Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/70

 44 JAINA ARCHITECTURE. BOOK V. there are or rather were, till about twenty-five years ago extensive remains of Jaina and Hindu temples of the same age and style as those on the mount, some of them probably more modern, but still all of the best age. The place, however, was destroyed at the time of the Muhammadan conquest in the middle of the I4th century, and has since remained wholly deserted. It has in consequence been used as a quarry by the neighbouring towns and villages, so that none of its buildings now remain. The fragment, however, preserved in Colonel Tod's work and shown in Woodcut No. 287, but now destroyed, may serve to illustrate the style in which they were erected, but no two pillars were exactly alike ; it would have required hundreds to represent their infinite variety of detail. PARASNATH. The highest point of the Bengal range of hills, south of Rajmahal, has characteristically been appropriated by the Jains as one of their most favourite Tirthas. They name it Parasnath and Samet Sikhar, and no less than nineteen of their twenty- four Tirthankaras are said to have died there, or rather " attained to Moksha" blessedness among others Pamvanath, the last but one, and he consequently gave to the hill the name it now bears. Unfortunately, no photographer has yet visited the hill, nor any one who was able to discriminate between what was new and what old. Such accounts, however, as we have are by no means encouraging, and do not lead us to expect any very remarkable architectural remains. The temples on the hill are numerous, but they seem all modern, or at least to have been so completely repaired in modern times that their more ancient features cannot now be discerned. Something may also be due to the fact that Bengal has never been essentially a Jaina country. The Pala dynasty of Bengal seem to have remained Buddhist nearly to the Muhammadan conquest (A.D. 1203), when they seem suddenly to have dropped that religion and plunged headlong into the Vaishnava and Saiva superstitions. Whether from this, or from some other cause we cannot now explain, Jainism does not seem to have taken root in Bengal. At the time that it, with Buddhism, took its rise in the 5th century B.C. Bihar was the intellectual and the political centre of India, and Buddhism long held its sway in the country of its birth. Before, however, Jainism became politically important, the centre of power had gravitated towards the West, and Jainism does not seem to have attained any great importance in the country where it first appeared. Were it not for this, there