A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 1/Chapter 1

by Ernest Binfield Havell

 

SECTION I
ARCHITECTURE

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGINS OF INDIAN ART—THE STŪPA, OR KING'S MONUMENT

Though Sanskrit literature gives a vista of a great Aryan civilisation planted in Indian soil perhaps several millennia before the Christian Era, the evidence of its artistic evolution during this long period, which may lie buried on the sites of ancient Indian cities, such as Ajodhya, Mathurā, Kanauj, and Rājagriha, has not yet been unearthed. Indian archæological research, as yet, hardly goes farther back than the third century b.c., when the Buddhist Emperor-Saint, Asoka, built splendid stūpas to enshrine the relics of the Blessed One, and marked the holy sites of Buddhism with colossal pillars carved in stone and inscribed with his edicts. These stūpas and pillars, together with the remains of chapels, monasteries, and hermitages, some structural and some carved in the living rock, provide the earliest visible evidence of the origins of Indian art.

It happens that the monuments of Asoka's time were almost exclusively dedicated to Buddhist worship; and as Buddhist doctrine was a revolt against the teaching of Brahmanism, it might be assumed that Asoka's propaganda brought about an entirely new departure in Indian building traditions—that early Buddhist art is to be entirely explained by the teaching of Buddhism. This would limit the field of investigation to the three centuries which preceded Asoka's conversion to Buddhism, which took place about 256 b.c., a period embracing the foundation of the Persian Empire by Cyrus, its overthrow by Alexander the Great, and the latter's famous expedition into India. Artistic research, in fact, has rarely gone beyond this limit, and the influence of Persia and of Greece during these centuries is persistently upheld by the highest authorities as that which dominated Indian art of the Mauryan period, and shaped its subsequent development.

It is apparent that Perso-Greek masons were among the many employed in Asoka's public works, and no doubt their exceptional skill gave them a high rank in the select body of craftsmen attached to the imperial service. But though it may be inevitable, according to the inductive method of archæological research, to describe the capitals of Asokan pillars as "bell-shaped" and "Persepolitan," such classification begs the whole question of the origins of early Indian art. Neither is it possible, by mere technical analysis of this kind, to discover the deeper meaning of any art, or to relate the monuments of a past age to the life and times of the people who built them.

The stūpa, as is well known, was a relic shrine and a symbol of the passing of the Buddha into Pari-Nirvāna, the boundless Ocean of Eternity. In Buddhist history it was primarily the funeral monument of the royal monk, the Prince of the Sākyas, who taught the four Aryan truths, the Aryan Eightfold Path, and founded the Sangha, organised after the customs and traditions of an Aryan clan. Although the stūpa apparently belongs almost exclusively to Buddhism or its rival cult, Jainism, its origin cannot be explained in a sectarian sense. Its history did not begin with the death of Gautama Buddha, or of Mahāvīra. We shall understand it better by describing it as the mausoleum, or funeral monument, of an Aryan king or chieftain. The Buddha was given a royal funeral by the Aryan tribesmen as the Head of the Sangha. Similar honours were paid to his successors, and to all the Abbots of the great Buddhist monasteries, who on state occasions adopted the insignia of Indo-Aryan royalty: temporal kings bowed down to them, and even gave up their thrones to them. The royal umbrella raised on the top of the stupa was not mere religious symbolism: it was in the first instance a recognition of the social rank, real or assumed, of the spiritual teachers whose ashes were deposited there.

Indian building traditions in Asoka's time were of much greater antiquity than the palaces of Darius, and it is not necessary to account for the perfection of Asokan masonic craftsmanship by assuming that it was borrowed from Iran. The royal craftsmen of Persepolis probably borrowed as much from India as the Mauryan craftsmen borrowed from Western Asia. The Iranians and Indo-Aryans were co-heirs of the Aryan tradition, but the symbolism of the "bell-shaped" capital of Persepolis, as we shall presently see, is Indian rather than Persian.

