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

7i
dominion of the Buddha's Law. This emblem
could be taken as a partial proof of the pre-
Asokan origin of the whole pillar. The Buddha's
turning of the Wheel of the Law is anagogically
a turning of the solar wheel, controlling the sun
in its diurnal path through the skies. The turning
of the Wheel is one of the powers inherent in
the early Indian concept of the universal ruler
or Cakravartin assumed by the Buddha; the
Sarnath column may be interpreted, therefore,
not only as a glorification of the Buddha's
preaching, symbolized by the crowning wheel,
but also, through the cosmological implications
of the whole pillar, as a symbol of the universal
extension of the power of the Buddha's Law, as
typified by the sun that dominates all space and
all
time, and simultaneously an emblem of the
universal extension of Maurya imperialism
22. Bull capital from Rampurva.cL^^"^
New Delhi, Presidential Palace
c
through the Dharma. The whole structure is,
then, a translation of age-old Indian and Asiatic
cosmology into artistic terms of essentially
foreign origin, and dedicated, like all Asoka's
monuments, to the glory of Buddhism and the
royal house.
As has already been suggested, it is not
certain whether all the Maurya columns were
actually erected under Asoka, or whether some
of them set up by his predecessors were
appropriated by this sovereign for Buddhist
usage. This is especially likely in the case of
those pillars which are surmounted by the
shapes of single animals. The form suggests the
royal standards or dhvaja stambhas used by pre-
Asokan rajahs; the idea of the animal symbol on
a column is of ancient Mesopotamian origin.
One of the finest examples of this simpler type
is
the bull capital from Rampurva [22]. This is
the capital of one of a pair of columns. The
companion pillar was surmounted by a single
lion, not unlike the finial of the Idt at Lauriya
Xandangarh. Iconographically, the exact significance
of the bull as a symbol in Buddhism is
rather difficult to discern; it may have been
either a Brahmanic emblem or the heraldic