Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/71

 INTRODUCTION. their abominations, we find our means of information painfully scanty and unsatisfactory. As will appear in the sequel, all that was written in India that is worth reading was written by the Aryans ; what was built was built by Turanians and Dravidians. But the known buildings extend back only to the 3rd century B.C., while the books may be ten centuries earlier, and, as might be expected, it is only accidentally and in the most contemptuous terms that the proud Aryans even allude to the abject Dasyus or their religion. What, therefore, we practically know of them is little more than inferences drawn from results, and from what we now see passing in India. Notwithstanding the admitted imperfection of materials, it seems to be becoming more and more evident, that we have in the north of India one great group of native religions, which we know in their latest developments as the Buddhist, Jaina, and Vaishnava religions. The first named we only know as it was taught by vSakyamuni before his death about 480 B.C., but no one I presume supposes that he was the first to invent that form of belief, or that it was not based on some preceding forms. The Buddhists themselves, accord- ing to the shortest calculation, admit of four preceding Buddhas according to the more formal accounts, of twenty-four. A place is assigned to each of these, where he was born, and where he died, the father and mother's name is recorded, and the name, too, of the Bodhi - tree under whose shade he attained Buddhahood. The dates assigned to each of these are childishly fabulous, but they may have been real personages, whose dates extended back to a very remote antiquity. 1 The Jains, in like manner, claim the existence of twenty- four Tirthankars, including Mahavira the last. Their places of birth and death, ages and numbers of converts, are equally recorded, all are in northern India, though little else is told of them ; but, from their fabulous ages, stature, and the immeasurable periods of the past when they are said to have lived they can only be looked on as purely fabulous. The series ends with Mahavira, who was the contemporary of vSakyamuni, and is said to have died before him at Pawa in Bihar. The Vaishnava series is shorter, consisting of only ten Avatars ; but it, too, closes at the same time, Buddha himself being the ninth, whilst the last is yet to come. Its fifth 1 A list of the twenty-four Buddhas, with these particulars, is given in the introduction to Tumour's ' Mahawansa,' introd. p. 32. See also Spence Hardy's ' Manual of Budhism,' 2nd. ed. pp. 96ff. Representations of six or seven of their Bodhi-trees, with the names attached, have been found at Bharaut and AjantS, showing at least that more than four were recognised,