THE JAIN STUPA

The author reveals that the plates in this volume, excepting the frontispiece, Plate II, and the supplementary plates were prepared several under the supervision of Dr Fuhrer, then Archaeological Surveyor and Curator of the Lucknow Provincial Museum. The writer advised that they should be published with concise descriptive text, a short introduction and references to any previous publications in the subjects of them have been treated, no attempt being made to discuss the many questions of interest suggested by the plates. His recommendations were accepted, and, no one else being available to do the work, he undertook it. Any attempt to discuss at length the linguistic, palaeographical, historical, artistic, and other topics connected with the works of an illustrated would have involved prolonged research, and resulted in a very bulky treatise. The plates and inscriptions, have therefore, been left to speak for themselves with only so much annotation and explanation as seemed indispensable. The Jain stupa was a type of stupa erected by the Jains for devotional purposes. A Jain stupa dated to the 1st century BCE1st century CE was excavated at Mathura in the 19th century, in the Kankali Tila mound. There is a possibly that the Jains adopted stupa worships from the Buddhists, but that is an unsettled point. However the Jain stupa has a peculiar cylindrical threetier structure, which is quite reminiscent of the Samavasarana, by which it was apparently ultimately replaced as an object of worship. The name for stupa as used in Jain inscriptions is the standard word “thupe”. The book is profusely illustrated to delineate the text in a consistent manner which prove to be handy.