topes in India is that known as the Bhilsa Topes, from a town of that name in the kingdom of Bhopal, near which they are situated. There, within a district not exceeding ten miles east and west and six north and south, are five or six groups of topes, containing altogether between twenty-five and thirty individual examples. The principal of these, known as the great tope at Sanchi, has been frequently described, the smaller ones are known from General Cunningham’s descriptions only;[72] but altogether they have excited so much attention that they are perhaps better known than any group in India. We are not however, perhaps, justified in assuming, from the greater extent of this group, as now existing, that it possessed the same pre-eminence in Buddhist times. If we could now see the topes that once adorned any of the great Buddhist sites in the Doab or the Behars, the Bhilsa group might sink into insignificance. It may only be, that situated in a remote and thinly-peopled part of India, they have not been exposed to the destructive energy of opposing sects of the Hindu religion, and the bigoted Moslem has not wanted their materials for the erection of his mosques. They consequently remain to us, while it may be that nobler and more extensive groups of monuments have been swept from the face of the earth.

Notwithstanding all that has been written about them, we know very little that is certain regarding their object and their history. Our usual guides, the Chinese Pilgrims, fail us here. Fa Hian never was within some hundreds of miles of the place; and if Hiouen Thsang ever was there, it was after leaving Ballabhi, when his journal becomes so wild and curt that it is always difficult, sometimes impossible, to follow him. He has, at all events, left no description by which we can now identify the place, and nothing to tell us for what purpose the great tope or any of the smaller ones were erected. The ‘Mahawanso,’ it is true, helps us a little in our difficulties. It is there narrated that Asoka, when on his way to Ujjéni (Ujjain), of which place he had been nominated governor, tarried some time at Chétyagiri, or, as it is elsewhere called, Wessanagara, the modern Besnagar, close to Sanchi. He there married Devi, the daughter of the chief, and by her had twin sons, Ujjenio and Mahindo, and afterwards a daughter, Sanghamitta. The two last named entered the priesthood, and played a most important part in the introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon. Before setting out on this mission, Mahindo visited his royal mother at Chétyagiri, and was lodged in “a superb vihara,” which had been erected by herself.[73] In all this there is no mention of the great tope, which may have existed before that time; but till some building is found in India which can be proved to have existed before that age, it will be safe to assume that this is one of the 84,000 topes said to have been erected by him. Had Sanchi been one of the eight cities which obtained relics of Buddha at the funeral pyre, the case might have been different; but it has been dug into, and found to be a stupa, and not a dagoba. It consequently was erected to mark some sacred spot or to commemorate some event, and we have no reason to believe that this was done anywhere before Asoka’s time.

On the other hand two smaller topes on the same platform contained relics of an undoubted historical character. That called No. 2 Tope contained those of ten Buddhist teachers who took part in the third great convocation held under Asoka, and some of whom were sent on missions to foreign countries, to disseminate the doctrines then settled, and No. 3 Tope contained two relic caskets, represented in the accompanying woodcuts (Nos. 8 and 9). One of these contained relics of Maha Moggalana, the other of Sariputra, friends and companions of Buddha himself, and usually called his right and left hand disciples.[74] It does not of course follow from this that this dagoba is as old as the time of Buddha; on the contrary, some centuries must elapse before a bone or rag belonging to any mortal becomes so precious that a dome is erected to enshrine it. The great probability seems to be that these relics were deposited there by Asoka himself, in close proximity to the sacred spot, which the great tope was erected to commemorate. The tope containing relics of his contemporaries must of course be much more modern, probably contemporary with the gateways, which are subsequent to the Christian Era.[75]

10. View of the great Tope at Sanchi.

11. Plan of great Tope at Sanchi.

Scale 100 ft. to 1 in.

12. Section of great Tope at Sanchi.

Scale 50 ft. to 1 in.

