This sort of speculation went on well into the nineteenth century. It was only from non-Indian sources that gradually a true and wholly unexpected picture of the origins of Buddhism emerged. William Chambers, the man who had first reported
on the boulder temples of Mahabalipuram, read a French account of Thailand and made the important identification of the Thai god, known as Pout or Codom, with the Ceylonese deity known as Buddha or Gautam. He also suggested that this Pout or Codom had once been worshipped in parts of India. This was borne out by Francis Buchanan, a naturalist and surveyor, who visited Burma in the late 1790s. He
made a useful study of Buddhist ritual there as well as reporting that the Buddha had been an Indian from Bihar.
Ten years later Buchanan’s surveying actually took him to Bihar: it was not long before he found further evidence. At Boddh Gaya, the name of which was a clue in itself, he declared that the extensive ruins, including the pyramidal temple, were clearly Buddhist in origin. Statues of
the Buddha were scattered through the neighbourhood to a radius of fifteen miles and were now objects of worship to the Hindus. Indeed the temple itself was now in the charge of Brahmins. But they admitted to being puzzled by its origins. Every now and then strange visitors from far-off lands would descend on them and reverently tour the overgrown ruins with ancient books in their hands. Only the
previous year, 1811, one such, ‘a man of some rank with several attendants [who] came from a country called Tamsa-dwip-maha-amarapura-paigu’ had arrived out of the blue. He claimed that the place had once been the residence of Gautama and that the temple was built by ‘Dharma Ashoka, king of Pandaripuk’. Buchanan knew that Gautama was the Buddha and correctly identified the strangers as from Burma;
but Ashoka and Pandaripuk (Pataliputra) meant nothing to him. Neither did he realize that Boddh Gaya was venerated, not as the residence of the Buddha, but as the place of his enlightenment.
It was not till the 1820s that Buddhist studies really got off the ground. Brian Hodgson had visited Sanchi soon after Captain Fell. His curiosity was aroused and, as the lone British representative in Kathmandu,
he resolved to take advantage of his unique position in a still partly Buddhist country. ‘Although the regular investigation of such a subject was foreign to my pursuits, [I commenced] a full and accurate investigation of this almost unknown subject.’ The Nepalese monks were far from co-operative, but Hodgson soon accumulated a horde of Buddhist scriptures and then found ‘an old Buddha residing
in the city of Patan’ who was willing to divulge some of the sect’s secrets. Hodgson drew up a detailed questionnaire and, on the basis of the old man’s answers, prepared a sketch of Buddhist beliefs. But when he proceeded to compare the results of the questionnaire with the textual evidence, he almost gave up. ‘I began to feel my want of languages, and (to confess the truth) of patience.’
His
collection of manuscripts was getting out of hand. It was already the largest hoard in existence and included two copies of the Tibetan encyclopaedia of sacred learning, which runs to 367 volumes, each of more than 100,000 leaves and each leaf about two feet long. Donated by the trunkload to the libraries of London, Paris and Calcutta, this collection was destined to provide the foundation for all
future Buddhist studies. But Hodgson’s immediate problem was that there seemed to be considerable divergence between Buddhism as now practised and traditional Buddhism as revealed in the texts. Even on the subject of the Buddha’s birthplace there was no agreement; ‘but all the places named are Indian’. Clearly both doctrine and practice had undergone a long process of change. On the other hand
it was interesting that Buddhism, like Hinduism, was still a living religion and a thriving culture. To scholars used to the idea that all classical civilizations were dead civilizations, it came as a revelation that in Asia they tended to be still going strong. One really could study the past through the present. Jones himself had been struck by the idea that it was like discovering an enclave of
Greeks who still spoke ancient Greek, read their Homer and consulted the Delphic oracle. Hodgson, with his questionnaire, was exploiting this situation. He was, for instance, able to provide a guide to the stylistic conventions used in sculptures of the Buddha. And he furnished an engraving of a modern Nepalese
stupa
which was clearly a descendant of Sanchi’s.
