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

THE EARLY CLASSIC PERIODS
western frontiers. There is every reason to
believe that this style, together with the technique
of stone-carving, is an importation no
earlier than the consolidation of the Maurya
Empire.
If the capital at Sarnath is completely un-
Indian in its stylistic execution, the ideas these
foreign shapes are intended to express are
completely Indian and by derivation peculiarly
Buddhist in character. In considering this
monument, as indeed every religious memorial
in Indian art history, we must keep in mind that
its primary function was magical and auspicious,
neither 'decorative' nor 'architectural'.
An example of the persistence of Indian
symbolism even in modern times is a curious
detail of the magical ceremonies attending the
investiture of the nineteenth-century monarch
of Siam, King Chulalongkorn. On the four sides
of an artificial mountain erected in the capital
for the occasion there were installed about a font
the effigies of four beasts - the lion, the elephant,
the bull, and the horse - in other words, the
same group that parade around the plinth of
the Sarnath capital. During the ceremony the
Prince received a baptism from these four gargoyles.
This was no more nor less than a piece
of magic for the investiture of a sovereign going
back to the beginnings of Indian metaphysics
and cosmology. It is an illustration of the
principle of pratibimba, the reconstruction in
architecture or sculpture of the imagined
structure of supernatural things or regions, in
order that men may have access to them or
power over them through an imminent symbol.
The artificial hill in Bangkok was the world
mountain Meru, according to ancient cosmology,
towering like a pillar between earth
and heaven; the four beasts stood for the four
quarters and the four rivers of the world, so that
the whole structure was a kind of replica of the
world system. 11 In Bangkok, the Prince's
circumambulation of this fanciful stage-set was
designed magically to ensure his dominion over
the universe reproduced there in a microcosm.
The merry-go-round of the four animals at
Sarnath is simply an earlier example of the
same principle in operation. Various early
legends identify these creatures with the four
great rivers that flow from the four openings of
a magic lake situated at the world's navel in the
Himalayas. 12
One of the legends concerned with the magic
lake, called variously Udaya or Anavatapta,
relates that from the waters of this pool there
rises a great shaft that uplifts a throne to uphold
the sun at noon and then sinks again with the
setting of the orb. The application of this rather
elaborate symbolism to the Sarnath column is
not difficult to explain or understand :
the shaft
of the column is an emblem of the world axis,
rising between heaven and earth, surrounded by
the attributes of the four directions; at its
summit is a Hon throne which, again following
the legend, upholds the great wheel or solar
disk. The lesser disks on the plinth enter into
the iconography, too: originally these wheels
had a precious stone, different for each, inlaid
in the hub. This is another part of the magic
directional symbolism of western Asiatic origin,
since in ancient Mesopotamia different colours
and jewels were associated with the quarters,
and so, too, were different planets; presumably
the lesser disks that are replicas of the great
wheel represented the four great planets that
were in their ascendant, in conjunction with the
sun, at the four equinoxes of the year, suggesting
thereby the position of the sun at the four
seasons of the year. In other words, it appears
that the Sarnath pillar was a time-and-space
symbol, typifying the sun's yearly round
through the heavens, and with the concept of
the axis and the four directions, including the
whole structure of the universe. This cosmology
is, of course, pre-Buddhist, and, like so many
other early myths and metaphysical ideas that
accrued to Buddhism, has been assimilated
as an appropriate emblem of the universal