Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/34

12 palace, but the entire Aryan settlement, was reckoned as sacrificial ground. They were the town-planners and architects of the Aryan community. Like the Brahmans, they were spiritual teachers, and as such it was held to be disgraceful for them to build houses for gain.

Seeing that before the time of the Buddha these Aryan royal craftsmen thus deliberately preferred wood as building material because it was the substance which produced the sacred fire, and also of set purpose used other impermanent materials in their improvised temples, rather than brick or stone, it is highly improbable that we shall ever discover evidence of the origins of Indo-Aryan art, especially of temple architecture, other than that which is disclosed in the existing early monuments and in the surviving traditions of Indian craftsmanship. All the weight of this evidence is against the theory that the authors of the Vedic hymns and of the Upanishads, an active, martial people, who by force of their intellect imposed their ideas upon many other races of mankind, were dreamers who lacked constructive genius and the technical skill which belongs to it.

Vedic thought, Vedic tradition and custom dominate the art of India in the earliest times, as they have continued to do so down to the present day. And it is not among the débris of ruined cities, or by the methods of the archæologist and philologist, that we shall ever penetrate to the roots of its inspiration. For it grew first and lived for untold generations in the Himālayan forests, where the tree of the Devas, the deodar, still lifts its lordly crown, in those grand forest-cathe-