more likely an iconic equivalent of the royal title, "King of the Four Quarters," adopted by all Egyptian kings from about 2,000 b.c., and brought to India by the Aryans from Mesopotamia. The Indo-Aryan kings used the term Chakra-vartin as an equivalent, implying that the world was a round plane, whereas in Egypt it was thought to be square.
Temples of Brahmā are now very rare, but in every Siva temple the Creator is worshipped in the ancient Mesopotamian solar symbol of the bull and in the lingam. At the great temple of Elephanta, dating from about the seventh century a.d., the cubical shrine with four doors guarded by the eight regents of the quarters is a Brahmā shrine. It was originally occupied by the superb sculpture shown in Pl. LIX, b. The lingam is here metamorphosed into an image of Brahmā[1] as King of the Four Quarters, the top of the lingam which surmounted the fourfold royal tiara being broken. The Buddhist had an equivalent symbol in a cubical shrine surmounted by a stūpa to represent the Adi-Buddha, the Creator, whose consort, or sakti, was Prajnāpāramitā, transcendental wisdom, an idea evidently borrowed from the Vedic idea of Brahmā. It is probable that the Saiva lingam very frequently took this form of a Brahmā image before Muhammadan iconoclasm compelled Hindu sculptors to content themselves with the plain lingam now used as a symbol of the Creator.
A fine statue of Brahmā from Java (Pl. LIX, a), now in the Ethnographic Museum at Leyden, gives a different but very dignified conception of the Grand-
- ↑ The esoteric teaching of the Saiva-Siddhāntins indicates this image as Sadāsiva-mūrti, the formless, incomprehensible Brahman (see Elements of Hindu Iconography, by T. A. Gopinath Rao, vol. ii, part ii); but as it is obviously impossible for the temple sculptor to render such abstract conceptions, he gives them a popular interpretation.
