1859.] Notes and Queries suggested by a Visit to Orissa. 195 



21. Was Bhubanesar originally Buddhist ? Ifc is singular that no 

 civil buildings remain in Bhubanesar with the exception of some 

 ruins pointed out as the site of the palace of the Kesari rajas, who 

 are said to have founded Bhubanesar A. D. 620, and to have made 

 it the seat of their government. Is it not probable that the exist- 

 ing Sivite temples were made out of Buddhist ones ? In Europe at 

 the Reformation, Roman Catholic Churches were turned to Pro- 

 testant uses. The Brahmans of India adopted the same plan with the 

 buildings of their Buddhist rivals, the Musalmans did the same 

 with Jain buildings. Is it not probable there was a Buddhist Bhu- 

 banesar ? It lay on the high road from Puri to Magadh, and as 

 at Delhi the ground has been the site of three distinct capitals of 

 three different dynasties, so why may Bhubanesar not have been 

 Hindu and Buddhist at successive periods ? 



22. Bock-cut Caves of Khandigiri. Six miles from Bhubanes- 

 ar are the Buddhist Caves of Khandigiri among the oldest in 

 India, executed probably about two centuries B. C, half a century 

 after Buddhism gained a footing in Orissa. The caves of Ajunta 

 were not excavated till about A. D. 1100, and yet it is singular 

 that nine-tenths of the fifty different groups of Buddhist caves in 

 India should be in the Bombay Presidency, so far away from Ma- 

 gadh the seat of Indian Buddhism. The Khandigiri caves are adapt- 

 ed either for solitary ascetics or for monks living in community. 

 Why is the verandah of one of them carved into a form to repre- 

 sent the tiger's head ? The Pali inscriptions over some of the caves 

 which have stood the storms and changes of twenty centuries, afford 

 a strong contrast with the ephemeral paper memorials of the Mah- 

 rattas and Moslems in Orissa. Jain merchants who occasionally 

 come on pilgrimage here have erected a Jain temple on the top of 

 one of those cave hills, behind the temple they heap up memorial 

 stones like the cairns of the Celts. No buildings are near those 

 caves, the Buddhists always preferring their fraternities to be locat- 

 ed away from the din and noise of cities. 



23. Kandralc temple. As a monumental link between the old 

 Vedic worship and Buddhism we have the temple of the Sun or 

 Kanarak, — there is another temple to the Sun at Ajmir — laud- 

 marks on the sand of time to show the passing away of false sys- 



2 b 2 



