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KUVERA

escaped massacre or slavery. The traditions of North Indian temple metal-workers have been also preserved in Nepal to the present day, but owing to their inaccessibility the Nepalese monasteries and temples have not yet furnished as much material for the student of Indian sculpture as those of Southern India; but some fine images collected for the Government Art Gallery, Calcutta, are illustrated in my Indian Sculpture and Painting. The splendid temple lamps and sacrificial vessels of Nepal are better known, for they have long had an established place in the collections of curio-hunters.


THE LESSER DEITIES

To the deities symbolising the deeper metaphysical theories of Indo-Aryan religion are added a host of lesser divinities representing popular ideas, such as Kuvera, the god of wealth; Ganēsha, the elephant-god; and Hanuman, the monkey-god. Kuvera, the king of the gnomes, or yakshas, who guard the treasures hidden in the earth, is probably a creation of the miner's fancy, He appears in many countries under various forms. In India he was especially popular in the Gandharan country, and a stone sculpture from Huvishka's monastery (Pl. LXIX, a), now in the Mathurā Museum, shows him as a jovial and thirsty dwarf who is plied with drink by an attentive handmaiden. Here he is a very characteristic miner's hobgoblin. In the fine copper-gilt statuette from Nepal (Pl. LXIX, b) he is treated with more dignity and with greater technical refinement. He has here developed into a four-armed deity for which a fat Brahman teacher might have been the model. He is in the ritualistic pose of "royal ease," expounding