So with the stūpa itself, we shall only get a clear conception of its place in Buddhist history by connecting it with Indo-Aryan traditions, of which Vedic literature and the epics of Indo-Aryan, the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, are the record. The connection of the stupa with Buddhist religious ritual was not derived entirely from the circumstance of Gautama Buddha's royal birth. The Kshatriyas, or the warrior class, to which he belonged, had been from time immemorial the spiritual leaders of the Aryan people. The Kshatriya king, or chieftain, ex officio presided over the sacrificial rites of the Aryan tribe or clan. He was regarded as the representative, or offspring, of the deity invoked. Thus the royal line of Ajodhya in the Rāmāyana claimed to be of the Sūrya-vamsa—the race of the Sun-god, Sūrya^[1]—while the Pāndava and Kaurava princes in the Mahābhārata were said to belong to the Chandra-vamsa—the race of the Moon-god, Chandra. The cult of king-worship would naturally have two branches, the one in which bhakti, or devotion to the deity in the person of the living king, was the starting-point; the other rooted in ancestor worship, with the stūpa of the deceased monarch as its shrine. The Sun-god was the presiding deity of the one, the Moon-god of the other. The changes of the moon determined the dates on which shrāddha offerings to deceased ancestors were made.

The Buddha himself condemned as worthless the whole system of Vedic sacrifices, including in his ban astrology, divination, spells, omens, and witchcraft; but in the earliest Buddhist stūpas known to us, the symbolism is entirely borrowed from the sacrificial lore of the Vedas. The Buddha, indeed, was emphatic in declaring that the Eightfold Path of Good Living along which he led his followers was the ancient Aryan way, trodden by Buddhas of a bygone age.^[2]

It has been assumed by archæologists, following Fergusson's lead, that we must draw a hard-and-fast line between the ritual of Hinduism and the ritual of the Vedas; that the temple worship of the former is mostly derived from aboriginal superstitions adopted by the Brahmans, and that the latter is pure Aryan. On this theory Fergusson tried to explain the origin of the most conspicuous feature of Hindu temple architecture in Northern India, the curvilinear spire, or sikhara.

But the more the symbolism of Hindu architecture is understood, the clearer it becomes that, just as the chanting of the Vedic hymns in the temple service of to-day follows the musical traditions of three thousand years ago, born in the mountain-groves of Ariana, so the design of the temple itself is also directly derived from the sacrificial rites of the ancient Aryans in India.

Throughout these Vedic rites, as described in the Brāhmanas, one can trace the same structural elements, though in a primitive form, and the same symbolism as are found in the Silpa-sāstras, the canonical books of Hindu craftsmen. In Hindu temples the ceremonies connected with the worship of the Fire-spirit, Agni, began with the construction of huts or tabernacles of various shapes, oriented differently in relation to the house, and with doors facing different points of the compass.^[3] These sacrificial tabernacles, though perhaps primitive in form and structure, served all the purposes of temples, and were doubtless the prototypes of those which were in later times built, on a great and costly scale, of permanent materials. In them the officiating priest, the householder, or Kshatriya chieftain, passed days, sometimes even a year, performing the prescribed rites.

Now, when the king or chieftain, assisted by his purōhita, or chaplain, presided over the tribal sacrifices as the son of Sūrya, the Sun-god, it is more than probable that the sacrificial hut constructed for him was of a special form easily distinguished by the crowd of the "impure," who were not allowed to enter the consecrated ground, that it was crowned by the royal or tribal ensign, and marked with the symbols of the Sun-god.

Furthermore, as the lighting of fires was an essential part of the Vedic ritual, it may be assumed that the sacrificial chamber was constructed so that the fire might burn effectively, and with the least inconvenience to the sacrificer—i.e., it must have had some kind of chimney with appropriate vent-holes for the smoke. All these conditions are fulfilled perfectly by the sikhara of the Hindu temple. The tall spire over the shrine, pierced by the sun-windows, which now are only ornamental since the shrine is no longer a fire-chamber, would have served admirably the purpose of a chimney. It forms a conspicuous landmark; it is crowned by the same insignia of royalty as Asoka's imperial standards—the amalaka, or pericarp of the blue lotus, which is the flower of Vishnu-Sūrya, the Preserver of the Universe, and specially the patron deity of a Kshatriya king. In the earliest known examples the curvilinear faces of the sikhara are always decorated with Sun-emblems. The name vimāna, the chariot, given to the temple shrine, connects it definitely with the sacrificial rites of the ancient Aryan warrior-priest; and as if to emphasise the fact, the wheels of the chieftain's war-chariot are sometimes carved in stone on two sides of the vimāna, as in the temple of Sūrya at Konārak. This suggests that the chariot of the Aryan chieftain, with a bambu sikhara lashed to it, often served as a sacrificial hut, especially in time of war.

