Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/105

78 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY world about him, all this is the immediate and strongest impression made on the mind. Heaven must not be thought of, perfection is the only possible goal for the soul. And so on. But at the selfsame moment, by creating a profound sympathy for India, and the Indian way of looking at the world, the door is opened to all sorts of complexities, and the disciple may well end by accepting a thousand things, each as unthinkable as the one or two he originally abandoned at the call of a higher truth. Such must always be the twofold effect of an Indian teacher of religion on a foreign mind.

This very phenomenon we may watch on a geographical scale in the history of Buddhism. Here the Southern countries, served by the early missions, received a stricter and more personal impress of the deposit of faith actually left to his church by the Master. This system was atheistic, nihilistic, and philosophic in the highest and severest sense. Even in the reign of Asoka we see the erection of rails, pillars, and stupas, the glorification of holy places, and the worship of the sacred relics, but never a trace of the multitudinous extraneous elements which were later to be accepted.

Many of the great chaitya halls were built between the time of Asoka and the Christian era, but the stupas which they contain are simple reliquaries. The dagoba bears no image, though it is often ornamented wuth an Asokan rail. Sculpture