58 Ancient Indian Weights. [No. 2, 



the course in other lands, it is clear that, in India, it was primarily 

 needful for the success of any new creed, to humour the prejudices, and 

 consult the eye-training of the multitude, as identified and associated 

 with past superstitious observances. 



Among other figures of very frequent occurrence and very varying 

 outlines, a leading place must be given in this series to the so-called 

 Chaityas. There is little doubt but that the normal tumulus originally 

 suggested the device, for even to the last, amid all the changes its 

 pictorial delineation was subjected to, there remains the clear ideal 

 trace of the central crypt, for the inhumation of ashes, or the deposit 

 of sacred objects, to which it was devoted in later times. 



Much emphasis has been laid upon the peculiarly Buddhistic cha- 

 racter of this symbol. It is quite true that its form ultimately entered 

 largely into the exoteric elements of that creed, but it is doubtful if 

 Buddhism, as expounded by Sdhya Sinha, was even thought of when 

 these fanciful tumuli were first impressed upon the public money ; and 

 to show how little of an exclusive title the Buddhists had to the chaitya 

 as an object of religious import,* it may be sufficient to cite the fact 

 that, so far as India is concerned, its figured outline appears in con- 

 junction wtth unquestionable planetary devices on the coins of the Sah 

 kings of Surashtra,f who clearly were not followers of Dharma. But, 

 as the Buddhist religion avowedly developed itself in the land, and 

 was no foreign importation, nothing would be more reasonable than 

 that its votaries should retain and incorporate into their own ritualism 

 many of the devices that had already acquired a quasi -reverence among 

 the vulgar, even as the Sun reasserted its pristine prominence so cer- 

 tainly and unobtrusively, that its traditional worshippers, at the last, 

 scarcely sought to know through what sectional division of composite 

 creeds their votive offerings were consigned to the divinity whose 

 " cultus" patriarchal sages, here and elsewhere, had intuitively in- 

 augurated. 



Many of the singular linear combinations classed in the Plate under 

 D, as Nos. 15, 16, which it would be difficult otherwise to interpret, 



* Prinsep, " Jour. A. S. B.," iv. p. 687. 



f " Jour. Royal Asiatic Society," xii. p. 1. Prinsep's " Essays," i., p. 425 ; 

 ii. pi. xxxvii. p. 84. " Jour. As. Soc. Bengal," vi. 377 ; vii. 347. Prinsep's 

 l-eading of his coin (No. 11, p. 354, " Jour. A. S. B.") as Jinaddmd, "votary of 

 Buddha," was an error; the name is Jitva Ddma, 



