THE ANCIENT ABBEY OF AJANTA 95
to be anything but Indian. The pillar with a group of animals on the top of it is not, in truth, adapted to the structural uses that it serves at Karli. It is the creation of Asia at an age when pillars were conceived as standing free, to act as landmarks, as vehicles of publication, as memorials of victory, and possibly even as lamp-standards. But this use was common to all Asia, including India, and though the Achamenides adorn Persepolis with it in the sixth century before Christ, and Asoka uses it at Sarnath or at Sanchi in the third, we must remember that the latter is not deliberately copying monuments from a distant site, but is translating into stone a form probably familiar to his people and his age in wood. In the simple chaityas Nine and Ten, at Ajanta — excavated during the same period as Karli, but by simple monks intent upon their use, instead 9f by a great merchant- prince, with his ecclesiastical ostentation — the columns from floor to roof are of unbroken plainness. The result may lose in vividness and splendour, but it certainly gains in solemnity and appropriateness. And the extremes of both these purposes, we must remember, are of the Indian genius.
Other things being equal, it is to be expected that symbols will emanate from the same sources as ideals. For an instance of this we may look at the European worship of the Madonna, Here it is those churches that create and preach the ideal which are also responsible for the symbolism
