had copied these customs from
Nestorian missionaries, who are known to have penetrated early even as far
as China.[93] But a serious objection to this theory is that Buddhism is
at least five hundred years older than Christianity, and that many of
these striking resemblances belong to its earliest period. Thus Wilson
(Hindu Drama) has translated plays written before the Christian era, in
which Buddhist monks appear as mendicants. The worship of relics is quite
as ancient. Fergusson[94] describes topes, or shrines for relics, of very
great antiquity, existing in India, Ceylon, Birmah, and Java. Many of them
belong to the age of Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor, who ruled all
India B.C. 250, and in whose reign Buddhism became the religion of the
state, and held its third Oecumenical Council.

The ancient Buddhist architecture is very singular, and often very
beautiful. It consists of topes, rock-cut temples, and monasteries. Some
of the topes are monolithic columns, more than forty feet high, with
ornamented capitals. Some are immense domes of brick and stone, containing
sacred relics. The tooth of Buddha was once preserved in a magnificent
shrine in India, but was conveyed to Ceyion A.D. 311, where it still
remains an object of universal reverence. It is a piece of ivory or bone
two inches long, and is kept in six cases, the largest of which, of solid
silver, is five feet high. The other cases are inlaid with rubies and
precious stones.[95] Besides this, Ceylon possesses the "left collar-bone
relic," contained in a bell-shaped tope, fifty feet high, and the thorax
bone, which was placed in a tope built by a Hindoo Raja, B.C. 250, beside
which two others were subsequently erected, the last being eighty cubits
high. The Sanchi tope, the finest in India,[96] is a solid dome of stone,
one hundred and six feet in diameter and forty-two feet high, with a
basement and terrace, having a colonnade, now fallen, of sixty pillars,
with richly carved stone railing and gateway.

The rock-cut temples of the Buddhists are very ancient, and are numerous
in India. Mr. Fergusson, who has made a special personal study of these
monuments, believes that more than nine hundred still remain, most of them
within the Bombay presidency. Of these, many date back two centuries
before our era. In form they singularly resemble the earliest Roman
Catholic churches. Excavated out of the solid rock, they have a nave and
side aisles, terminating in an ap