and amusements of those of his rank. At the age of 35, he-to use the language of his followers attained to Buddhahood, and spent the remaining 45 years of his life wandering through the various countries of India, promulgating those doctrines which subsequently obtained such universal acceptance in all the countries of Eastern Asia.

One or two points in the doctrines of Buddhism will be necessary to be borne in mind. The present Buddha-Sakya Muni, or Sinha as he is generally called-is held to be only the fourth of the great Buddhas. His three predecessors, Kakusanda, Konagamma, and Kasyapa, are supposed to have existed in extremely remote ages. Their history, as might be expected, is a mere mass of fables and absurdities.

The Buddhists expect a fifth manifestation of the Deity in the person of Maitri Buddha, who is supposed to be now going through the innumerable transmigrations necessary to the attainment of Buddhahood: these transmigrations being an essential part of the whole system. We shall find, in speaking of Thibet, a curious extension of the belief. There the divine soul is held to pass immediately from one Delai Lama to his successor, so that they are never without a living manifestation of the lower class of Buddhas, which they believe their great Lamas to be.

It is still a disputed point among the learned whether Sakya Muni was the original inventor of this religion, or even its first introducer into India. There are many and strong reasons for supposing that he cannot even aspire to this last distinction, for there are certainly many traces of the existence of at least a similar faith, in that country, before his time; though he no doubt gave it that mode of worship, and fixed upon it those peculiar doctrines, which afterwards distinguished it from the other religions of the land. Traces exist of very similar institutions, long before the time of Buddha, in Ethiopia, and as far west as Cyrene. In Syria we have something very similar to it in the tenets of the sect of the Essenes; and at Babylon it is nearly certain that a religion closely allied to it was long the faith of a large section of the people. Pythagoras, the contemporary of Sakya Muni, introduced doctrines of the same class at Crotona, in Italy; and in Persia the sect of the Magi adopted rites and practices so similar, that it is not easy always to detect the distinction between them.

Immediately after the death of Sakya Muni, the first great convocation or council of his followers and disciples was held at Rajagriha in Behar, and a second about a century afterwards at Vaisala on the Gunduck, opposite Patna; and though, if we may believe the traditions, these assemblies were most numerously attended by thousands of priests from all parts of the country, we have still no proof of the religion having been generally adopted at that time by either the people or their rulers.

We know that Chandragupta, so familiar to us as the Sandracottus of Alexander's historians, still adhered, with all his court, to the old Brahminical faith; so did his son Bimbasaro. His grandson Asoka, however, after reaching the imperial throne by the murder of his hundred brothers, forsook the faith in which he had been brought up,

and adopted that of Buddha. He then, with the zeal of a new convert, used the influence he possessed as the most powerful monarch of India in those ages, to establish it as the state religion of the country. He afterwards extended it to Ceylon on the south, and Afghanistan on the north; though, as hinted above, there is reason for suspecting that something similar to it existed before his time in the last-named country, one of the original seats of the Arian race.

It was in the seventeenth year of the reign of this king that the third convocation was held in the city of Palibothra, the modern Patna, almost exactly 300 years after the death of the founder of this religion, where the doctrines and formulas of the faith seem finally to have been settled. It is of more importance to our present purpose, that with this king (250 B.c.) the architectural history of India commences not one building nor one sculptured stone having yet been found in the length and breadth of the land which can be proved to date before his accession. From his time, however, the series of monuments, some monolithic, some rock-cut, and others built, is tolerably complete during the ten or twelve centuries in which Buddhism continued to be a prevalent religion in the country of its birth.

After this we lose the thread of our architectural narrative in India Proper, but it is continued in Ceylon, Burmah, Java, Thibet, and China, to the present day; and we propose to follow it through all the mutations it has undergone in these different lands, before considering the other styles that arose and still exist in India. Each of them will occupy a niche to itself in the following order.

After the Buddhist styles, as above enumerated, will come

1. The Jaina style, a corruption of the pure Buddhist by admixture with the Hindu style.

2. The Southern Hindu, a style of architecture of the Tamul races of the South.

3. Northern Hindu, a cognate style, occurring in the Valley of the Ganges and its tributaries.

4. The modern Hindu, or that form which Indian architecture took after being modified by the influence of the Mahometan styles.

5. The Cashmirian and other aberrant styles, which cannot be included under any of the preceding heads.

CHAPTER II.

BUDDHIST ARCHITECTURE.

CONTENTS.

Division of subject - Topes, Sanchi Temples, Karli

Ornamentation of caves.

