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Rh understand it better by describing it as the mausoleum, or funeral monument, of an Aryan king or chieftain. The Buddha was given a royal funeral by the Aryan tribesmen as the Head of the Sangha. Similar honours were paid to his successors, and to all the Abbots of the great Buddhist monasteries, who on state occasions adopted the insignia of Indo-Aryan royalty: temporal kings bowed down to them, and even gave up their thrones to them. The royal umbrella raised on the top of the stupa was not mere religious symbolism: it was in the first instance a recognition of the social rank, real or assumed, of the spiritual teachers whose ashes were deposited there.

Indian building traditions in Asoka's time were of much greater antiquity than the palaces of Darius, and it is not necessary to account for the perfection of Asokan masonic craftsmanship by assuming that it was borrowed from Iran. The royal craftsmen of Persepolis probably borrowed as much from India as the Mauryan craftsmen borrowed from Western Asia. The Iranians and Indo-Aryans were co-heirs of the Aryan tradition, but the symbolism of the "bell-shaped" capital of Persepolis, as we shall presently see, is Indian rather than Persian.

So with the stūpa itself, we shall only get a clear conception of its place in Buddhist history by connecting it with Indo-Aryan traditions, of which Vedic literature and the epics of Indo-Aryan, the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, are the record. The connection of the stupa with Buddhist religious ritual was not derived entirely from the circumstance of Gautama Buddha's royal birth. The Kshatriyas, or the warrior class, to which he belonged, had been from time immemorial the spiritual leaders of the Aryan people. The Kshatriya king, or chieftain, ex officio presided over