the cenotaph and bodhi-tree of the great Rishi who taught the universal Law of Life (Pl. V).
It is impossible in this work to give an adequate impression of the richness, beauty, and variety of Sānchī sculpture: some of it is primitive and archaic, some—like the reliefs (Pl. VII) on the rail of the stūpa No. II, built on the western slope of the hill—are as cultured in design and accomplished in technique as Italian Cinquecento work. These reliefs resemble very closely the work of the Amarāvatī stūpa, the remains of which are now divided between the Madras Museum and the British Museum.
The bas-reliefs of Amarāvatī (Pl. VIII), forming the decoration of the railing and of the marble casing of the stūpa itself, should properly be studied in connection with the fresco paintings of Ajantā. They must have resembled the latter very closely when the colour and gilding with which they were finished were intact; the technical treatment also is usually much more pictorial than plastic. A good artistic monograph on these superb fragments would be of great value in filling up the hiatus in Indian art history which has been made by the almost complete ruin of the early pictorial record, but this goes beyond the scope of the present handbook.
At Sānchī, as at Amarāvatī and elsewhere, there are many evidences of the cosmopolitan life of the ancient capitals of India, which must have been hardly less striking than it appears at Calcutta and Bombay in the present day. But nevertheless the dominating influence in Sānchī sculpture is not foreign, but Indian or Indo-Aryan, for here one can see how perfectly the Aryan culture of Vedic times had adapted itself to its Indian environment, and learnt to penetrate with true artistic insight into the exuberant life of Indian nature.