The peculiar form of the sikhara is certainly derived from bambu construction—bambu being the universal material for temporary structures of this kind in the holy land of the Aryans in India.

But Aryan history points to the conclusion that the sikhara derives ultimately from the conical mud huts of Mesopotamia and Persia, such as exist there in the present day. The stūpa also probably comes from the valley of the Euphrates. One of the most interesting discoveries of modern archæology is the fragmentary history of Aryan rule in Mesopotamia, for it helps to explain much that is obscure in the origins of Indian art. About 1746 b.c. Babylon was stormed and sacked by the Hittites. On their retreat the city was occupied by an Aryan tribe, the Kassites, and their chieftain, Gandash, founded a dynasty which lasted for six centuries.

About the same time another Aryan tribe, the Mitanni, founded a kingdom farther north, between the Tigris and Euphrates. Sūrya, the ancient Vedic Sun-god, was the chief god of the Kassites, and the gods of the Mitanni were also those which appear in the Vedic hymns—Varuna, the Concealer, the ruler of the night sky, and of the cosmic ocean into which the sun disappears at night; Indra, the ruler of the day, who, like Surya, was the especial patron of the Aryan warrior, said to be the brother of Agni, the Fire-spirit; and the Ashvins, the twin horsemen who preceded the coming of Ushas, the Dawn-maiden. Among the later kings of the Mitanni we find the name of Dushratta (or Dasaratha)—one which is very familiar in Indo-Aryan literature from the story of the Rāmāyana, and in Indian history as the name of Asoka's son and successor. Among the finds at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, is a series of letters written by Dushratta to his relative Amenhetep III, King of Egypt, inscribed on clay tablets in the cuneiform script of Babylonia.^[4]

During the six centuries of Aryan domination in the Euphrates valley, we can hardly doubt that there was a close communication between the Indian and Mesopotamian branches of the Aryan family, and there are remarkable resemblances to be noted between the Aryāvarta of Mesopotamia and that of the Panjab. The Aryans in Mitanni were living in a land of many rivers on the slopes of an "abode of Snow," the Taurus mountain range, sacred to the Bull—which in Babylonia was a symbol of the Sun ploughing his way among the Stars. It may be only a curious coincidence that on the western side of the Taurus, where their powerful neighbours the Hittites worshipped a god whose emblems, like Siva's, were a trident and a bull,^[5] lies the Anatolian vilayet called Sivas with a chief town of the same name, a district towards which the sun-worshipping Aryans of Mitanni must have turned their faces when they adored the setting sun. Was there another Mount Kailāsa in the Anatolian plateau worshipped as the Sun-god's paradise?

The Aryan kings of Mitanni and of Babylon, like those of Vedic India, left no records of temple building or of sculpture. Their sacred literature was handed down orally from one generation to another, and, says Mr. H. R. Hall, "obviously they cared little for the religion, and probably less for the literature and arts, of their highly civilised subjects."^[6] From which he concludes that both the Kassites and Mitannians were uncultured people who learnt civilisation from the people they conquered.^[7] Fergusson arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the ancient Aryan invaders of India, but this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles of Indo-Aryan culture. A fine porcelain dish is useless to the orthodox Brahman, because his religion enjoins him to eat his meals from a platter of fresh leaves, which is to be thrown away directly after use. Similarly it was not from want of culture or of technical ability that the ancient Aryans did not commit their sacred literature to writing, and built no permanent structures for their sacrificial rites. It was that they feared the abuse of the magic power of the mautram which would arise if the sacred mysteries were revealed to the vulgar; the efficacy of the sacrifice would be impaired if the uninitiated took part in it, or if the "impure" craftsman assisted in the preparations. The construction of their fire-altars was an exact science involving all the knowledge of geometry possessed by the ancient world; an error of calculation or in the ritual prescribed might bring dire disaster upon the sacrificer. Therefore the Aryan craftsmen who planned the altars, built the tabernacles of the Fire-spirit, and cut and carved the posts of the sacred trees, were a special class ranking with Brahmans. They were in the king's service, protected by special laws, and took a leading part in the constructive work involved in the sacrificial rites.

