The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c14.17

c14.17

The structural importance and historical interest attaching to the great Vishnu shrine of Bodh-Gayâ are unique. Seeing that all the symbolism of Buddhist art was derived from the ancient Indo-Aryan tradition, the fitness of building a shrine to symbolise the Vaishnava aspect of the Blessed One at the spot where the Buddha had overcome the powers of Mâra, the Evil One, needs no further explanation. It was an immemorial tradition to mark the site of a famous Bodhi tree with a Vishnu shrine, and the place where the yogi who sat under it was cremated with a Siva shrine, or stûpa. Fergusson's chronological estimate of the building is an amusing attempt to reconcile the inconsistencies of his stylistic categories. He had to explain how the "Hindu" sikhara, typical of "a Dasyu province," came to be built on one of the most sacred sites of Buddhism. He surmounted the difficulty by calling the Vishnu sikhara a stûpa: in the "Cave Temples of India" he declared that it was "evidently of foreign design, as there is nothing of the same style in India, either before or after it." He adds that "anyone at all familiar with the architecture of the East would know that it was built by the Burmese in the thirteenth or fourteenth century A.D.” In the first edition of his “History of Indian and Eastern Architecture” he revised this estimate by attributing it to the sixth century A.D.