-

CHRONOLOGICAL MEMORANDA.

- Monasteries, Ajunta

THE examples which remain of Buddhist architecture have hitherto been imperfectly examined, and are generally little known. It is therefore by no means easy to classify them so as to include all, and at the same time render the divisions clear and intelligible. The following arrangement, it is believed, will represent our present knowledge of the subject with tolerable exactness.

1. Topes.-Under this name are included the most important class of buildings. They consist of detached pillars, towers, and tumuli, all of a sacred or monumental character. The word is a corruption of the Sanscrit sthupa, meaning a mound, heap, or cairn.

2. Temples. Known as Chaitya halls, or caves.

3. Monasteries.- Viharas, being the residences of the priests.

TOPES.

This class includes edifices differing from one another principally in the purposes for which they were erected. The oldest and simplest topes were single pillars (sthambas), either carved out of one stone or regularly built; the former being distinguished as Lâts. The oldest monuments hitherto discovered in India are a group of these monoliths set up by Asoka in the middle of the third century B.C. They were all alike in form, and all bore the same inscription, being four short edicts containing the creed and principal doctrines of Buddhism, which he

had recently embraced.' Of these one is at Delhi, having been reerected by Feroose Shah in his palace, as a monument of his victory over the Hindus. Three more are standing near the river Gunduck, in Tirhoot; and one, represented in the annexed woodcut (No. 1), has recently been placed on a pedestal in the fort of Allahabad. A fragment of another was discovered near Delhi, and part of a seventh was used as a roller on the Benares road by a Company's engineer officer.

The following description of the Allahabad pillar will of course serve for all. It is one stone, 42 ft. 7 in. in height, of which 7 ft. 7 in. may be considered as the base, which probably was buried to some extent in the ground, or in the masonry that supported it. The shaft,

2. Honeysuckle ornament from capital of Lât.

properly so called,
was 3 ft. in diameter
at the base, diminish-
ing to 2 ft. 2 in. at the
summit. The neck-

ing immediately below the capital (woodcut No. 2) represents, with considerable purity, the honeysuckle ornament of the Assyrians, which the Greeks borrowed from them with the Ionic order. It is very interesting to meet with

it also on the earliest known monu

ment of Buddhist art. The pillar at
Allahabad has lost its capital, but
we are able to supply the deficiency
from two of the Tirhoot examples,
which retain their capitals with the
lions which seem to have crowned
the summits of all. In these we
meet with the bead and reel orna-
ment familiar to us from Persian
Greek architecture. The capitals
are so similar to the lower members
of those at Persepolis, and more
especially to the bases of the columns
there, as to leave no doubt of their
common origin.

duck. From a drawing by It is almost certain that these
the late Capt. Kittoe.
pillars of Asoka stood originally in

front of some sacred buildings which have perished.
We know that the great tope of Sanchi had one or two

such monoliths in front of each of its gateways, and the

2.11

great caves of Karli (woodcut No. 18) and Kennari show 1. Lát at Allahabad.

1 Translated by Jas. Prinsep, in the sixth volume of the Bengal Journal of the Asiatic Society, p. 566 et seq.

2 These dimensions are taken from Capt. Burt's drawings published in the J. A. S. B., vol. iii. plate 3.

similar pillars cut in the rock in front and on each side of the entrance of the great halls, which, therefore, we may assume to be their proper position.

There is no instance, so far as I am aware, of a built monumental

4.

Surkh Minar, Cabul.

From a drawing by Mr. Masson in Wilson's

Ariana Antiqua.

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 by which alone they had been protected. There are, however, two such pillars among the topes of Cabul, and evidently coëval with them, now called the Surkh Minar, and 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. They are probably of the third or fourth century of our era, and their shape and outline exhibit great degeneracy from the purer forms with which architecture commenced in India, and which were there retained to a much later period than in this remote province. There can be little doubt but 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. They may also have resembled the chapiters which form so important a part of the two pillars which Solomon set up before his temple at Jerusalem.'

The remaining topes are not distinguishable from one another in external shape, though they differed considerably in the purposes for which they were designed, and in the feelings of veneration with which they were regarded. The most important of these purposes was the preservation of relics, the worship of these objects being one of the principal characteristics of Buddhism. In some of the topes which have been opened regular relic-chambers are found, some still furnished with the relics themselves, others plundered of their treasure. These were properly designated as dagobas (from dhatu, relic, and gabba or garba, shrine or womb), of which the word pagoda appears to be a

11 Kings vii. 16, et seq.