at Māmallapuram, near Madras, now known as Arjuna's Rath—the war-car of Arjuna.
The stūpa, as the symbol of the Lord of Death, Siva, was venerated by the Saivas as much as it was by the Jains and Buddhists, the only distinction being that the former did not use it as a reliquary, for relic-worship formed no part of Brahman ritual. The chief difference between the Saiva and Buddhist shrine is that the former is square or octagonal in plan—a cubical cell being the usual Brahmanical symbol for the cosmos[1]—while the latter is circular, or wheel-shaped, the equivalent Buddhist symbol.
The fact that the cubical cell was intended either for the spiritual exercises of a living Yogi or for an image of the deity conditioned the size of it, so the builders, in their endeavours to give height and importance to the shrine, were constrained to pile replicas of it one over the other, gradually diminishing in size so as to form a pyramidal structure. In this case it is a three-storied shrine, the topmost crowned by a solid stūpa dome. Miniature cubicles are placed at the four corners of the terraced roofs, with a rectangular cell in the middle of each side intended for an image in a recumbent pose, like the Buddha in his last sleep of Pari-Nirvāna,[2] or for the ascetic dormitory of a living Yogi.
There is very little difference between the structure of the "Dravidian" dome and that of the Buddhist stūpa-shrine seen at Ajantā. Both are closely related to the ribbed dome of the fire-shrine—probably formed of skins stretched on a wooden or bambu framework—
- ↑ Derived from the ancient idea that the world was square, the sky being supported on four pillars.
- ↑ If the shrine were Brahmanical, it would be for the analogous figure of Vishnu, as Nārāyana, slumbering under the cosmic waters in the coils of the great serpent, Ananta, a symbol for the Milky Way.