This covered a very wide field, for not only the royal palace, but the entire Aryan settlement, was reckoned as sacrificial ground. They were the town-planners and architects of the Aryan community. Like the Brahmans, they were spiritual teachers, and as such it was held to be disgraceful for them to build houses for gain.^[8]

Seeing that before the time of the Buddha these Aryan royal craftsmen thus deliberately preferred wood as building material because it was the substance which produced the sacred fire, and also of set purpose used other impermanent materials in their improvised temples, rather than brick or stone, it is highly improbable that we shall ever discover evidence of the origins of Indo-Aryan art, especially of temple architecture, other than that which is disclosed in the existing early monuments and in the surviving traditions of Indian craftsmanship. All the weight of this evidence is against the theory that the authors of the Vedic hymns and of the Upanishads, an active, martial people, who by force of their intellect imposed their ideas upon many other races of mankind, were dreamers who lacked constructive genius and the technical skill which belongs to it.

Vedic thought, Vedic tradition and custom dominate the art of India in the earliest times, as they have continued to do so down to the present day. And it is not among the débris of ruined cities, or by the methods of the archæologist and philologist, that we shall ever penetrate to the roots of its inspiration. For it grew first and lived for untold generations in the Himālayan forests, where the tree of the Devas, the deodar, still lifts its lordly crown, in those grand forest-cathedrals where the ancient Aryans first sang the hymns of the Rig-Veda—as they are still sung in the "thousand-pillared" halls of Hindu temples—their sonorous chants reverberating from tree to tree like the drone of a mighty organ. It was there that Indra, crashing with his thunderbolt, and the Maruts, the Storm Winds, chafing the tops of cedar and pine, lighted Agni's sacrificial fire; when Rudra, "the Roarer,"^[9] rushed like a fiery serpent down the deep ravines, clearing a path through the jungles and seasoning the soil for the Aryan ploughmen, but often in his rage taking their cattle or human victims as his toll; hence he had to be propitiated by voluntary burnt offerings and sacrifices.

In sequestered groves, among the mountains, the Vedic Rishis, sheltered from the raging elements, guarded the shrine of the sacred fire precious to the Aryan homestead and listened to the Devas whispering in the tree-tops the secrets of the universe; or worshipped them at the foot of their Himālayan thrones—the mystic Lotus-flowers of the cosmic lake,^[10] pink or crimson when the dawn flushed on them in the East, golden when Sūrya sank in glorious majesty in the West, and silvery white when King Soma or Chandra reigned at night. The imagery of this ancient Himālayan poetry, the ritual of the Aryan mountain-forest cult, and the religious teaching which grew out of its philosophy, formed the basis of the symbolism of all the art of India throughout all its subsequent technical modifications.

To return now to the earliest known Indo-Aryan monument—the stūpa; its connection with the Aryan traditions of pre-Buddhist India can be traced both in the Vedic funeral ritual, and in the structure of the stūpa itself.

According to Buddhist tradition, eight different Indo-Aryan tribes built stūpas to contain the remains of the Buddha, while two more were built to preserve the ashes of the funeral pyre, and the iron vessel in which the Blessed One's body had been cremated. We know, from the records of Vedic ritual, that it was the Aryan custom for relatives to collect the fragments of bones of a deceased person from the funeral pyre, and to deposit them in an urn which was subsequently buried in the ground. Among Vedic rites was one called Pitrimedha, or the sacrifice for ancestors, performed when a monument was raised over the funeral urn.^[11] The exact character of the monument is not described, but it is clear that the Aryan tribes, in building stūpas to honour the Sākhyan chieftains, were not creating a precedent, but following an ancient Vedic tradition. The Buddhist stūpa, when it was not merely a cenotaph or memorial, was built to contain a funeral urn; the railing, or the enclosure surrounding the sacred relics, was known as the vedikā, the Sanskrit word used for sacrificial ground in Vedic rites; the cross-bar of the rail was called sūchi—another allusion to Vedic ritual, for sūcha means a shoot of the sacred kusha grass, which was spread upon the place of sacrifice. Again, the lofty terrace at the base of the stūpa used as the procession path of the pilgrims was called medhī, derived from medha, sacrifice.^[12] The symbolism of the pradakshinā, or circumambulatory rite performed by Buddhist pilgrims, was likewise derived from Vedic sun-worship. The Aryan people, when they went in solemn procession round an altar, keeping the right hand towards it—and also their cattle as they trod out the corn on the threshing-floor—were, like the Buddhist pilgrims, "turning the wheel of the Law,"^[13] i.e., they were following the path of the Universal Law which directed the Sun in its orbit. The Buddha only changed the Aryan concept of the Law from a law of sacrifice to a law of spiritual evolution propounded by himself. In Buddhist art, therefore, the ancient Aryan sun-emblem remained the symbol of the Law, and early Buddhist ritual was a purified form of the ancient Aryan ritual minus the Brahman priest and his elaborate and costly animal sacrifices.

