North Indian Inscriptions

PART B

When the stench of the carcasses, left by them on the spot, becomes intolerable, a foolish tree-spirit, without heeding the warnings of another tree-spirit, drives the wild animals away, but only with the result that the villagers, no longer kept back by the fear of the tigers, come and hew down the trees and till the land. In vain the tree-spirit tries to bring back the tigers. I fail to see the slightest resemblance between this story and the scene of our relief where nothing of the tree-deities is to be seen and where certainly the antelopes are not represented as being frightened or even killed by the lions.

   Hultzsch took migasamadaka as migasaṁmadaka and rendered it by ‘ the chaitya which gladdens the antelopes ’. Hultzsch’s derivation of samadaka is probably correct, but I think that the meaning of the word has to be modified a little. In Pāli bhattasammada is a common term denoting ‘after-dinner nap, siesta’^[1]. Migasammada then would mean either ‘ the siesta of the antelopes’ or ‘ the siesta of the wild animals ’ and there would be no difficulty in explaining the name of the chaitya as being formed by adding the suffix –ka to sammada. The siesta of the antelopes would seem to be well illustrated by the sculpture. But peace and quietness apparently prevails also between the antelopes and the lions of the relief, and so we may assume that the term miga is used here in the wider sense and that the chaitya owed its name to the miraculous event that all animals of the forest held there their siesta without doing harm to one another^[2].

B 69 (693); ^[3] PLATES XXII, XLII

ON a coping-stone, now in the Indian Museum, Calcutta. Edited by Cunningham, StBh. (1879), p. 94; 130, No. 4, and Pl. XLVIII and LIII; Hoernle, IA. Vol. X (1881), p. 120, No. 7; Hultzsch, ɀDMG. Vol. XL (1886), p. 61, No. 5, and Pl.; IA. Vol. XXI (1892), p. 227, No. 5; Barua-Sinha, BI. (1926), p. 90 f., No. 210; Ramaprasad Chanda, MASI. (1927), No. 30, p. 5, and Pl. I; Barua, Barh. Vol. II (1934), p. 133 ff. and Vol. III (1937), Pl. LXXXIV (124a).; Lüders, Bhārh. (1941), p. 23 ff.

TEXT:
Abode chātiyaṁ

TRANSLATION:
The Chaitya on the A(ṁ)boda (the mango-mountain).

   The relief shows a tree which, judging from the leaves, can be a mango tree. It has a stone seat in front of it. Some rocks in the right corner from which a brook flows down suggest that the place of the scene is on a mountain. Two elephants are approaching the stone seat, the bigger one of the animals bears a bundle of lotus fibres in its trunk, apparently intending to deposit it on or before the stone seat. The smaller animal sprays itself with water from the brook. Because in the relief treated under B 68 the tree with a stone seat is called chetaya (for chetiya) it can be taken as absolutely certain that chatiyaṁ here is a scribe’s
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^[1]See D. II, 195; S. I, 7; J. VI, 57; II, 63, 14.
^[2]A very similar representation is found in the relief on Cunningham’s Pl. XLIV, 8. Here six stags (Rusa axis), three of them male and three female, lie or stand round the tree with a stone seat underneath it. But here the lions are missing. The wish to identify the sculptures as Jātakas at all costs led Barua to see in the latter relief a representation of the Tipallatthamigajātaka (16). Apart from the unacceptable interpretation of the particulars, the identification with the Jātaka is quite impossible on account of the fact that the chaitya figuring in the centre of the picture remains altogether unexplained.
^[3] Lüders’ treatment of this inscription (B 69) is missing in the manuscript. What follows below is based on his remarks l.c., pp. 23-25.