that instead of being the place of interment of a corpse, it is the depository of
relics.
Besides being used as a relic-shrine, the Tope was frequently employed as a
memorial tower to indicate a sacred spot. Of the 84,000 Stupas which, according
to tradition, Asoka erected, fully one half would seem to have been raised to
mark the scenes where Buddha or some Bôdhisatwa had performed a miracle or
done something worthy of being remembered by the faithful.
The “rails,” or stone-circles, surrounding the Indian Topes are often of as much
importance as the Topes themselves; and in the case of Sanchi and Amravati, are
even more important. As with the Topes, they are sepulchral in origin. “The
circles of rude stones found all over Europe certainly are so in most cases. They
may sometimes enclose holy spots, and may possibly have in some instances
places of assembly, though this is improbable. Their application to the purposes
of ancestral worship is, however, not only probable, but appropriate. Sometimes
a circle of stones encloses a sepulchral mound, as at New Grange in Ireland, and
very frequently in Scandinavia and Algeria. In India rude stone circles are of
frequent occurrence.” Some hundreds are found in the neighbourhood of
Amravati alone, and all are sepulchral; but like the Topes when adopted by the
Buddhists, they were “sublimated into a symbol instead of a reality.”
Reference must briefly be made to another group of early Buddhist monuments,
the lats or stembhas, of which very few are now extant in India, the British
engineer having used them for his roads, and the native zemindar for his rice or
sugar mills. Those erected by Asoka are uniform in character: circular stone
shafts, monoliths, thirty or forty feet high, and surmounted by a capital of a bell-
shaped or falling leaf form, imitated from the later Grecian architecture. They
were erected in order that certain edicts might be engraved upon them, which
Asoka desired to keep constantly in the remembrance and before the eyes of his
subjects. But in the fifth century, those raised by the Guptas had no other object
than to perpetuate the name and fame of their royal founders.
The Topes at Sanchi form part of a large group of Topes situated between the
towns of Bhilsa and Bhopul in Central India. They range over an area about
seventeen miles from east to west, and about ten miles from north to south, in
five or six different clusters, and number in all between forty and fifty of various