North Indian Inscriptions

PART B

filling their house with the seven treasures, after having uttered the lion’s roar. Standing by the side of the funeral pyre he asks by turns the Bodhisattva and the four females why they do not weep and is highly pleased with their answers which all tend to show the futility of grief. According to Barua the burning fagots in the sculpture represent the heap of rubbish burnt by the brahmin’s son and at the same time his funeral pyre. The snake is the snake that has caused his death and what I take to be a lizard is declared to be the corpse of the youth. The person sitting in the proper right corner is supposed to be Sakka, while the four lions are said to symbolize his lion’s roar. The persons standing on the left side are identified with the brahmin and the four female members of his family, and the chaṅkama which Barua, following a remark by Cunningham, takes to be an altar ‘is designed as a protection of fire against the wind and signifies symbolically…a dividing line between the living and the dead’.

   Vogel has already remarked that this interpretation of the sculpture is impossible. Apart from the fact that the heads of the demons are ignored, that the explanation of the chaṅkama is certainly wrong and that the symbolization of Sakka’s lion’s roar is highly improbable, the five standing persons cannot represent the brahmin and the four female member of his household as all of them are clearly characterized by their turbans as male persons^[1]. Nor can the seated figure be Sakka. A man in the same attitude is found in the relief on Pl. XXXVII, (cf. B 26, fig. on the left, and it cannot be doubted that there Māra is represented as mourning, while all the other gods are rejoicing at the birth of the Bodhisattva. The attitude is quite in keeping with the

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description of Māra in literary sources after his defeat by the Buddha. ‘Then’, it is said in the S. I, 124, ‘Māra, the Evil one, went away from that place and sat down on the earth with crossed legs, not very far from the Holy one, silent, discontented, with his shoulders falling and his face bent down, down-cast, bewildered, scratching the earth with a piece of wood’ (atha kho Māro pāpimā….tamhā ṭhānā apakkamma Bhagavato avidūre pathaviyaṁ pallaṅkena nisīdi tuṇhībhūto maṅkubhūto pattakkhandho adhomukha pajjhāyanto appaṭibhāno koṭṭhena bhūmiṁ vilikhanto). The same description is found in the Lalitav. and the Mvu. with the only difference that in the Mvu. an arrow (kāṇḍa) takes the place of the piece of wood (kāshṭha). Mvu. II, 283: Māro ca pāpīmāṁ duḥkhī daurmanasyajāto antaḥśalyaparidāghajāto ekamante pradhyāye kāṇḍena bhūmiṁ vilikhanto ; II, 349: Māraś ca durmano āsi kāṇḍena likhate mahīṁ | jito’ smi devadevena Śākyasiṁhena tāpinā ; III, 281 : Māro pāpimāṁ Bhagavato avidūre saṁnishanṇo abhūshi duḥkhi durmano vipratisāri kāṇḍena bhūmiṁ vilikhanto. Lalitav. 378: atha khalu Māraḥ pāpīyān… ekānte prakrāmya sthito’ bhūt | duḥkhī durmanā vipratisārī adhomukhaḥ kāshṭhena mahiṁ vilikham vishayaṁ me’ tikrānta iti.

   In the Nidānakathā (J. I, 78) Māra is spoken of as sitting at the corner of a road and meditating on the sixteen points in which he is not equal to the Buddha by drawing lines on the sand until his three daughters arrive and enquire after the cause of his grief. In the Māra-and Bhikkunīsaṁyutta of the S. (IV ; V) it is regularly stated that Māra is plunged into grief whenever one of his many attacks on the Buddha or some monk or some men has turned out unsuccessful. The representation of the mourning Māra apparently was conventional, and we may be sure that in our sculpture also the dejected person drawing figures on the ground was at once rightly understood as Māra by every Buddhist. We may further assume that the cause of his depression apparent in the relief is the fact that he has failed to subdue some saint meditating on the chaṅkama. The saint, of course, does not appear in the relief, as neither the Buddha nor Buddhist clericals are ever represented in the sculptures
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^[1]There is not the slightest evidence that the figure wearing a turban in the relief Pl. XLVIII, II is a female as asserted by Barua.