INDIAN ARCHITECTURE.
India—the land of enchantment and wonder, lighted by the clear 'southern sky, endowed with magic beauty, embracing the grandeur of all climes from eternal ice to tropical verdure, possessed of stupendous moun tain-ranges, of majestic forests, of mighty rivers, of broad and fertile valleys, as also of morass and desert of wide extent, teeming with Nature's most valued products, and enriched with a profusion of vegetable forms and a variety of animal life scarce conceivable—must in the earliest ages have tempted man to fix his abode within its hounds.
From the first the luxuriant richness of the land must have had its 'effect upon the inhabitants, and must have imposed its imaginative ex uberance upon their civilization without especially accentuating it in an intellectual direction. It was not simply the charm of beauty that gave direction to the fancy of the people: the awe-inspiring solemnity and weirdness of Nature also had their influence.
Even in the earliest times we have here a developed and brilliant culture, but we are unable to follow it from point to point in chronological order or to ascertain the relative antiquity of each element. Old though the culture is, our historical knowledge of it is comparatively recent.
Dreaming, admiring, seeing and feeling the wonders of Nature, musing and striving for knowledge, and finding in that knowledge the highest happiness, yet seeking it with, the imagination rather than with the intel lect, the people of India lived on, perhaps for thousands of years, to other people a mystery as great as the land itself. The Greeks celebrated the wisdom of the Indian philosophers and from it derived their own.
Ancient as reverence for the past, for the fixed facts of history and its useful lessons, increases, so also slowly grows the desire to give it monumental expression—the longing to execute works which shall outlast time, which shall remain entire to distant generations and convey to posterity the fame of the age in which they were erected.
The land is filled with the ruins of extinct cities, it is everywhere covered with the remains of temples, palaces, and other works, but these have not all been explored. Those with which we are acquainted point not to high antiquity, but to an age which must have been preceded by a series of stages before the works known to us could possibly have been executed. Where shall we find the first? They can scarcely be other than those which show relations with the ancient civilization of Western Asia; so that the origin of Indian architecture may well be sought there.
Literature and older than the monuments of the land is its poetry. The Vedas are a collection of religious narratives which go back to 1800-1500 B. C., and were brought into their existing shape in the seventh century before Christ. Somewhat more recent is the rhythmic book of laws of Manu. The great epics Ramayana and Ma/lab/lora/a were composed about moo B. C. Though poesy goes back so far, it is not until 115 the sixth century E. C. that reliable chronology commences. The oldest inscriptions on stone belong to the. middle of the third century.
The Brahmanical Cult was in its fantastic and sophistical obscurity, in its voluptuousness as in its barbarity, the perfect outcome of the peculiar nature of the land and of the national character induced by it. Out of the primitive nature-worship it rose to the knowledge of one supreme God, in whom, as an impersonal, uncreated All, resided the totality of all knowledge and all happiness, and near whom circled personal gods who in great numbers peopled the Indian Olympus and were worshipped with fantastic ceremonies.
The Cult of Buddha, or Sakya Muni, King of Magadba, was a return to the simple naturalistic foundation. But even his time—which may have been'about 600 B. C.—is variously given. He has become a hero of the imagination. In the time of Alexander the Great, whose entrance into India gives ns the first authentic particulars, the two sects lived in friendly relations.