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
- ↑ 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.)
- ↑ The metaphor of the Eightfold Path was borrowed from the processional path of the Aryan fortified settlement, which generally had eight gates.
