Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/88

BUDDHIST ARCHITECTURE. BOOK I. CHAPTER II. STAMBHAS OR LATS. IT is not clear whether we ought to claim a wooden origin for these, as we can for all the other objects of Buddhist archi- tecture. Certain it is, however, that the lats of Ajoka, with shafts averaging twelve diameters in height, are much more like wooden posts than any forms derived from stone architecture, and in an age when wooden pillars were certainly employed to support the roofs of halls, it is much more likely that the same material should be employed for the purposes to which these stambhas were applied, than the more intractable material of stone. The oldest authentic examples of these lats that we are acquainted with, are those which King Ajoka set up in the twenty-seventh year after his consecration the thirty-first of his reign to bear inscriptions conveying to his subjects the leading doctrines of the new religion he had adopted. The rock-cut edicts of the same king are dated in his twelfth year, and convey in a less condensed form the same information Buddhism without Buddha but inculcating respect to parents and priests, kindness and charity to all men, and, above all, tenderness towards animal life. 1 The best known of these lats is that removed from Topra in Ambala district, and set up in 1356, by Firoz Shah Tughlak, in his Kotila at Delhi, without, however, his being in the least aware of the original purpose for which it was erected, or the contents of the inscription. A fragment of a second was found lying on the ridge, north of Delhi, where it had been set up by Firoz 1 These inscriptions have been pub- lished in various forms and at various times by Sanskrit scholars, such as Burnouf, Kern, Senart, Biihler, etc. Among these reference may be made to ]. Senart, ' Les Inscriptions de Piyadasi ' (2 vols.) Paris, 1881-1886; Buhler, in ' Epigraphia Indica,' vols. i. and ii. ; and 'Archaeological Survey of Southern India,' vol. i. Among other things, they explain to us negatively why we have so little history in India in these days. Ajoka is only busied about doctrines. He does not even mention his father's name ; and makes no allusion to any historical event, not even those connected with the life of the founder of the religion. Among a people so careless of genealogy, history is impossible.