________________
DECEMBER, 1893.]
NOTES ON ANTIQUITIES IN RAMANNADESA.
363
rousing students in Burma to a deep examination of the splendid antiquities about them, and observing, as indeed one cannot help doir.g, the unanimity with which they hold that Burmese Buddhism has always been what it is now, and their tendency to refer everything Vaishnava or Saiva in form to & supposed pre-Buddhistic Hinduism, I would draw prominent attention to some remarks made by Brian Hodgson nearly 70 years ago. The cantion he inculcates is to my mind as important now as it was in those early days of Buddhistic research.
Writing in 1827 and 1828, he says: “It is the parpose of the following paper to furnish to those who have means and inclination to follow them out, a few bints relative to the extreme resemblance that prevails between many of the symbols of Buddhism and saivism Having myself resided some few years in a Bauddha country (Népål], I have had ample opporta. nity.of noting this resemblattce, and a perosal of the works of Crawfurd, of Raffles, and of the Bombay Literary Society, has satisfied me that this curious similitude is not peculiar to the country wherein I abide. I observe that my countrymen, to waom any degree of identity between faiths, in general so opposite to each other as Saivism and Buddhism, never seems to have occurred, have, in their examination of the monuments of India and its islands, proceeded on an assumption of the absolute incommunity between the types of the two religions, as well as between the things typified. This assumption has puzzled them not a little, so often as the evidence of their examination has forced upon them the observation of images in the closest juxtaposition, which their previons, ideas, nevertheless, obliged them to sunder as far apart as Brahmanism and Buddhism.
“When, in this country in which I reside, I observed images the most apparently Saiva placed in the precinots of Saugata (Buddhist ] temples, I was at first inclined to consider the circumstance as an incongruity, arising out of ignorant confusion of the two creeds by the people of this country. But, upon multiplying my observations, such a resolution gave me no satisfaction. These images often occupied the very penetralia of Sangata temples, and in the sequel I obtained sufficient access to the conversation and books of the Bauddhas to convince me that the cause of the difficulty lay deeper than I had supposed. The best informed of the Bauddhas contemptuously rejected the notion of the images in question being Baive, and in the books of their own faith they pointed out the Bauddha tegends, justifying and explaining their use of such, to me, doubtful symbols. Besides, my access to the Europeen works, of which I have already spoken, exhibited to me the very same apparent anomaly existing in regions the most remote from one another and from that wherein I dwell. Indeed, whencesoever Banddha monumente, sculptural or architectural, had been drawn by European curiosity, the same dubious symbols were exhibited; nor could my curiosity be at all appeased by the assumption which I found employed to explain them. I showed these monuments to a well informed old Bauddha, and asked him what he thought of them, particularly the famous Trimurti image of the Cave Temple of the west. He recognized it as a genuine Banddha image! As he did many others, declared by our writers to be Saiva!.............. The purpose of my paper is to show that very many symbols, the most apparently Saiva, are, notwithstanding, strictly and purely Bauddha; and that, therefore, in the examination of the antiquities of India and its islands, we need not vex ourselves, because on the sites of old Saugata temples we find the very gontus looi arrayed with many of the apparent attitudes of a Saiva god. Far loss need we infer, from the presence, on such sites, of seemingly Saiva images and types, the presence of actual Saivism. ............ Upon the whole, therefore, I deem it bertain, as
"On the extreme resemblance that prevails between many of the symbols of Buddhism and Seivism." Oriental Quarterly Magasins, vii. 218ff. viii. 858ff. Languages, etc., of Népdi, 13311.
N Q. Crawford, Sketches of the Hindus, 1792, or perhaps J. Crawford, History of the Indian Archipelago. In the former work, Vol. ii. p. 1178., is an scoount of the "Afterkty between the religion of Siam, China, Japan, and Thibet, and that of Hindustan," the author remarking in a tootnote to p. 117, " with the religion of Arracan and Pegu we are not much acquainted; but, as far as I had been able to learn, it is almost the same with that of Siam." In 1786, Flonest, the traveller, sent home a long hooount of the “Religions des Peguans et des Brama" (Toung Pao, ii. 7.), but it seems to have been official and to have never been published till 1891.
