Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/26

4 conversion to Buddhism, which took place about 256, a period embracing the foundation of the Persian Empire by Cyrus, its overthrow by Alexander the Great, and the latter's famous expedition into India. Artistic research, in fact, has rarely gone beyond this limit, and the influence of Persia and of Greece during these centuries is persistently upheld by the highest authorities as that which dominated Indian art of the Mauryan period, and shaped its subsequent development.

It is apparent that Perso-Greek masons were among the many employed in Asoka's public works, and no doubt their exceptional skill gave them a high rank in the select body of craftsmen attached to the imperial service. But though it may be inevitable, according to the inductive method of archæological research, to describe the capitals of Asokan pillars as "bell-shaped" and "Persepolitan," such classification begs the whole question of the origins of early Indian art. Neither is it possible, by mere technical analysis of this kind, to discover the deeper meaning of any art, or to relate the monuments of a past age to the life and times of the people who built them.

The stūpa, as is well known, was a relic shrine and a symbol of the passing of the Buddha into Pari-Nirvāna, the boundless Ocean of Eternity. In Buddhist history it was primarily the funeral monument of the royal monk, the Prince of the Sākyas, who taught the four Aryan truths, the Aryan Eightfold Path, and founded the Sangha, organised after the customs and traditions of an Aryan clan. Although the stūpa apparently belongs almost exclusively to Buddhism or its rival cult, Jainism, its origin cannot be explained in a sectarian sense. Its history did not begin with the death of Gautama Buddha, or of Mahāvīra. We shall