But, it maybe asked, if the ancient Aryans always, like the Buddhists, built stūpas to contain the ashes of their illustrious dead, why are there no traces of their existence to be found before Buddhist times? The explanation is also to be found in Vedic ritual. Like the tabernacles used in the Vedic sacrifices, the stūpas were temporary structures built for the occasion of the sacrifice, and removed when the sacrifice was over. The sacrifices to the spirits of the ancestors only extended to three generations. If the shrāddhas had been duly performed by his relatives, the spirit of the great-grandfather needed no more their pious help. He passed away to the regions beyond the solar sphere. His stūpa was removed or allowed to decay, and his ashes, probably, were thrown into a sacred river, as is the custom in modern Indian ritual.

If this conclusion is correct, Aryan culture should not be misjudged, as it has been by archæological writers, because so few traces of pre-Buddhist culture have been discovered. The art of Bharhut, Sānchī, and Kārlē is the direct offspring of Indo-Aryan culture, though the craftsmen were doubtless often of non-Aryan race.

1. The Kings of Egypt, beginning with the Fifth Dynasty, were also reputed to be the sons of Ra—the sun-god of Heliopolis. Each king of this dynasty built for himself a sanctuary of Ra, and the charge of these sun-temples was given to specially honoured nobles. (H. R. Hall's Ancient History of the Near East, pp. 129-30.)
2. The metaphor of the Eightfold Path was borrowed from the processional path of the Aryan fortified settlement, which generally had eight gates.
3. In the Agny-ādhēya, or consecration of the household fires, there was a round hut placed on the west with doors on the east and south; a square hut on the east with doors on the east and west; a crescent-shaped hearth for one fire, and a round hearth for another, etc. (see Barnett, Antiquities of India, pp. 156-7). Very similar instructions for the building of temples are given in Mānasāra. Thus a temple of Brahmā, the Creator, must have a door on all four sides—the four doors of the sky. A temple of Vishnu, the Preserver, must have one door facing the rising sun, Vishnu taking the place of Sūrya, the ancient Aryan sun-god. A temple of Siva, the Lord of Death, must have one door facing the setting sun. A Brahmā pillar was square, a Vishnu pillar octagonal, and a Siva pillar sixteen-sided. A plain cylindrical pillar symbolised Chandra, the Moon.
4. See H. R. Hall, Ancient History of the Near East, pp. 258-60.
5. See Frazer, The Golden Bough, v. 134.
6. Ancient History of the Near East, p. 200.
7. Ibid., p. 202.
8. The tradition of the high status they held in ancient India survives in the name āchārya, which is used as a cognomen by the higher caste artisans of Southern India in the present day.
9. Rudra, the Vedic form of Siva, seems to have been regarded as the destructive aspect of the Fire-spirit. In Rig-Veda I. cxiv. he is invoked as "the accomplisher of sacrifices, the tortuous," "the destroyer of heroes," and prayers are offered that his "cow-killing and man-slaying weapon" may be averted.
10. The "sea of milk" of Vedic and Puranic mythology is no doubt a poetical simile for the vast stratum of low-lying fleecy clouds which sometimes collects over the Himālayan valleys, the snow-peaks rising above it being compared by the Aryan poets to the lotus-flowers blooming in the Himālayan lakes.
11. See Barnett's Antiquities of India, p. 151.
12. Medhī or methī was also the name of the circle made by the Aryan cattle when they trod out the corn on the threshing-floor.
13. In certain Vedic rites a chariot-wheel was fastened to a post, and turned towards the right by a Brahman, while he chanted a hymn from the Sam-Veda. Hence the expression, "Turning the Wheel of the Law."