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The Destruction of Sarnath.

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Kittoe: all has been sacked and burnt, priests, temples, idols, all together. In some places bones, iron, timber, idols, &c., are all fused into huge heaps; and this has happened more than once.' Proofs of a great final catastrophe by fire have been afforded by 'pieces of charred wood with nails sticking in some of them,' ' stores of unhusked rice only partially burnt,' and 'evident traces of fire on the stone pillars, umbrellas, and statues.' From 'the remains of ready-made wheaten cakes,' and from 'portions of wheat and other grain spread out in one of the cells,' the destruction of Sarnath is concluded to have been both sudden and unexpected.' Such a conclusion is well borne out by the following account of Mr Thomas, late Judge of Benares:— The chambers on the eastern side of the square were found filled with a strange medley of uncooked food, hastily abandoned on their floors,-pottery of everyday life, nodes of brass produced apparently by the melting down of the cooking vessels in common use. Above these again were the remnants of the charred timbers of the roof, with iron nails still remaining in them, above which again appeared broken bricks mixed with earth and rubbish to the height of the extant walls, some six feet from the original flooring. Every item here bore evidence of a complete conflagration, and so intense seems to have been the heat, that in portions of the wall still standing, the clay, which formed the substitute for lime in binding the brick-work, is baked to a similar consistency with the bricks themselves. In short, all existing indications lead to a necessary inference that

the destruction of the building, by whomsoever caused, was effected by fire applied by the hand of an exterminating adversary, rather than by any ordinary accidental conflagration.'

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The work of excavation at Sarnath had been going on until a recent period. The idols and sculptures dug from that place have scarcely turned out in an entire state. Many of these curiosities are deposited in the museum of the Benares College. Among the various articles exhumed the most remarkable are 'pestles and mortar sills (or flat stones for mashing), loongas, &c., &c., found in a large quadrangle or hospital,' 'fine specimens of carved bricks;' 'heads of Buddha, made of pounded bricks and road-earth, coated with fine shelllime, in beautiful preservation;' 'a fine head of a female in white marble (partly calcined), and a portion of the arm;' two stone umbrellas, one in fragments (burnt) of six feet diameter, mushroom-shaped, and another, also burnt, but not broken, elegantly carved in scroll on the inside, but nearly defaced by the action of saltpetre;' 'a square, elaborately corniced block, that was the seat of the Teacher for the daily reading and expounding of the Buddhist Scriptures;' and 'an impression in burnt clay, of a seal, 11⁄2 inch in diameter, with two lines of Sanscrit, surmounted by a lozengeshaped device, with two recumbent deer as supporters.' The device of the two deer is said to prove that the seal belonged to a monk of the Deer Park monastery at Sarnath, whose name is stated in the inscription to have

Sarnath,-Monasteries, Temples, Mosques. 299

been Sri Saddharma Rakshita, or the cherisher of the true Dharmma.

According to Hwen Thsang, there were no less than 30 monasteries at Sarnath, containing about 3000 monks. These edifices must have been of various ages-having been built from time to time during the ascendancy of Buddhism from the time of Asoca to that of the Gupta dynasty. Their number must have increased under the Pal kings of Bengal. Few of the Buddhistic buildings have escaped the ruthless hand of spoliation. The Brahmins demolished the greater number of them, and raised upon their sites temples, which in their turn were again converted into mosques by the Mahomedans. Upon the sites of Buddhist temples and from the materials of Buddhist monasteries, did the Brahmins build their shrines of Ad-Biseswara, of Kirt-Biseswara, of Banee Madhoo, the Bakarya Koond, and others. Many of these fell into the hands of the Mussulmans, and were altered and modified by them to form the Mosque of Aurungzebe, the Kangura Mosque, the Alamgiri Mosque, and the Choukhamba Mosque. Of the early Vedist Benares there probably exist no remains, and supposing them to do, it is difficult to recognize them. But the débris of Buddhist Benares 'may be traced in the multitude of carved stones, portions of capitals, shafts, bases, friezes, architraves, and so forth-inserted into modern buildings in the northern and north-western quarters of the city. These fragments exhibit a great diversity of style, from the severely simple to the exceedingly ornate,

and are in themselves a sufficient proof of the former existence of buildings, of styles of architecture corresponding to themselves, yet differing in many important respects from the styles of modern Hindoo and Mahomedan structures, and coinciding with those of ancient temples and monasteries of the Gupta and preGupta periods, the ruins of which are still existing in various parts of India.' It either indicates a great ignorance or deep craftiness of the present Brahmins to state that Benares forms the city of Shiva from an unfathomable antiquity, when Buddha had been worshipped there for more than a thousand years, when the temple of Ad-Biseswara may be detected to have been raised upon the ruins of a Buddhist monastery, and when the Kasi of the early Hindoos occupied a different site from that of Benares, which, in popular tradition, is said to have been built and named by Rajah Banar, probably at some period between the fifth and eighth centuries of the Christian era—a period remarkable for the influence once possessed by the followers of Shiva, and for those desolating wars of Sambhu and Ni-sambhu (Shivites and Buddhists), which are magnified to have been the most bloody in the annals of Hindoo warfare.

CHAPTER VII.

By

October 26.—FAST as four wheels and a four-legged animal could carry us, we were on our way to Allahabad. The night was high when we passed by Gopigunge, missing that place of mutiny-notoriety. eight o'clock this morning we had glibly rolled over a road seventy-two miles long, and stood upon the left bank of the Ganges. On the other side rose in view the city of Pururava, the Pratishthana of the Aryas, the Prayag of the Puranists, and the Allahabad of Akbar. The river intervened, and on its surface lay the bridge of boats floating like a leviathan. The bridge was yet incomplete for an opening in the middle,—and it told much against our patience to lose two precious hours in crossing by the ferry of a primitive age.

The first thing we did on landing was to go at once to the famous prayag or junction of the Ganges and Jumna. It was not until standing upon that tongue of land, where the two holy streams have met, that we felt ourselves really in the city of Allahabad. The Ganges at Calcutta is scarcely an interesting object to the dull eye of familiarity. The Ganges at Benares is forgotten in the more absorbing associations of the city of Shiva.

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