Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s19.2

c12.s19.2

Of the architectural remains usually ascribed to the Maurya period very few are artistically significant. Tradition ascribes a large number of stūpas and chaitya-halls to the building activities of Aśoka, but none of them exists today in their original form and plan except the excavated chaitya-halls, bearing inscriptions of Aśoka and Daśaratha, in the Barābar caves. The monolithic rail at Sārnāth in grey and polished Chunar sandstone may have been erected under the direction and patronage of Aśoka himself. Its architectural form is exactly that of the rails of Bhārhut, and must have been literally transferred into stone from contemporary wooden originals without possibly any understanding of its constructional characteristics. The plinth or the ālambana, the uprights or the stambhas, the horizontal bars or the sūchis and the coping or the uṣṇiṣa have all been just carved out of what must have been a huge slab of stone; an understanding of the constructional characteristics would have certainly made the task easier by piecing together the constituent parts of smaller slabs of stone exactly in the same way as we see them done at Bhārhut or Sāñchī or Bodhgayā. The altar or the bodhimaṇḍa at Bodhgayā is also traditionally associated with Aśoka. It is permissible to assume that it was perhaps much like the bodhimaṇḍa as we see it on one of the Bhārhut reliefs¹ bearing the inscription in Brāhmī characters ‘Bhagavato Sakya Munino Bodho.’ The point of architectural interest is that the Bhārhut altar consists of four pilasters the forms of which were evidently derived from wooden prototypes and had nothing to do with the monumental Aśoka columns.