Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/135

Rh which is shown on the eastern gateway of Sānchī (Pl. XXI, ). This belongs to a Brahmanical forest hermitage where the Buddha is said to have performed a miracle, thereby converting a thousand Brahmanical fire-worshippers. According to the Buddhist legend, the shrine was tenanted by a five-headed serpent. In all probability we have here an exact representation of an ancient Vedic forest-shrine, where the sacred fire which served the Aryan homestead was guarded by Brahman hermits, and where the graven image of the serpent was worshipped as an appropriate emblem of the Fire-Spirit. For just as the bull was regarded in ancient Babylonian ritual as a symbol of the sun ploughing his way across the heavens, so here we find the deadly earth reptile taken as a symbol of the heavenly serpent manifesting itself in various forms, either as the lightning—which is always represented in Indian pictures by serpentine lines of gold—or as the Milky Way, the great serpent or dragon of eternity which enfolds the earth in its coils. On the slopes of the Himālayas, where these forest hermits dwelt, the fiery serpent is even now often seen at night, as it is described in the Vedic hymns, rushing through the woods "tossing his flames about like running streams of water," and leaving his sinuous fiery trail upon the mountain-side.

This was, perhaps, the deity whom the Aryans personified as Rudra, "the Roarer," who again was so closely identified with the Siva of Vedic times, the Spirit of the snow-mountain, that eventually the two were worshipped as one. The Sānchī sculpture, therefore, probably shows us a primitive Saiva shrine, the