The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c8.9

c8.9

These symbols of the four chief events in the Buddha’s life were not inventions of the Buddhists. They had been associated with popular Indian cults from time immemorial, and for that very reason had been annexed by the Buddhists and invested with a new significance. Thus the Sambodhi tree at Bodh-Gayā takes its place among the countless trees that from prehistoric days were objects of cult-worship in India, where every village had its sacred tree and every tree its living spirit. It was in the prehistoric age, also, that the wheel was invented, and we may well believe that it was not long before such a wonderful invention became an object of worship and was associated in men’s minds with the sun’s disk and the world-wide power which the sun typified. Even the two deer which the Buddhists used to symbolize the deer-park are figured on a prehistoric seal of the Chalcolithic Age. Lastly the funeral mound or stūpa had been the recipient of honours offered to the dead long before the death of the Buddha himself, though it was not until after Aśoka’s nation-wide distribution of the Buddha’s relics that the stūpa itself came to be universally adored in the Buddhist world.