The general appearance of the Sanchi Tope will be understood from the view of it on Woodcut No. 10, and its shape and arrangement from the plan and section, Nos. 11 and 12. From these it will be observed that the principal building consists of a dome somewhat less than a hemisphere, 106 ft. in diameter, and 42 ft. in height.[76]

13. Tee cut in the rock on a Dagoba at Ajunta.

On the top of the tope is a flat space about 34 ft. in diameter, formerly surrounded by a stone railing, some parts of which are still lying there; and in the centre of this once stood a feature known to Indian archæologists as a Tee. The woodcut (No. [13]), from a rock-cut example at Ajunta, represents the usual form at this age. The lower part is adorned with the usual Buddhist rail (to be described hereafter), the upper by the conventional window, two features which are universal. It is crowned by a lid of three slabs, and no doubt either was or simulated a relic casket. No tope, and no representation of a tope—and we have hundreds—are without this feature, and generally it is or was surmounted by one or more discs representing the umbrellas of state; in modern times by as many as nine of these. The only ancient wooden one now known to exist is that in the cave at Karli ([Woodcut No. 56]), but the representations of them in stone and painting are literally thousands in number.

The dome rests on a sloping base, 14 ft. in height by 120 ft. in diameter, having an offset on its summit about 6 ft. wide. This, to judge from the representations of topes on the sculptures, must have been surrounded by a balustrade, and was ascended by a broad double ramp on one side. It was probably used for processions round the monument, which seem to have been among the most common Buddhist ceremonials. The centre of this great mound is quite solid, being composed of bricks laid in mud; but the exterior is faced with dressed stones. Over these was laid a coating of cement nearly 4 inches in thickness, which was, no doubt, originally adorned either with painting or ornaments in relief.

Beside the group at Sanchi, which comprises six or seven topes, there are at Sonari, six miles distant, another group of eight topes. Two of these are important structures, enclosed in square courtyards, and one of these yielded numerous relics to the explorers.

At Satdhara, three miles further on, is a great tope 101 ft. in diameter, but which, like that at Sanchi, seems to have been a stupa, and yielded no relics. No. 2, however, though only 24 ft. in diameter, was found to contain relics of Sariputra and Moggalana, like No. 3 at Sanchi. Besides these there are several others, all small, and very much ruined.

The most numerous group, however, is situated at Bhojpur, seven miles from Sanchi, where thirty-seven distinct topes are grouped together on various platforms. The largest is 66 ft. in diameter, but No. 2 is described as one of the most perfect in the neighbourhood, and, like several others in this group, contained important relics.

At Andher, about five miles west of Bhojpur, is a fine group of three small, but very interesting topes. With those above enumerated, this makes up about sixty distinct and separate topes, in this small district, which certainly was not one of the most important in India in a religious point of view, and consequently was probably surpassed by many, not only in the number but in the splendour of its religious edifices.[77]

Without more data than we at present possess, it is of course impossible to speak with certainty with regard to the age of this group of topes, but, so far as can be at present ascertained, there seems no reason for assuming that any of them are earlier than the age of Asoka, B.C. 250, nor is it probable that any of them can be of later date than the era of Salivahana, A.D. 79, or say after the first century of our era. Their rails may be later, but the topes themselves seem all to be included within these three centuries and a half.

Topes at Sarnath and in Behar.

Not only is there no other group of topes in India Proper that can be compared, either in extent or in preservation, to those of Bhilsa, but our knowledge of the subject is now so complete that it is probably safe to assert that only two, or at most three, topes exist between the Sutlej and the sea, sufficiently perfect to enable their form and architectural features to be distinguished. There are, of course, numerous mounds near all the Buddhist cities which mark the site, and many of which probably hide the remains, of some of the hundreds of stupas or dagobas mentioned by the Chinese Pilgrims, besides many that they failed to distinguish. All, however, with the fewest possible exceptions, have perished; nor is it difficult to see why this should be so. All, or nearly all, were composed of brick or small stones, laid either without mortar, or with cement that was little better than mud. They consequently, when desecrated and deserted, formed such convenient quarries for the villagers, that nearly all have been utilised for building huts and houses of the Hindus, or the mosques of the iconoclastic Mussulmans. Their rails, being composed of larger stones and not so easily removed, have in some instances remained, and some will no doubt be recovered when looked for; and as these, in the earlier ages at least, were the iconostasis of the shrine, their recovery will largely compensate for the loss of the topes which they surrounded.

