The Construction Of The Bagh Caves, As Well As Of All The Cave
Temples Of India, Whose History Is Lost In The Darkness Of Time,
Is Ascribed By The European Archeologists To The Buddhists, And
By The Native Tradition To The Pandu Brothers.
Indian paleography
protests in every one of its new discoveries against the hasty
conclusions of the Orientalists.
And much may be said against
the intervention of Buddhists in this particular case. But I shall
indicate only one particular. The theory which declares that all
the cave temples of India are of Buddhist origin is wrong. The
Orientalists may insist as much as they choose on the hypothesis
that the Buddhists became again idol-worshipers; it will explain
nothing, and contradicts the history of both Buddhists and Brahmans.
The Brahmans began persecuting and banishing the Buddhists precisely
because they had begun a crusade against idol-worship. The few
Buddhist communities who remained in India and deserted the pure,
though, maybe - for a shallow observer - somewhat atheistic teachings
of Gautama Siddhartha, never joined Brahmanism, but coalesced with
the Jainas, and gradually became absorbed in them. Then why not
suppose that if, amongst hundreds of Brahmanical gods, we find
one statue of Buddha, it only shows that the masses of half-converts
to Buddhism added this new god to the ancient Brahmanical temple.
This would be much more sensible than to think that the Buddhists
of the two centuries before and after the beginning of the Christian
era dared to fill their temples with idols, in defiance of the
spirit of the reformer Gau-tama.
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