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The Earliest Buddhist Shrines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Stuart Piggott
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Extract

Among the earliest monuments of the Buddhist faith as propagated through India by king Asoka in the third century B.C. is a peculiar class of structure known as a stupa, and since Fergusson (1) first put forward the idea at the end of the last century it has been vaguely realized that these monuments were in all probability a formalized version of nothing more or less than a specialized type of prehistoric (and pre-Buddhist) round cairn. The possible implications of this prototype's peculiar features in reference not only in oriental, but in European archaeology, were pointed out by Mr Harold Peake with characteristic acumen (2), but no convenient summary of the relevant Indian material has appeared in an English archaeological journal, and a recent discovery in Jaipur State has thrown most interesting light on the subject at large. It seems therefore desirable to bring the results of the Bairat excavations before a wider archaeological public than that reached by the original report by the excavator, the late Rai Bahadur D. R. Sahni, and to consider it in relation to the wider question of the origins of the stupa and of the curious features which are presented in formalized guise on the elaborate monuments which represent the supreme artistic achievements of the Sunga Dynasty in the closing centuries of the pre-Christian era. I am deeply indebted to Mr Peake not only for material amplifying his original thesis, but for stimulating discussion and correspondence on the whole question. The latter part of this paper is in fact to such a degree based on his ideas that it amounts to an appendix in which I have paraphrased views exprcssed by him and shared by myself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 17 , Issue 65 , March 1943 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1943

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References

Authorities and Notes

* For authorities cited, see p. 10.

1 J. Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1910), p. 65.

2 H. J. E. Peake. These views have not been published, but were communicated by letter to the author.—H .P.

3 cf. J. Marshall, The Monuments of Sanchi, I, 21.

4 Iraq, III, 159.

5 D. R. Sahni, Archaeological Remains and Excavations at Bairat (Jaipur 1937).

6 Fergusson and Burgess, Cave Temples of India (1880), plate XVIII, 3, 4.

7 A. Cunningham, The Stupa of Bharut (1879), plate XVI, upper relief.

8 Oelmann, Haus und Hof in Altertum (1927) ; Bersu in Proc. Prehist. Soc, 1940, VI ; Koch-Grünberg in Archiv. für Anthrop., 1909, xxxv, 43 ; Fletcher and La Flesche in Twenty-seventh Annual Report of Bureau of American Ethnology (1905–6), 75, 97–8 ; Vayson de Pradenne, in ANTIQUITY, 1937, XI, 87.

9 S. Piggott, Arch. Journal., 1939, XCVI, 193–222.

10 J. Marshall, op. cit. supra.

11 The Sanscrit name for these cross-bars is suci, literally ‘ needles,’ from their being ‘threaded’ through the uprights.

12 J. Marshall, op. cit. 31–2.

13 Epigraphica Indica, II, 92, 378.

14 Cunningham, op cit. supra.

15 A. Rea, South Indian Buddhist Antiquities (Arch. Survey of India, New Imp. Series, XV, 1894).

16 V. A. Smith, The Jain Stupas and other Antiquities of Mathura (Arch. Survey of India, New Imp. Series, xx, 1901).

17 Fergusson, op. cit. 102.

18 The excavators considered the arrangement of the stone ‘fence’ at Sarnath to be probably a reconstruction of an earlier structure. Sahni and Vogel, Cat. Mus. Ard. Sarnath, 1914, pp. 208–16.

19 cf. especially Rigveda III, VIII, a hymn to the Sacrificial Post in which the ‘divine stakes’, ‘hewn and planted in the ground’ are invoked to grant blessings for the crops and to bring wealth. They are later described as ‘arrayed in brilliant colour’ and ‘decked with rings.’ (Griffith’s translation of the Hymns of the Rigveda, Benares, 1920,1, p. 327–29).

20 Rigveda, X, XVIII, 4. Imam jïvebhyah paridhim dadhämi maisam nu gädaparo arthametam— ‘Here I erect this rampart for the living’, in Griffith’s translation (II, p. 406).

21 For references cf. Piggott, loc. cit.

22 For Jhukar and Jhangar wares and the late phases of the prehistoric cultures of the Indus Valley generally see N. G. Majumdar, Explorations in Sind (Mem. Arch. Survey of India), XLVIII, 1934, and E. J. A. Mackay, ‘Excavations at Chanhu-Daro’, Journ. Royal Soc. Arts., 1907, LXXXV, 527–44.