The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c10.3

c10.3

The stûpa did not originate with Buddhism, nor was it solely associated with that aspect of Indo-Aryan religious thought, though the effect of Asoka's ardent propaganda of the cult of Sâkiya Muni made the Buddhist stûpa much more common than any other. The Jains, and probably all other sects in Asoka's time, had their stûpas. The former place the earliest of the 24 *Tîrthankaras*, or saints, commemorated by their stûpas, as far back as the Vedic Rishis; and doubtless the oldest stûpas were not symbols of a religious cult, but memorials of the dead associated with the practice of burial instead of cremation. It may be observed that even in the present day the body of a Brahman who has taken the vow of a *Sannyâsin* and retired from the world to devote himself to a religious life is not cremated after death but thrown into a sacred river—the idea being that it has been made so pure by spiritual exercises that the purificatory rite of cremation is superfluous. Another exception to the rule of cremation is that of a Hindu victim to small-pox, in which case Sitala, the dread goddess who has possessed the body, is supposed to claim it from Agni, the god of fire. Probably the imminent risk of infection for relatives whose duty it was to prepare a corpse for the funeral pile was the motive of this custom.