Meanwhile, far away in the western
extremity of the Himalayas, another scholar, in rather different circumstances, was poring over the sacred texts of the Tibetans. Alexander Czoma de Koros had originally armed himself with a stout stick and set off to walk from his native Hungary to China. In 1822, two years and several thousand miles later, he ran into William Moorcroft, the legendary explorer of the Western Himalayas. Moorcroft
had travelled in Tibet and was deeply attracted to Buddhism. He urged de Koros to take up the study of the Tibetan texts and provided him with the limited funds he needed (de Koros lived off Tibetan tea, and his only possessions were a single change of clothes). Moorcroft then headed for Afghanistan and promptly disappeared; but, thanks to the intervention of the Asiatic Society, de Koros continued
to receive a frugal stipend. In the cliff-top monasteries of Ladakh and Kinnaur he sat cross-legged through the cruel Himalayan winters, oblivious of all but the text before him. He compiled the first-ever Tibetan dictionary and grammar and began to make important contributions to the elucidation of the Buddhist mysteries.
With Hodgson and de Koros able to provide textual interpretations, archaeological
discoveries came into their own. In the early 1820s the British representative at Bhopal, Henry Maddock, inspired by Fell’s hint that there might be hidden chambers in the Sanchi stupas, attempted to open the Great Stupa. If it was indeed a pyramid of some sort it might contain treasure, or at least some clue to its origin and purpose. But Maddock was disappointed. The
stupa
did not consist of
sealed chambers, but was indeed a solid mass of masonry. He retired with nothing to show for his labours but a gaping hole in one side of the monument, a mound of rubble, another collapsed gateway, and a lasting reputation as one of the raj’s vandals.
Inspired by no nobler motives, a further attempt was made to explore a
stupa
in 1830. This time the would-be tomb-robber was one of a band of ex-Napoleonic
officers now serving under the independent rajah of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh. The
stupa
in question was a lofty domed edifice at Manikyala, near Rawalpindi, in what is now Pakistan. Encamped in the vicinity with no obvious employment for his soldiery, General Ventura directed them to dig into the ruin. A British mission twenty years earlier had thought it might be Greek; it was worth investigating.
Like Maddock, Ventura first tried to excavate a hole in the side and succeeded only in collapsing vast quantities of rubble. But, with time and unlimited labour, he adopted a different approach and started burrowing down from the top of the dome. Only three feet down, he found his first coins. More followed at intervals, and then came small compartments containing cylindrical boxes and canisters
of gold and copper in which were scraps of material, jewellery and more coins.
The coins, many of which were gold, had important consequences for the reconstruction of Indian history. Ventura’s initiative was accounted a considerable success and brought him, besides some saleable treasure, renown as an archaeologist. Other European officers in Ranjit Singh’s service joined the fray and, in the
Punjab and neighbouring Afghanistan, there followed a period of intense
stupa
raiding. As yet there was little conclusive evidence, but it was beginning to look as if the
stupas
and their relics were Buddhist. Moreover the success of these new archaeological ventures provided a powerful stimulus to would-be archaeologists across the frontier in British India.
In 1834, Lieutenant Alexander Cunningham,
only twenty years old and just arrived in India, began to take an interest in the well-known
stupa
at Sarnath just outside the city of Benares. Forty years earlier, in the days of Sir William Jones, an Indian contractor had used the site as a hardcore quarry for a new market place in Benares. He had dug up a stone urn ‘of the size and shape of the Barberini vase’, and a statue. The urn contained
another of marble which, with its contents of a few bones, some gold leaf and pearls, was presented to the Asiatic Society as a curiosity. The statue was a seated Buddha. Here was incentive enough to explore further, and Cunningham, himself an engineer, enlisted the financial support of James Prinsep for his dig.
Of several ruinous mounds at Sarnath, the Dhamek stupa, with its superb bands of
sculptural ornament, was much the best preserved and most inviting. Learning from Ventura’s experience, Cunningham decided to start from the top and drive a shaft right down the middle. But the first problem was to get up there; the
stupa
was 143 feet high.