14. Tope at Sarnath, near Benares.
(From a Photograph.)

The best known, as well as the best preserved of the Bengal topes, is that at Sarnath, near Benares ([Woodcut No. 14]). It was carefully explored by General Cunningham in 1835-36, and found to be a stupa: viz., containing no relics, but erected to mark some spot sanctified by the presence of Buddha, or by some act of his during his long residence there. It is situated in the Deer Park, where he took up his residence with his five disciples when he first removed from Gaya on attaining Buddhahood, and commencing his mission as a teacher. What act it commemorates we shall probably never know, as there are several mounds in the neighbourhood, and the descriptions of the Chinese Pilgrims are not sufficiently precise to enable us now to discriminate between them.

The building consists of a stone basement, 93 ft. in diameter, and solidly built, the stones being clamped together with iron to the height of 43 ft. Above that it is in brickwork, rising to a height of 110 ft. above the surrounding ruins, and 128 ft. above the plain.[78] Externally the lower part is relieved by eight projecting faces, each 21 ft. 6 in. wide, and 15 ft. apart. In each is a small niche, intended apparently to contain a seated figure of Buddha, and below them, encircling the monument, is a band of sculptured ornament of the most exquisite beauty. The central part consists—as will be seen by the cut on the next page—of geometric patterns of great intricacy, but combined with singular skill; and, above and below, foliage equally well designed, and so much resembling that carved by Hindu artists on the earliest Mahomedan mosques at Ajmir and Delhi, as to make us feel sure they cannot be very distant in date.

The carvings round the niches and on the projections have been left so unfinished—in some instances only outlined—that it is impossible to guess what ultimate form it may have been intended to give them. The upper part of the tower seems never to have been finished at all, but from our knowledge of the Afghanistan topes we may surmise that it was intended to encircle it with a range of pilasters, and then some bold mouldings, before covering it with a hemispherical dome.

In his excavations, General Cunningham found, buried in the solid masonry, at the depth of 10½ ft. from the summit, a large stone on which was engraved the usual Buddhist formula, “Ye dharmma hetu,” &c., in characters belonging to the 7th century, from which he infers that the monument belongs to the 6th century. To me it appears so extremely improbable that men should carefully engrave such a formula on a stone, and then bury it ten or twelve feet in a mass of masonry which they must have hoped would endure for ever, that I cannot accept the conclusion. It seems to me much more probable that it may have belonged to some building which this one was designed to supersede, or to have been the pedestal of some statue which had been disused, but which from its age had become venerable, and was consequently utilised to sanctify this new erection. I am consequently much more inclined to adopt the tradition preserved by Captain Wilford,[79] to the effect that the Sarnath monument was erected by the sons of Mohi Pala, and destroyed (interrupted?) by the Mahomedans, in 1017, before its completion.[80] The form of the monument, the character of its sculptured ornaments, the unfinished condition in which it is left, and indeed the whole circumstances of the case, render this date so much the most probable that I feel inclined to adopt it almost without hesitation.

15. Panel on the Tope at Sarnath.
(From a Photograph.)

The other Bengal tope existing nearly entire is known as Jarasandha Ka Baithak. General Cunningham state its dimensions to be 28 ft. in diameter by 21 ft. in height, resting on a basement 14 ft. high, so that its total height, when complete, may have been about 55 ft.[81] As it was not mentioned by Fa Hian, A.D. 400, and is by Hiouen Thsang, A.D. 640, its age is probably, as General Cunningham states, intermediate between these dates, or about A.D. 500.[82] It is a bold, fine tower, evidently earlier than that at Sarnath, and showing nothing of the tendency towards Hindu forms there displayed. It has, too, the remains of a procession-path, or extended basement, which is wholly wanting at Sarnath, but which is always found in the earlier monuments. It was erected, as Hiouen Thsang tells us, in honour of a Hansa—goose—who devoted itself to relieve the wants of a starving community of Bhikshus.[83]

