Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Some remarks on the Great Tope at Sânchi / by S. Beal. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
5/24 page 3
![Essays).” The Toran is merely a contraction of the Sanscrit Toranya or Torana “an ornamented gate or en- trance,” and denotes the entrance or door to the abode of the celestials.^ [Around Japanese temples are erected gate- ways called “ Toris,” evidentl}'^ derived from the same root.] Above the Toran rises the pyramid or cone, which Hodgson calls the Chura-mani, denoting the element “fire;” and above this the mysterious Trisul, combining the two ele- ments of “air and ether,” and used by accommodation as the emblem of the “ Highest.” If these several elemental em- blems be thus united, we have the figure of the “ Tope.” In confirmation of this argument, we observe that Mr. B. Hodgson explains the division of the cone which surmounts the “ garbh,” or “ dome,” of the Tope, as symbolical of the thirteen heavenly mansions above the sky (p. 43, Collected Essays). But if this be the true explanation, it seems to follow that the lower portion of the Tope must represent the “ lower world.” This opinion is borne out by the use of the word “ts’a,” in Chinese, for a Pagoda, or Tope. This symbol represents the Sanscrit “ kshetra,” a land of Buddha,” and compre- hends the entire chiliocosm, over which Sabya Tathagata is supposed to rule. Now this was the idea of the expanded form of the Tope, from which the Pagoda, in China, is derived; but the expansion of an idea necessarily assumes 1 Compare the remarks of Mr. Baring-Gould (“ Origin of Religious Beliefs,” pp. 98, 99) : “ The localization of the Deity in heaven gave hirth to a number of other names. From the first moment that the consciousness of a God rose upon man’s soul, like the morning sun, he lifted his head on high and sought him in the sky. That vast uplifted sphere, now radiant with light, now twinkling with countless stars, attracted the wonder of man, and in it he placed the home of his gods. Heaven was an upper world inhabited by Deities. The Esth supposed it to he a blue Tent, behind which Ukko the Ancient, and the sustainers of Sun, Moon, and Stars and the guardians of the clouds, dwelt in splendour. Men for a long time supposed that the earth was a flat plane, sur- rounded by the sea, and that the sky was a roof on which the heavenly bodies travel, and from which they are suspended as Lamps. The Polynesians, who thought, like so many other peoples, ancient and modern, that the sky descended at the horizon and inclosed the earth, still call foreigners pajyalangi, or heaven- bursters, as having broken in from another world outside. The sky is to most savages what is culled in a South American language mumeseke, that is, the- earth-on-high [compare “heaven,” that which is “ heaved up”]. There ate holes or windows through this roof or Armament, where the rain comes through, and if you can climb high enough, you can get through and visit the dwellers above, who live, and talk, and look, very much like people upon earth.”](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2239803x_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
