Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/108

8o FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY the moment of the Mahanirvana itself, is an evidence not to be set aside. The doctrine of the divinity of Buddha and his miraculous birth into a world long preparing for his advent must in the year a.d. 150 have been only the keystone of an arch already built. Here we have the picture of the self-projection into the sphere of maya of a soul immeasurably higher and sweeter than those dragged there by their own deeds. It is the theory which reappears in w^idely separate times and places under the names of Christ, Rama, Krishna, and Chaitanya. Even the Persian Bab would seem to owe the idea that makes him possible to this Indian " superstition," as it has been called.

This was the movement that placed in each new vihara excavated at Ajanta its Buddha shrine. Whether Seven or Eleven is the older it is difficult to determine, but each contains its image in its shrine. This fact coincides with a further step taken about this time. The ancient abbey with its bhikshugrihas began to transform itself into a university. Each of these new and more ambitious viharas is a college as well as a monastery. We are very familiar, from the study of Burma and Japan, with the educational system in which every student is theoretically a novice of the monastery. Something of the same sort is true to this day of Oxford itself. And there can be no doubt that it obtained at Ajanta. It was with this emphasizing of the function of the sangJiarania as the abode of learning that the image of the