On the 18th January 1835 my scaffolding was completed and I stood on the top of the great tower. On cutting the long grass [there were also several trees on the top] I found two iron spikes each eight inches long and shaped like the head of a lance. On the following day I removed the ruined brick pinnacle and began sinking a shaft or well, about five feet in diameter; at three feet from the top I found a rough stone; and on the 25th January, at a depth of ten and a half feet, I found an inscribed slab.
After Ventura’s discoveries,
these were nothing to get excited about; Cunningham pressed on. At first he made good progress, but seventy feet down he struck solid stone. Was this the casing of some chamber? In spite of the cost it looked too promising to give up now.
The labour of sinking the shaft through the solid stone-work was very great as the stones, which were large (from two to three feet in length, eighteen inches broad and twelve inches thick), were all secured to each other with iron cramps. Each stone had usually eight cramps, four above and as many below, all of which had to be cut through before it could be moved. I therefore sent for regular quarrymen to quarry out the stones, and the work occupied them for several months.
And still there was no find. Only a man who was gradually discovering his
true vocation in life could have kept at it.
At length, at a depth of 110 feet from the top of the monument, the stone gave way to brickwork made of very large bricks. Through this the shaft was continued for a further depth of twenty-eight feet, when I reached the plain soil beneath the foundation. Lastly a gallery was run right through the brickwork of the foundation & but without yielding any result. Thus ended my opening of the great tower, after fourteen months labour and at a cost of more than five hundred rupees.
Cunningham was bitterly disappointed. All he had to show was a stone with an unknown inscription on it. But this was better than nothing and he sent a copy of the inscription to Prinsep. The letters were of the Gupta Brahmi script and the whole was identical to
one recently found on a broken pedestal in northern Bihar. Prinsep thought he could read it; but it did not make much sense, some sort of invocation apparently. By chance, Alexander Czoma de Koros happened to be down from the mountains at the time, and, in view of a possible Buddhist connection, was asked for his opinion. Instantly he recognized it as the standard Buddhist formula or confession of
faith. There was therefore no question that the Dhamek
stupa
was a Buddhist monument of the Gupta period and that the key to understanding the purpose and sculptures of all the
stupas
lay in Buddhism. Not only had the Buddha been an Indian, but his religion had evidently been widespread in India and had flourished there for several centuries.
Further dramatic evidence of this would soon be provided
by the translation of the Ashoka edicts, and by 1838 it was even being asked whether perhaps Buddhism antedated Hinduism or, as Prinsep put it, ‘whether the Buddhists or the Brahmins may claim precedence in the history of Indian civilization’. The Sanskrit of the ancient Hindus appeared to be much earlier than the Prakrit used for Buddhist texts. Yet in terms of architecture – rock-cut temples,
pillars, or structural
stupas
— and inscriptions, the evidence seemed to favour Buddhism.
The same also seemed to be true of sculpture. Whilst excavating the Dhamek
stupa,
Cunningham met an old man who had taken part in that quarrying operation, forty years earlier, in an adjacent mound. He not only remembered where the stone urn had been discovered, but also directed Cunningham to a spot where
he recalled seeing a whole subterranean room full of statues.
I at once commenced an excavation on the spot pointed out by Sangkar & At a depth of two feet below the surface I found about sixty statues and bas-reliefs in an upright position, all packed closely together within a small space of less than ten feet square.
Superstition had evidently prevented the previous diggers from disturbing
this collection and Cunningham was thus able to exploit the first major discovery of Sarnath scupture. He singled out those figures that bore inscriptions or that were best preserved, including a magnificent Buddha, and sent them off to the Asiatic Society.
The remaining statues, upwards of forty in number, together with most of the other carved stones that I had collected, and which I left lying on the ground, were afterwards carted away by the late Mr Davidson and thrown into the Barna river under the bridge to check the cutting away of the bed between the arches.
Though himself an engineer, Cunningham could not condone such behaviour. It was his first brush with the iconoclasts – but by no means his last.