Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/47

Rh Vājapūja sacrifice, performed by Aryan householders for obtaining worldly advancement. At the conclusion of the sacrifice the householder, after a dialogue with his wife referring to their attainment to the higher spiritual spheres, mounted the sacrificial post and seated himself on the top, upon which seventeen robes were spread. When he came down he was enthroned and consecrated as a Samrāj, or universal monarch. Evidently the structure above the relic casket on the stūpa is such a symbolic altar throne.

The arched ornament resembling a horse-shoe on the Bhāja relic casket represents the gable of the curved roof of a shrine through which the light fell upon the altar. It occurs in nearly all the buildings represented in the Bharhut or Sānchī sculptures. No doubt similar roofs and similar shrines were common in pre-Buddhist times, and the gradual adaptation of the form as an emblem of the rising or setting sun must have been a survival of Vedic symbolism. At first the imitation of the roof-end is very close, though no one familiar with Indian ways of thinking would believe that the whole intention of the sculptor lay in copying the form of a roof. He, no doubt, was thinking of the sun- or moon-light streaming in through the lattice-work which filled the upper part of the arch, and of the face of the sun or moon, which on certain holy days looked in at the window. Successive generations of craftsmen put the thought into symbolic form.

In the later monasteries at Ajantā an image of the Buddha as the Light of the world sometimes fills the