Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/467

 CHAP. II. TEMPLE OF ANGKOR VAT. of Buddha, of any scene from his life, or from the jatakas to be found among the sculptures. In former days it might be excusable to doubt this ; but it is not so now that any man may make himself familiar with the sculptures at Bharaut, at Sanchi, or Amaravati, or with those from the Gandhara monasteries or at Boro-Budur. It is just as easy to recognise a Buddhist scene or legend in these representations, as it is to identify a Christian scene in the Arena chapel at Padua, or at Monreale near Palermo. What may hereafter turn up I do not know, but meanwhile I most unhesitatingly assert that there is not a trace of Buddhism in any of the bas-reliefs yet brought to light from Angkor Vat, nor an integral statue of Buddha or of any Buddhist saint about the place. I am, of course, aware that there are traditions of Asoka. having sent missionaries there, and of Buddhaghosha having visited the place, 1 but they are the merest of traditions, imported apparently from Siam, and resting on no authenticated basis. Had Buddhists ever come here en masse, or the country ever been converted to that religion, it seems impossible the fact should not be observable in the buildings. But there seems no trace of it there. There is no Eastern country, in fact, where that religion seems to have been so little known in ancient times. The testimony of the Chinese traveller, who visited the country in A.D. I295, 2 is sufficient to prove it did exist in his time ; but, like his predecessors Fah Hian and Hiuen Tsiang, he saw his own faith everywhere, and, with true Chinese superciliousness, saw no other religion anywhere. So far as can be at present ascertained, it seems as if the migrations of the Indians to Java and to Cambodia took place about the same time and from the same quarter ; but with this remarkable difference: they went en masse to Java, and found a tabula rasa a people, it may be, numerous, but with- out arts or religion, and they implanted there their own with very slight modifications. In Cambodia the country must have been more civilised, and had a religion, if not an art. The Indians seem slowly, and only to a limited extent, to have been able to modify their religion towards Hinduism, probably because it was identical, or at least sympathetic ; but they certainly endowed the Cambodians with an art which we have no reason to suppose they before possessed. Now that we know to what an extent classical art prevailed in 1 Gamier, loc. cit. vol. i. p. 120. Bastian, vol. i. pp. 400, 415, 438, etc. 2 In the extracts from the ' Chinese Annals,' translated by Abel Remusat, in the first volume of the ' Nouveaux Melanges Asiatiques,' he finds the earliest mention of the Cambodian kingdom in A.D. 6 1 6. From that period the accounts are tolerably consecutive to A.D. 1295, but before that nothing.