image,[1] paid homage to their living and dead saints—those who had reached Nirvāna. But when Buddhism entered upon the bhakti-marga, the popular craving could not be resisted. Similarly the philosophic Brahman, when he tried to gain converts to the jnāna-marga among the masses, was forced to show them the image of the Great Yogi and the place where He dwelt on earth. The comparative lateness of the appearance of Saiva temples and images should not, however, be taken as evidence of the late origin of the cult. The way of knowledge is always the most difficult to find, and the abstruse philosophic ideas which form the basis of Vedic wisdom are not those which appeal directly to popular imagination. Moreover, the Brahmans, as the special custodians of the Vedic tradition, would naturally be the last to sanction any deviation from the Vedic forest ritual, in which wood, thatch, and clay were deliberately chosen for the temple service in preference to more permanent and costly materials. Siva's abode is placed in the Himālayas, and the cult which is so distinctively Brahmanical had its original Indian home in the north, though its early ideals and symbols may have been brought by the first Aryan invaders from Iran or Mesopotamia. But at the present time the Saivas predominate in the south, and the best of the Saiva sculpture now extant mostly belongs to the period of the Chola Empire, or from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries a.d., when the disturbed
- ↑ The prohibition of the graven image by the Buddha and later religious reformers was probably directed against its common employment in sorcery and the black art rather than against its use as an aid to religious devotion. The making of the image of an enemy who was to be destroyed was a usual part of the ritual of the sorcerer; and belief in the effect of his spells was at the root of the furious iconoclasm which so often attended popular religious movements.
