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Updated: May 27, 2025
China is full of the traces of polytheism; the land swarms with Taouist deities of all names and functions, with Confucian and ancestral tablets, and with Buddhist temples and dagobas; but within the sacred enclosure of this temple no symbol of heathenism appears. Of the August Imperial service Dr.
The wealth of the then known world was in the possession of a very few individuals, and the poor were all the poorer in comparison; despotism was rampant, and royalty commanded at will the unpaid services of the million. Near the site of the Brazen Palace of Anuradhapura are several dagobas, partially hidden by rank tropical verdure.
Some buildings are still standing; among these are two dagobas, huge monuments of bricks, formerly covered with white cement, and elaborately decorated with different devices.
Then they opened out the master's relics and in eight parts equally divided them. Themselves paid reverence to one part, the other seven they handed to the Brahman; the seven kings having accepted these, rejoiced and placed them on their heads; and thus with them returned to their own country, and erected Dâgobas for worship over them.
The rock-hewn temples and the yet more strange dagobas of India now belong to science.
It is solidly built of bricks, and contains material enough to build a complete modern town of 50,000 people. These Buddhist dagobas of Ceylon have the bell-shape form, and serve the same purpose as the Shwe Dagon in Rangoon, viz., to shelter relics of the Buddhas.
These Ceylon dagobas are only one class of monuments, and are to be considered in connection with other vestiges of vast public structures, the origin and purpose of which have been lost sight of in the lapse of ages.
About fifty feet higher there is another terrace of similar shape. Then follow four other terraces of more irregular contour, the structure being crowned by a dome or cupola, fifty feet in diameter, surrounded by sixteen smaller bell-shaped cupolas, known as dagobas.
The Newars excel also in bell-making; it is the trade of the land; they are all bell-makers from their youth, and proofs of their skill are exhibited hanging at the corners of pagodas, swinging from the roofs of houses, surmounting Dagobas in fact, the device upon a Nepaulese banner should be a bell. In jewellery they are no less expert, and are elaborate workmen in all metals.
As monuments of personal aggrandizement, or as individual memorials, what total failures they have proved! Think for a single moment of the vast contrast between either of the Egyptian pyramids, or these bell-shaped dagobas, with their plain stuccoed coverings, and that modern shrine and tomb combined, the Taj Mahal of Agra.
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