22 L. A. Waddell— Discovery of Buddhist Remains [No. 1, 
The last noted idol has an inscription in mediaeval Nagari, and all 
of them are of very coarse workmanship. But here is the interesting 
point, as bearing on the destruction of the Buddhist settlement: all 
these Brahmanic images have been mutilated in exactly the same manner 
as the Buddhist images: the heads being broken off and the features 
deliberately smashed. No Hindus, nor the hill tribes, who especially 
worship stones, even unsculptured, could have been the destroying 
agents here. It is, therefore, only reasonable to believe, as the local 
tradition relates, that the Muhammadan invaders, not discriminating 
between Buddhist and Brahmanic images, mutilated both alike. Uren, 
it is to be noted, must have felt the full force of the invasion, as it 
lay directly in the line of route to Mungir, a stronghold in which the 
“ invaders soon established themselves, as it seems to have been the 
second town in Southern Bihar ”* at that period. 
Conservation of Buddhist images by the Hindus. —The relatively good 
state of preservation in which many of these fragments of Buddhist 
images are found after the lapse of so many centuries is directly due to 
the extreme veneration, in which images of every kind are held by Hindu 
villagers. The numerous Buddhist images and sculptured stones, now 
collected on the brick mound, marked No. 16 on Plate VI, which seems to 
be the ruins of the deva temple and is now the Kali shrine of the village, 
are reported to have been gathered by the Hindus from the ruins of the 
garh and deposited there, where they now are treasured up. And as 
further fragments from time to time are unearthed, they are added to the 
collection or deposited under one or other of the pipal (Ficus religiosa ) 
trees in the village, where the larger ones are worshipped by daubing 
with red lead. The images of Buddha are thus worshipped under the 
names of Mai ( = mother) or Chandi Mai , Parbati or Devi ( = goddess), 
all of them names of S'iva’s consort—the mild benign expression of the 
images being interpreted as indicating a female ; and the votive chaityas 
are worshipped as lingas (phallus). In such veneration are these images 
held that I had the greatest difficulty in copying the inscriptions and 
taking the photographs. The villagers at first gathered in a rather 
threatening manner, and said that they would not allow their gods to 
be desecrated by the hands of any person, whether Hindu or not. I ex¬ 
plained to them that these Buddhist images were not Hindu gods at all; 
but the villagers still persisted in saying that they had for generations 
become accustomed to regard these images as the grdma-devatd (village- 
gods) of the place, and they would not now give up that belief. Ul¬ 
timately they were somewhat appeased on my promising to touch the 
* Blochmann, oc. c it. 
