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Rh royal chapel almost a necessity. There is much historical significance in the name given to a temple in Southern India—a kōvil, or King's house.

The limited view of ancient Indian life afforded by early Buddhist sculpture gives no indication of any kind of royal chapel other than the domed stūpa shrine. Buddhism was a protest against the rites celebrated by Aryan kings in Vedic India. No Brahmanical paintings or sculptures of that period are known. In the beginning the Buddhist cult of stūpa worship concerned itself with the Buddha as the Great Yogi, who at his death had attained to Pari-Nirvāna—the Sākya Prince had not assumed any priestly functions or instituted a ritual of divine worship. The royal chapel in early Buddhist times conformed to the ritual of stūpa worship and was covered by a dome, as shown in the shrine attached to the Palace of the Gods in the Bharhut sculptures (Pl. XXXIV, ).

It was not until Mahāyāna Buddhism introduced the idea of a Bodhīsattva as a king of the heavenly spheres that another form of shrine appeared in Indian art—that which is crowned by the curvilinear steeple, or sikhara, not unlike the high peaked crown, or mūkuta, of the Bodhīsattva himself. And the form, when it does appear, is, as Fergusson observed, already fully developed as if it had a long history behind it.

There are several indications that the sikhara temple was the Kshatriya king's chapel where the rites of Sūrya or Vishnu worship were performed in his presence as the gods' representative on earth. The cap of it, in the oldest as well as in the most modern examples, is invariably the same as that found in Asoka's imperial standards—the amalaka, or fruit of Vishnu's blue lotus, the symbol of a Chakra-vartin, or world ruler. The Mānāsāra Silpa-Sastra lays down the rule that a