52 Annual Addr^si. [l^Eg. 



and their accessories. The late Pandit Bhagwatilal Indraji was the first 

 to point out in 1883, in a paper on the Hathigumpha iiiscriptionj read 

 before the Sixth International Congress of Orientalists at Leyden, that 

 the Jains worshipped stupas. But Hofrath Prof. Biihler's investigations 

 have now fully proved that the hitherto accepted opinion about the "Wheel 

 and Stiipa must henceforth be relegated to the limbo of popular errors. 

 The remnants of a Jain stiipa have been discovered at Mathura. Indeed 

 under the influence of the old error, it was at first thought that it must 

 be Buddhist ; but when ruins of two Jain temples were found in the 

 closest proximity and all the other numerous evidences of Jainism, such 

 as inscriptions and images of Jain saints, came to light, the true 

 character of the stiipa as a Jain monument could no longer be doubted. 

 This discovery has been confirmed by the discovery of sculptured slabs, 

 on which Jain stupas with all their accessories are fully represented, 

 closely resembling those hitherto known to us as Buddhist. Hofrath 

 Prof. Biihler has even gone further and shown that the building and 

 worshipping of stupas was an ancient practice common not only to the 

 Buddhists and Jains, but also to other and even orthodox Brahnianic 

 orders of ascetics. One of the most curious discoveries is an inscribed 

 and sculptured slab, which formed the pedestal of a Jain statue. It shows 

 the representation of a Wheel mounted on a trident, exactly in the same 

 wny as seen on Buddhist monuments, and proves that the celebrated 

 Wheel is not a distinctive mark of the Buddhists. The inscription 

 states that the statue was put up by a Jain lay-woman under the advice 

 of her spiritual director, and the portrait-figures of these are sculp- 

 tured on the slab in the act of worshipping the sacred symbol. The 

 inscription further states that the statue was put up in a year probably 

 corresponding to 157 A.D., at a votive stupa which was built by the 

 Gods. That phrase " built by the Gods " shows that the stupa must 

 have been an extremely ancient one, since in the second century A.D. its 

 real origin had already been forgotten, and a myth did duty for historical 

 truth. The conclusion is inevitable that the stupa must have been 

 erected several centuries earlier, and this is confirmed by a tradition 

 which Hofrath Prof. Biihler has discovered in one of the Jain books. "^ 

 According to that tradition, the stupa was still in existence in the 

 middle of the ninth century A.D., when it underwent repairs, and was 

 encased in stone. Originally it is said to have been built of bricks, and 

 to have enshrined a gold casket dedicated to Par9vanatha. This gold 

 casket had been brought, as it is said, by the gods to Mathura, and was 

 for a long time kept exposed to view for the worship of the Jains ; 



T Jiuaprabha's Tirthakalpa ; see the Transactions of the Vienna Academy of 

 Sciences, Vol. CXXXVII. 



