Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/202

110, instead of being, as it really was, a new and brilliant development of the ancient Indo-Aryan building traditions under the pressure of foreign domination. The æsthetic ideas which found expression in Musalman architecture in India came from the mind of the Indian builder, and not from his Arab, Pathān, Turkish, or Mongol master.

For nearly a thousand years before the mission of the Prophet of Arabia began, India had exercised a profound influence upon the building craft of Asia, for wherever Indian Buddhist teachers found a footing, the Indian craftsman and artist followed to show the correct practice of the True Law in the ritual of the Buddhist Church. The great universities of India were schools of religious craftsmanship as well as of philosophy and science. In some of the oldest temples of Japan there exist at the present day fresco paintings of the school of Ajantā. We know from the memoirs of the Chinese pilgrims, Fa Hiān and Hiuen Tsang, how the work of the Indian image-maker was prized by the foreign pilgrims who flocked to Indian shrines, as much as the precious manuscripts in which the teaching of the Law was written. One cannot doubt that the Silpa-Sāstras, the canonical books of the Indian craftsman, were among the Buddhist texts which were carried to many distant countries by these earnest seekers after truth, and that their first care on reaching home after their long and perilous journeys would be to build a fitting shrine for the sacred relic or image, as nearly as possible after the Indian model.

The master-builder in all countries was a constant traveller, accustomed to long journeys in search of work, and the rapid spread of Buddhist propaganda, both from its original home in Magadha and from the