Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/97

 CHAP. III. STUPAS. paying a visit to Benares, 1 it was conveyed to Kandahar, and is said to be still preserved there by the Musalmans, and looked upon even by them as a most precious relic. 2 All this will become plainer as we proceed, for we shall find every Buddhist locality sanctified by the presence of relics, and that these were worshipped apparently from the hour of the death of the founder of the religion to the present day. Were this the place to do it, it would be interesting to try and trace the path by which, and the time when, this belief in the efficacy of relics spread towards the west, and how and when it was first adopted by the Catholic Church, and became with them as important an element of worship as with the Buddhists. 3 That would require a volume to itself; mean- while, what is more important for our present purpose is the knowledge that this relic-worship gave rise to the building of these great stupas or dagabas, which are the most important feature of Buddhist architectural art. No one can, I fancy, hesitate in believing that the Buddhist stupa is the direct descendant of the sepulchral tumulus of the Turanian races, whether found in Etruria, Lydia, or among the Skyths of the northern steppes. The Indians, however, never seem to have buried, but always to have burnt, their dead, and consequently never, so far as we know, had any tumuli among them. It may be in consequence of this that the stupas, in the earliest times, took a rounded or domical form, while all the tumuli, from being of earth, necessarily assumed the form of cones. Not only out of doors, but in the earliest caves, the forms of dagabas are always rounded ; and no example of a straight - lined cone covering a stupa has yet been discovered. This peculiarity, being so universal, would seem to indicate that they had been long in use before the earliest known example, and that some other material than earth had been employed in their construction ; but we have as yet no hint when the rounded form was first employed, nor when it was refined into a relic shrine. We know, indeed, from the caves, and from the earliest bas-reliefs, that all the 1 ' Hiouen Thsang,' tome i. p. 83, or Beal, ' Life of Hiuen Tsiang,' p. 63. 2 ' Foe Koue Ki,' pp. 351-352 ; Beal's 'Travels of Fah-Hian,' p. 161. A de- tailed account of its transference from the true Gandhara Peshawar to the new Gandhara in Kandahar will be found in a paper by Sir Henry Rawlinson, 'Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,' vol. xi. p. 127. Conf. 'Indian Anti- VOL. I. quary,' vol. iv. p. 141. 3 The craze for relics that sprang up in the 5th century was largely stimulated by the writings of such authorities as Augustine, Ambrose, Basil, and Chrysostom. It was strictly akin to the belief of the Buddhists. The reverence for the " qadam-i-rasul," and relics of Muhammad by his followers is also of a similar character. E