The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

INDIA, NEPAL, AND TIBET 263
vincial Indian Buddhist art before proceeding
to the account of the last stages of development
of Hindu art in India.
The beginnings of art as well as history in
Nepal are so obscured in legend that nothing
can be said with any certainty of early civilization
in the so-called Valley of Nepal, that
beautiful little tract of ground, surrounded by
the peaks of the Himalayas, which has supported
an extremely interesting culture for more than
two thousand years. The original settlers of
Nepal were presumably immigrants from Tibet
who became the ancestors of the ruling Niwar
race and contributed a distinctive Tibetan
character to the religion, language, temperament,
and appearance of the people. Although
pious legend records a visit of the Buddha himself
to Nepal, it is unlikely that the religion of
Sakyamuni was introduced to this Himalayan
fastness before the days of the Emperor Asoka.
Persistent tradition ascribes many monuments
to the piety of Asoka, and it is quite possible that
some of the surviving stupas were originally
dedicated by the great Dharmardja. The entire
later history of Nepal has been linked with
India, especially after the foundation of a feudal
dynasty by the Licchavis from India in the
second century a.d. Nepal and Tibet perpetuated
the forms and the art of Indian Buddhism
after the extinction of the religion in India.
According to tradition, a great many of the
surviving stupas in Nepal are relics of the
legendary visit of Asoka, and it is quite possible
that the essential structure of some of these goes
back to the third century B.C. Traditionally, the
oldest stupas in Nepal are the monument at
Sambhunath and the Bodhnath shrine in
Bhatgaon, which very possibly were built
around tumuli of Mauryan origin. In its present
form the Bodhnath has a typically Nepalese
form [199]. On a square platform rises a rather
flat, saucer-like tumuius, suggestive of the
mounds at Lauriya-Nandangarh. This is surmounted
by a square, box-like construction,
equivalent to the harmika of the Indian relic
mound. The four sides of this member, at
Bodhnath and elsewhere, are decorated with
enormous pairs of eyes painted or inlaid in ivory
and metal. This is perhaps the most distinctive
and striking feature of Nepalese stupa architecture.
Now interpreted as representing the
all-seeing eyes of the supreme Buddha of the
Nepalese pantheon, it is likely that in origin the
symbolism referred to the eyes of Prajapati or
Purusa, who, as Universal Man and world axis,
properly had his eyes at the summit of the skydome.
Above the harmika at Bodhnath rises a
stepped pyramid in thirteen storeys typifying
the thirteen heavens of the devas. This is surmounted
in turn by the finial of the mast or hti,
which in Nepalese stupas was literally a single
199. Bhatgaon, Nepal, Bodhnath stupa ^^c^CtL-