Buddhist Sites
By locating Buddhist sites in north and central India, Cunningham could lay to rest speculations on the Buddha’s life-story. Of Rajgir, a site he plotted as Buddhist, he enthused that “every hill and stream had been made holy by the Buddha’s presence… Numerous ruined topes, sculpted friezes and inscribed pillars still remain scattered over the country as lasting proofs of the high veneration in which this religious capital of Buddhism was held by the people” (1871, p. vii). Cunningham’s fieldwork, which he undertook through his reading of two ‘foreign’ Buddhist textual sources, was premised on a conditional for which he argued as follows––
“in describing the ancient geography of India, the elder Pliny, for the sake of clearness follows the footsteps of Alexander the Great. For a similar reason I too would follow the footsteps of the Chinese pilgrim Hwen Thsang, who in the seventh century of our era traversed India from west to east and back again for the purpose of visiting all the famous sites of Buddhist history and tradition”
(ibid, p. v)––
By locating Buddhist sites in north and central India, Cunningham could lay to rest speculations on the Buddha’s life-story. Of Rajgir, a site he plotted as Buddhist, he enthused that “every hill and stream had been made holy by the Buddha’s presence… Numerous ruined topes, sculpted friezes and inscribed pillars still remain scattered over the country as lasting proofs of the high veneration in which this religious capital of Buddhism was held by the people” (1871, p. vii). Cunningham’s fieldwork, which he undertook through his reading of two ‘foreign’ Buddhist textual sources, was premised on a conditional for which he argued as follows––
“in describing the ancient geography of India, the elder Pliny, for the sake of clearness follows the footsteps of Alexander the Great. For a similar reason I too would follow the footsteps of the Chinese pilgrim Hwen Thsang, who in the seventh century of our era traversed India from west to east and back again for the purpose of visiting all the famous sites of Buddhist history and tradition”
(ibid, p. v)––
The argument, however, calls for a reflection on Cunningham’s use of Xuanzang and Faxian’s narratives for interpreting and corroborating his archaeological finds. Cunningham formally voiced his archaeological project of following the trail of the Chinese pilgrims in 1848, when the French translation of Faxian’s account had already been published (in 1836), and the places mentioned by the latter were being identified by scholars keen to promote the antiquity of Buddhism within India with a view to critique the Brahmin orthodoxy’s perceptions of its own history. In 1853, the first French translation of Xuanzang’s account was published, and it would indeed be a remarkable oversight on our part if we were to ignore the opportunity this translation provided to Cunningham in foreseeing the feasibility of his research plans. His subsequent material exposure of a Buddhist India, from 1862 to 1884, through texts he could comprehend can only be perceived as a calculated move, which apart from complying with the desires of his government to present the Brahmins as foreigners to India, was also built upon the confidence that his research objectives were destined to be successful.