1864.] 



On the Ruins of Buddha Gaya. 



181 



left, and the rest to the right foot. The scholiast has pointed out at 

 length the different places which these marks should occupy and the 

 objects they subserve at those places. His opinion has been ques- 

 tioned, and Vaisnava writers of eminence have distributed these marks 

 in very different ways. None has, however, to my knowledge, brought 

 them together within a circle on the centre of the sole, as we find 

 them at Buddha Gray a. 



The date of the inscription on the Buddhapad is S'aka 1230 = A, D. 

 1308, and the characters are the nearest remove from the modern Deva- 

 nagari. The inscription must have been engraved immediately after 

 the completion of the sculpture of the feet, for it is not likely that 

 the profane hands of an engraver would be allowed to touch a stone, 

 which had been, for any length of time, sanctified by the adoration 

 of thousands, while the Hindu character of the emblems does not 

 permit the supposition of the stone having existed at Buddha Gaya 

 during the supremacy of the Buddhists. They suggest the idea that 

 the foot-marks in question are of Hindu origin, and were put up by 

 Hindus to reduce the place and its old associations to the service of 

 their creed. Such adoption, whether insidious or avowed, of the holy 

 places as well as the rites and ceremonial observances of one sect by 

 another, has been common enough in the history of religion. We 

 meet with it everywhere, and no where more prominently than in 

 India among the Hindus and the Buddhists. There is scarcely one 

 Hindu temple in ten of any great age in which is not to be seen some 

 relic of Buddhism borrowed by the Brahminists. The great temple 

 of Poori, which every year draws together pilgrims by hundreds 

 of thousands from all parts of India, most of whom are prepared to lay 

 down their lives for the truth and sanctity of the holy idol Jagannatha, 

 is a Buddhist edifice built on the plan, and very much in the style, of 

 the sacred monument at Buddha Graya, # and the idol itself is no other 

 than an emblem of Dharma, the second member of the Buddhist triad 

 represented by the old Pali letters y. r. v. I s. ; while tradition 

 still preserves the memory of its Buddhist origin and calls Jaggan- 

 natha the incarnation of Buddha, (JBuddhdvatdraJ.f It is not too much 



* A closer parallel is met with in the temple of Barrolli near the fall of the 

 Chambul. The domical structure on its top and that of the Poori monument 

 is not however met with at Buddha Gaya. 



t C unnin g nam ' s Bhilsa Topes, p. 358 and Laidlay's Fa Hian, p. 21 — 261. There 

 is an inscription on the temple of Jagannatha which assigns, the temple to Ananga 



