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Whatever the motives of his conversion, we have it on the authority of Hiuen-Tsang that he ultimately did great things for Buddhism, and the magnificent stupa, which he erected outside his capital, five-and-twenty stories high and crowned with a cupola of diamonds, was still 150 feet high and measured a quarter of a mile in circumference when the Chinese pilgrim visited Purushpura five centuries later.
Obviously he was now taciturn, and disliked the cloying exuberance of youth that clawed against the concentrated walls of his deliberation, although deliberating what he could not say, as he sat there leaning his head against the stupa with eyes resting on the clouds, if indeed he was in a state of rest.
He could then appreciate a cognizant activity and social order other than that of his own or his own dominant species. If he could lean against a stupa and be in awe of the sun baking his face like a brick or appreciate the titillation of wind caressing his head like that of a Cambodian child-beggar patted by a foreigner, he would at last be alive.
There is a considerable difference between Jain and Buddhist architecture both in intention and effect. Jain monks did not live together in large communities and there was no worship of relics. Hence the vihâra and the stûpa—the two principal types of Buddhist buildings—are both absent.
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