The third stupa, if it may be so called, is the celebrated temple at Buddh Gaya, which stands immediately in front of the celebrated Bodhi-tree (Ficus religiosa)[84] under whose shade Buddha attained complete enlightenment in the thirty-fifth year of his age, B.C. 588. Its history is told in such detail by Hiouen Thsang[85] that there seems little doubt as to the main facts of the case. According to this authority, Asoka built a small vihara here, but long afterwards this was replaced by a temple 160 ft. high and 60 ft. (20 paces) wide, which are the exact dimensions of the present building, according to Cunningham,[86] and we are further told that it was erected by a Brahman, who was warned by Maheswara (Siva), in a vision, to execute this work. In this temple there was a cella corresponding with the dimensions of that found there, in which the Brahman placed a statue of Buddha, seated cross-legged, with one hand pointing to the earth. Who this Brahman was we learn from an inscription translated by Mr. Wilkins in vol. i. of the ‘Asiatic Researches’ (p. 284), for it can hardly be doubted that the Brahman of the Chinese pilgrim is identical with the Amara Deva of the inscription, who was one of the ornaments of the court of Vicramaditya of Malwa, A.D. 495-530. From a Burmese inscription on the spot, first translated by Colonel Burney, we further learn that the place, having fallen into decay, was restored by the Burmese in the year 1306-1309.[87]

From the data these accounts afford us we gather, with very tolerable certainty, that the building we now see before us ([Woodcut No. 16]) is substantially that erected by Amara the Brahman, in the beginning of the 6th century, but the niches Hiouen Thsang saw, containing golden statues of Buddha, cannot be those now existing, and the sculptures he mentions find no place in the present design; and the amalakas of gilt copper that crowned the whole, as he saw it, have disappeared. The changes in detail, as well as the introduction of radiating arches in the interior, I fancy must belong to the Burmese restoration in the beginning of the 14th century. Though these, consequently, may have altered its appearance in detail, it is probable that we still have before us a straight-lined pyramidal nine-storeyed temple of the 6th century, retaining all its essential forms—anomalous and unlike anything else we find in India, either before or afterwards, but probably the parent of many nine-storeyed towers found beyond the Himalayas, both in China and elsewhere.

16. Temple at Buddh Gaya with Bo-tree.
(From a Photograph by Mr. Peppe, C.E.)

Eventually we may discover other examples which may render this noble tower less exceptional than it now appears to be; but perhaps its anomalous features may be due to the fact that it was erected by Brahmans for Buddhist purposes in an age of extremest toleration,[88] when it was doubtful whether the balance would incline towards Buddhist or Brahmanical supremacy. In less than a century and a half after its erection the storm burst (A.D. 648) which eventually sealed the fate of Buddhism in Central India, with only a fitful flickering of the lamp afterwards during lulls in the tempest.

At Keseriah, in Tirhoot, about 20 miles north of Bakra, where one of the pillars of Asoka mentioned above is found, are the ruins of what appears to have been a very large tope. It is, however, entirely ruined externally, and has never been explored, so that we cannot tell what was its original shape or purpose.[89] All along this line of country numerous Buddhist remains are found, all more or less ruined, and they have not yet been examined with the care necessary to ascertain their forms. This is the more to be regretted as this was the native country of the founder of the religion, and the place where his doctrines appear to have been originally promulgated. If anything older than the age of Asoka is preserved in India, it is probably in this district that it must be looked for.

Amravati.

Although not a vestige remains in situ of the central dagoba at Amravati, there is no great difficulty, by piecing together the fragments of it in the India Museum—as is done in Plate 93 of ‘Tree and Serpent Worship’—in ascertaining what its dimensions and general appearance were. It was small, only 30 ft. to 35 ft. in diameter, or about 100 ft. in circumference, and 50 ft. high. The perpendicular part, 34 ft. high, was covered with sculptures in low relief, representing scenes from the life of Buddha. The domical part was covered with stucco, and with wreaths and medallions either executed in relief or painted. No fragment of them remains by which it can be ascertained which mode of decoration was the one adopted.