58 Ancient Indian Weights. [No. 2, 
the course in other lands, it is clear that, in India, it was primarily 
neediul 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 Sdkya 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 chattya 
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 Séh 
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. 8, B.,” iv. p. 687. 
7 “Jour. Royal Asiatic Society,” xii. p. 1, Prinsep’s “ Essays,” i., p. 425; 
ii. pl. xxxvii, p. 84, “Jour. As. Soc. Bengal,” vi. 377; vii. 347. Prinsep’s 
reading of his coin (No. 11, p. 354, “ Jour, A. 8. B.’) as Jinadémd, © votary of 
Buddha,” was an error; the name is Jia Dama, 

