The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c10.12

c10.12

only the Buddhists called them Buddha, Sangha, and Dharma, instead of Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Siva, according to the orthodox Brahman formula. Four bars to the Brahman meant the four Vedas, the depository of the sacred traditions of the Aryan race; the Buddhists explained them as the four events in the life of the Blessed One—the Nativity, the Enlightenment, the First Sermon at Benares, and His Death, or Pari-Nirvana. The splendid open lotus flowers carved upon the rail (Pl. XIII, A) were symbols and votive offerings which had the same meaning for all schools of Aryan philosophy and religion. The rite of pradakshinâ, the circumambulation of the stûpa, which the pilgrims performed, was the ancient Aryan rite which was repeated every day round the enclosure of every Indian village. And in Asoka’s time all the beautiful imagery of Aryan poetry which first found expression in the Vedic hymns was woven into the fabric of the stûpa. It was no longer a funereal mound, but planned like the Indian village on the lines of the cosmic order which the Divine Artificer Himself had drawn. The dome was the symbol of the sky, the blue lotus flower enveloping the earth with its inverted petals. The group of five columns which rose from the base of the dome at the point opposite the four gateways marked the arms of the cosmic cross, like the main streets of an Aryan village, and represented the five cosmic jewels, earth, air, fire, water, and ether. The reliquary, at the crown of the dome, was the Vedic altar of burnt sacrifice; the rail pattern upon it reproducing in a decorative form the actual rail which enclosed the sacrificial area, and also the village shrine. The umbrella over the reliquary, originally part of the royal insignia of the Kshatriya Prince Siddhartha,¹ was transformed into the pyramidal Tee (fig. 15), which was only the Buddhist and Jain equivalent symbol for the mystic tree of Vishnu, the cosmic tree, the tree of wisdom, and the trysting tree of the village; for all Indian art derives ultimately from the life of the Aryan village.