The Rashtrakutas and their Times c20.94

c20.94

The problem of the origin and prevalence of the image worship is still to be properly worked out. Dharmasūtra writers rarely refer to the duty of worshipping images of gods either at home or in public temples; nor is it mentioned by Manu. The cult of public temples seems to be later than the time of Asoka. It may have been deemed a suitable substitute for the great S'rauta sacrifices which were attended by a great number of people. Possibly the example of Buddhism with its splendid temples and monasteries may have given rise in the Hindu mind to a desire to have similar centres of public worship and congregation. Whatever the real causes may have been, temples soon became recognised centres of public worship and were characteristic of the Hinduism of our period. It must be, however, noted that the sums of money that were being spent over the temples, images, their ornaments and daily worship were tending to become excessively high in our period. Al Utbi says :—‘The kings of Hind, the chiefs of that country, and rich devotees used to amass their treasures and precious jewels and send them time after time to be presented to idols, that they might receive a reward for their good deeds and draw near to their God.’(66) Not much evidence is forthcoming from the Deccan proper about the wealth unnecessarily hoarded in temples in the form of ornaments etc., but we know that in northern India temples were the places that yielded highest amount of plunder to Mahmud of Ghazni. Epigraphical evidence is available to show that large sums of money were spent in Tamil country to furnish costly gold and jewel ornaments to the deity in the Rājarājeśvara temple by Chola kings and their subjects.(67) Some of the temples in the Deccan too must have been centres of wealth; Kṛṣṇa I is known to have given a number of gold and jewel ornaments to the Śiva image in the Ellora temple, which he had excavated from solid rock at great cost.(68) Specific cases of alienations of lands and villages for different temples are fairly numerous and the Cambay plates of Govinda IV,(69) dated 930 A.D., inform us that this monarch gave away 400 villages and 32 lakhs of drammas for the different temples in his dominions. Watchmen were essential under these circumstances for the bigger temples and we often come across provision made for their maintenance.(70)