Almost as celebrated as these was the begging-pot of Sakya Muni, which was long kept in a dagoba or vihara erected by Kanishka at Peshawur, and worshipped with the greatest reverence.[68] After paying a visit to Benares,[69] it was conveyed to Kandahar, and is still said to be preserved there by the Mussulmans, and looked upon even by them as a most precious relic.[70] All this will become plainer as we proceed, for we shall find every Buddhist locality sanctified by the presence of relics, and that these were worshipped apparently from the hour of the death of the founder of the religion to the present day. Were this the place to do it, it would be interesting to try and trace the path by which, and the time when, this belief in the efficacy of relics spread towards the west, and how and when it was first adopted by the early Christian Church, and became with them as important an element of worship as with the Buddhists. That would require a volume to itself; meanwhile, what is more important for our present purpose is the knowledge that this relic-worship gave rise to the building of these great dagobas, which are the most important feature of Buddhist architectural art. * * * * * No one can, I fancy, hesitate in believing that the Buddhist dagoba is the direct descendant of the sepulchral tumulus of the Turanian races, whether found in Etruria, Lydia, or among the Scyths of the northern steppes. The Indians, however, never seem to have buried, but always to have burnt, their dead, and consequently never, so far as we know, had any tumuli among them. It may be in consequence of this that the dagobas, even in the earliest times, took a rounded or domical form, while all the tumuli, from being of earth, necessarily assumed the form of cones. Not only out of doors, but in the earliest caves, the forms of dagobas are always rounded; and no example of a straight-lined cone covering a dagoba has yet been discovered. This peculiarity, being so universal, would seem to indicate that they had been long in use before the earliest known example, and that some other material than earth had been employed in their construction; but we have as yet no hint when the rounded form was first employed, nor why the conical form of the tumulus was abandoned when it was refined into a relic shrine. We know, indeed, from the caves, and from the earliest bas-reliefs, that all the roofs of the Indians were curvilinear; and if one can fancy a circular chamber with a domical roof--not in stone, of course--as the original receptacle of the relic, we may imagine that the form was derived from this.[71] BHILSA TOPES.